Today's Music Monday is dedicated to one of my favorite albums and a three-part essay by one of my favorite bloggers.
I happen to agree with this assessment. Top to bottom, Peter Gabriel's third solo album, way back when he could release albums without titles, is a master work of incredible songs and a sonic joy.
I have been a huge Peter Gabriel fan ever since, and I am excited for the new album i/o that was just released and will be delivered to me on the 16th.
But this post is about Peter Gabriel III, and it's excellence.
Peter Gabriel’s Revolutionary Third Album Has Never Bored…Will Never Bore [pt. 1]
Peter Gabriel: Peter Gabriel [III] – US – LP [1980]
- Intruder
- No Self Control
- Start
- I Don’t Remember
- Family Snapshot
- And Through The Wire
- Games Without Frontiers
- Not One Of us
- Lead A Normal Life
- Biko
When I moved from listening to Top 40 radio to FM Rock for a period in the 1978-1980 timeframe it brought more than just freedom from Disco Overload®. It still managed to expand my musical horizons, even under the insane restrictions and locking down of AOR from the salad days of freeform FM Rock that had begun earlier in the decade. Lee Abrahams was doing his level best to kill and monetize FM Rock with tight playlists and market research but still, there were revelations to be found even among the crushing payload of Stones/Who/Zeppelin every hour, on the hour.
MEETING PETER GABRIEL
One such new [to me] artist in 1978 was Peter Gabriel. The better of the two AOR stations in the Orlando market were adding cuts from his second, Robert Fripp produced album at just the time I was developing an interest in Fripp as a player/mover/shaker. That album had two cuts that were entrancing to my ears through airplay; “On The Air” and “D.I.Y.” Those songs made me a Peter Gabriel fan even though I had never been a big fan of Genesis. Between Fripp’s guitar playing/production and Larry Fast being responsible for the synth technology on the album, there was a lot of bait to make me bite the hook being dangled in front of me.
At the time, I didn’t know of the drama that was unfolding between Gabriel and his label, Atlantic Records. Atlantic had released the 1878 album by Gabriel, but little did I know at the time that A+R man John Kalodner and venerable label head Amhet Ertegun were having teeth-gnashing over what they were hearing come out of the Gabriel camp as the follow up to his second album which, by 1980, was a staple in every cut-0ut bin in town. Kalodner went as far as suggesting to Ertegun that Atlantic drop Gabriel from their roster, which they did. For his part, Ertegun wondered if Gabriel had suffered from a breakdown! This was obviously the place where businessmen couldn’t tell the difference from a breakdown and a breakthrough!
In the summer of 1980 I was still listening to FM Rock radio, though that only had a few more months before I would stop. Mostly due to the dumber of Orlando’s two stations in that format winning the war for ears and kick-starting the race to the bottom. Still, the better of the stations, WORJ-FM had a program called the Vinyl Hour where each week the station would play several deep cuts from new albums released that week. I can vividly recall that on that week particular I got to hear material from the new Roxy Music album, “Flesh + Blood” as well as the third Peter Gabriel album, which was called, like all of them then, simply “Peter Gabriel.”
Needless to say, I wasted no time in hitting stores and buying those two great albums which were easily in my top ten releases for 1980! Around this time, I was also hearing Gabriel’s single “Games Without Frontiers” being added to the playlist on the same station. I had to say that there was a vast qualitative gulf between the Ted Nugent tracks the station also played and that song! It was way closer to the vibe that was found on the 1979 TVLKING HEVDS album, “Fear Of Music” to these ears.
But that Gabriel album was offering new stimuli to my young ears with my first introduction to Chapman Stick at the hand of Tony Levin. It sounded like a bass. It sounded like a synth. But it didn’t sound like a bass synth! The otherness to be found on “Games Without Frontiers” was almost a sensory overload to me at the time. After all, this was also a track with a masterful Robert Fripp guitar performance. Little did I know that the seeds of next year’s King Crimson flowering were being sowed right here on this album that featured a disturbing portrait of Gabriel fluid and melting in the [very] distinctive cover by Hipgnosis. The stark confrontation it implied was a far cry from their sometimes camp hippie aesthetic heavy on the visual puns.
THE SOUNDS FROM ANOTHER PLACE
We heard the difference of the 80s right in the first second of the album. Gabriel had given instruction to his two drummers on the album, former bandmate Phil Collinsand Jerry Marotta, to refrain from using cymbals on the album. A restriction meant to spur new directions and creativity. Gabriel had also sought out Steve Lillywhite to produce the album, and Lillywhite had just done the honors on that year’s Psychedelic Furs and XTC albums. Tracks on those two albums, “Sister Europe” and “Travels In Nihilon,” respectively, each featured bold, blunt beats that came within a hair’s breadth of what the performing/producing unit arrived at in defining the infamous gated reverb sound. The latter in particular. Truly the sonic fingerprint of the first half of the 80s.
The first track, “Intruder,” threw the high contrast, bombastic beats into our faces with impunity. Where the decay of the reverb was brutally cut off at lower volumes, juxtaposing the maximum impact of each beat with jarring stillness. The sound of creaking metal suggestive of an unraveling of sorts, added only the texture of madness. Finally decadent, atonal piano further unbalanced the nearly psychotic vibe of the song. The backing vocal harmonies were tinny, distorted, and chorused; like distant sheep bleating. Then the desolation of the song was emphasized by tubular bell strikes.
An enervated and hostile environment was already a given by the vocabulary of sound employed here, and yet when Gabriel began singing after the rhythmic chanting that signaled the end of the minute long introduction, he managed to dramatically increase the threat level of the song with his disturbing lyric. Words that invited us into the head of an interloper who got his thrills breaking into homes. Homes which were not empty. All delivered in a dryly dispassionate voice.
After the first verse, an unhinged xylophone solo at the hands of Morris Pert [ex-Brand X] flitted back and forth between the left and right channels almost randomly as the pounding heartbeat of Phil Collins’ drum pattern thundered in our heads like blood rushing in our temples. The second verse then confirmed our worst fears as the pervert narrating the song reveled in his transgressive power. The drop in the climax brought more squeaking and creaking as Gabriel whistled an eerie melody and then barely restated the lyrical theme… “I am the intruder.”
Peter Gabriel’s Revolutionary Third Album Has Never Bored…Will Never Bore [pt. 2]
Dual synth riffs ping-ponged between the two channels to coalesce into a single tense synth loop in the intro of “No Self Control,” the second single from the album. Then on the off-beats, the processed sax of Dick Morrissey and the lecherous serpentine guitar of Robert Fripp engaged in a pithy call-and-response for another bar. Then the marimba of Morris Pert began its entrancing polyrhythmic rondo ensnaring all of the disparate elements of the song, as well as our ears, in the compulsive groove.
Highly appropriate, that, since compulsion was the absolute thrust of the song. It was another dark character study, albeit this time of a protagonist who was at least aware of their wrongdoing, even though they were powerless to act against it. Kate Bush and Gabriel contributed single note, rhythmic, backing vocals which occupied the space where violins weren’t in the song. Gabriel vacillated between disaffected and strident vocals in the first two verses while the minimal drumming from Phil Collins, again, barely kept the beat as a subdued heartbeat at the almost subliminal level.
Until the cataclysmic chorus, when the full gated drums of Collins came to the fore via crushing reverse reverb until the violent fills hit like being kicked down a stairwell. Emphasizing the inevitability of the protagonists’ actions; no matter how wrong he thought they were nor how much he protested against it. Doppler shifting guitar descending in pitch took us to a lower level of despair as the twin vocals of Bush and Gabriel mockingly sang the song’s title in falsetto; each of them a ghastly mirror twin of the other while the guitar writhed in agony until the song’s climax.
Then the music bed dropped to just the marimba while the synth loops faded up with the single note BVs. The energy levels circled back to the first verses but the brutal power of the drums didn’t wait for the verse to play out before insinuating themselves in the mix until dropping out for the coda, which left the synth loops and a solitary bongo keeping the time as the song began its retreat. It was astonishing material to be considered for a single release, yet there we were.
The potent combination of “Start/I Don’t Remember” have always been my go-to Peter Gabriel track. The two tracks are so intrinsically joined that I cannot think of them except as a stunning whole. I’m guessing that Gabriel was attempting to grease his royalties by adding another song to the program. That was one of the lessons learned the hard way by bands [like Genesis] in the Prog era that favored side long suites over succinct Pop tunes. “Start” began with a sampled string loop that eventually moved into a melody that had the synth bass join in before ceding the spotlight to Dick Morrissey’s creamy, and mellifluous sax. Meanwhile the string patches sustained an increasingly minor key countermelody under the sax. Until the sax dropped out, leaving only a curdled, minor key note sustaining.
Then the drumbeats hit and a serpentine yowl from Fripp’s skysaw guitar [straight out of “Beauty + The Beast”] set the stage for the nothing less than dramatic, even psychotic, appearance of Gabriel’s voice in the song; ululating and trilling like a gibbering primate. While the Chapman Stick of Tony Levin slithered through the dense thicket of Art Funk. It sounded like he had been listening to David Byrne and had managed to surpass Byrne’s ability to project a nearly psychotic state. The synths spiraling downward and unraveling the music at the end of each chorus echoed the sense of breakdown explicitly.
The backing vocals in the middle eight were yet more of the distorted, metallic BVs that were the calling card of this album. A signifier of the raw, shattered nerves that most of the songs seem to have been built upon. The wordless climax had Gabriel reduced to more animal trills as Fripps’ seagull guitar gave way to the almighty Stick and the diseased, feel-bad groove that persisted until the devastating coda. Where the synths eventually coalesced into a crushing, industrial drone that simply obliterated the song. Leaving Gabriel to whisper tantalizing murmurings that 43 years and countless headphone sessions have failed to shed any light on as the slow motion, grinding tritone of the synths sounded like the futile herald of an inescapable emergency state. Did I imply earlier that Gabriel was using Fripp like Bowie did here? Well, he had also been paying heed to Bowie’s excursions with Iggy Pop, as the coda had more than a little of “Mass Production” in its DNA. And he wisely gave it plenty of room, almost a minute, to play out its stultifying, entropic vibe.
I’ve been listening to “Family Snapshot” for 43 years now and I’m only now just uncovering new and fascinating facets of it which were previously opaque to me. The song began intimately, with simple piano accompaniment as we listened to the song’s protagonist begin to outline the scenario of the planned killing with all of the melodrama and pathos of a song of self-actualization. Think of Ian Hunter’s great, presumably autobiographical, “Irene Wilde.” Only this was not Ian Hunter singing about growing up and making something of himself. It was John Kennedy’s assassin, proclaiming how he will ultimately matter in the world by taking a life. No names were mentioned, but the detail of the day’s events as recounted here were just too close to what happened in Dallas that day to be anything otherwise to me.
Following an emphatic climax to the otherwise placid first verse, the second verse increased the accompaniment to heighten the tension with sustained synth chords and a fretless bass solo from John Giblin. The middle eight was where Gabriel began to play his hand like a card shark. As the drumming began and rhythm section began to cook, the first clue to Gabriel’s surprising intent was the appearance of the saxophone and glockenspiel in the middle eight. After hearing this song hundreds of times, I have finally realized Gabriel’s brilliant conceit of him framing the Kennedy Assassination… as a Bruce Springsteen street melodrama! The third verse pulled out all of the stops and added propulsive cowbell to the triumphant sax, while making certain to instill lyrical references to motorcycles in a cunning simile to “Born To Run’s” streetwise lyrical milieu. Framing the internal scenario of Kennedy’s assassin as anything as self-aggrandizing as Bruce Springsteen’s protagonists constructed for their own storylines.
Where Gabriel differed greatly from early Springsteen was in that in the beginning of his solo career, he had learned painful truths from working with Bob Ezrin on his first album. He had learned that piling on bombast was no direct path to meaning, as with his 1st version of “Here Comes The Flood.” Gabriel had learned that simplicity and intimacy was a better means to convey impact as his second recording of “Here Comes The Flood” on Robert Fripp’s “Exposure” album had shown. So at the point of climax in the song as the trigger was released, the song pulled back its fevered, widescreen scope to a single spotlight on its now darkened stage; leaving only bass, and then piano as accompaniment for Gabriel’s plaintive ruminations on the painful childhood foundations of the monstrous act at the heart of the song. Entirely appropriate as Gabriel’s wife at the time, Jill, was a psychoanalyst. The pithy lyrics she wrote for Gabriel’s “Mother Of Violence” on his previous album were surely the sparks that lit the kindling of this later song.
My esteem for “Family Snapshot” has increased dramatically after all of the listening to this album I’ve done in the last month to the point where this is now one of my crucial Gabriel tracks. In the end, it ran the gamut of points of view for the assassination at its core. From depicting the elaborate and heroic internal fantasy that the killing represented for the man pulling the trigger, to the final harrowing glimpses of his childhood that set him inexorably on this path. Daring us to empathize with a monster as Gabriel had by now proven his songwriting mastery beyond the shadow of a doubt.
Peter Gabriel’s Revolutionary Third Album Has Never Bored…Will Never Bore [pt. 3]
he low synth drone and the three piano notes that heralded the beginning of “And Through The Wire” could not have been more ideally situated than to be following the final notes of “Family Snapshot.” The emotional through arc that carried forward from them could not be stronger, as by that time it was time for the closest thing to a redemptive moment on the dour and uncompromising album.
For a big change of pace, the song pulled the gambit of opening with the big chorus with with Gabriel, holding on to the “wiiiiiiiire” that each line in the chorus carried. On this track only, guest guitarist Paul Weller’s ragged chords defined a very different space on this atypically upbeat moment on the album. The rhythm section were working for once not to provide a further discomfiting intensity to the proceedings. Instead, they reflected the pulse-beat of desire coursing through the song. Cowbell at the ready.
The next two verses mirrored the structure of the first verse, by repeating the mantra of “I Want You” after every other line in the stanza. It seemed like the telephone was the only way of connecting with the subject of his ardor here, leaving him enervated with desire. A not uncommon subject for Rock Music. Leading to the feeling that this song, might have been the one throwback here to the deliberately “MOR” [Fripp’s choice of words] vibe for the second Gabriel album. Though that notion does material like “On The Air” a huge disservice.
But that’s didn’t mean that “And Through The Wire” was in any way a sense of Gabriel slumming. Even an album this intense and uncompromising as this one needed a relative light spot to give it some balance and contrast. The middle eight was just down to synthesizer and cowbell as Gabriel retreated into a dreamlike state only to intensify, once again, as he ended the verse with a hard-bitten “watch the wiiiire!” Using the emphasis of that word as a leitmotif that carried through the song and introduced the drop where Weller was alone in the spotlight and throwing angular shapes with his guitar and daring drummer Jerry Marotta to follow his lead.
The coda for the song intriguingly began to mutate into something more left-field as Gabriel’s voice began to be slurred with vocal effects on the line “we get so strange across the border.” And the sense that things had normalized on this album ebbed away as the otherness that had been its calling card reinstituted itself for the ultimately typical breakdown of the song by the last notes of the coda. We had returned to the dark place once more and awaited the second part of this journey.
The familiar otherness quickly returned with the surprise hit single that had announced the album. The release reached an impressive numbers four and seven in the UK/Canadian charts. While the relatively low US Billboard peak of 48 was disappointing in comparison, let us remember that at the same time, the US Top 40 was heavy with acts like Billy Joel, Air Supply, Christopher Cross [not the Ultravox bass player!] and…Journey. Having a song as radical as “Games Without Frontiers” even at number 48 was something of a red letter day in The States.
It began with a tape of a rhythm box coming up to speed under a four count before David Rhodes’ languorous slide guitar parts circled overhead. Guest vocalist Kate Bush sang the title in French. “Jeux Sans Frontières” was a European game show where oddly costumed contestants competed against one another. The UK version was called “It’s A Knockout.” Both titles were used as lyrics in the song, but the vibe was more serious than fun and games. At the time we first heard this in America, no one had ever heard of “Jeux Sans Frontières,” and I thought that the lyric was “she’s so popular!” Gabriel was obliquely commenting on the immaturity of nationalism and Cold War hostility that had resulted in the US leading other nations to boycott the 1980 Summer Olympics due to the Soviet Union’s invasion of Afghanistan.
Larry Fast and Gabriel split duties on synth bass while Jerry Marotta worked that cowbell yet again with the percussion. Creating a sinister, almost gelatinous, groove for the song that was undercut by the jollity of the whistling which followed the verses. Sounding more than a little like “Colonel Bogey’s March” from the soundtrack to “A Bridge On The River Kwai.” Underpinning the song, however subtly, not only to warfare, but also Britain’s class structure as well.
The sustained, droning guitar of David Rhodes dropped out for the surprisingly funky coda that cranked up the whipcrack synthetic percussion and added descending fills from Marotta as the song faded out this time instead of breaking down entirely. The juxtapositions of sound in the single managed to make it both repellent and seductive at the same time. An astonishing tonal balancing act that undoubtedly led to its success in the marketplace that saw it break out as an early hit single and perhaps not the “commercial suicide” that Atlantic Records deemed it in the States. Atlantic swallowed a crowburger in attempting to renegotiate the album release with Gabriel with it was apparent that it would be going places commercially, but he was over their lack of faith. He rermained content to let Mercury Records be the label to sell a considerable amount of this third album in America.
Peter Gabriel’s Revolutionary Third Album Has Never Bored…Will Never Bore [pt. 4]
[…continued from last post]
Gabriel warmed up vocally and was laughing at something. These non-sequiturs were sprinkled in the tritone synth drones that opened up the introduction to “Not One Of Us.” Queasy Chapman Stick leads from Tony Levin vied with Fripp guitar leads as more of the distinctive Gabriel brittle, distorted BVs which were one of this album’s calling card were joined by rhythmic and unvarying identical eighth note BVs which were yet another.
The ADSR envelope on the synths made the attack and decay sound like it was being played backwards compared to what our ears expect to hear from acoustic sounds. Then by almost a minute in, Marotta’s drumbeats and open guitar chords from David Rhodes that occupied some of Andy Summers’ sonic turf took this song down what ever, for this album, familiar roads. “Not One Of Us” existed comfortably within the stylistic parameters of Peter Gabriel’s third album, but nowhere else… before or since!
The verses were polite, with only the drums adding the occasional fill every few bars, but once the gears shifted for the song’s chorus, the rhythms briefly stopped to realign themselves for something altogether funkier. Finding the strident urgency and power in the paradox of the dominant culture coming together to build social barriers to communion.
The wordless middle eight one more restated the unsteady, tilting horizon of the intro before venturing into the extended breakdown and coda. The sort which were part and parcel of the album’s DNA, with Marotta’s powerful polyrythmic drum fills dancing with grinding synth drones and Gabriel interjecting the title repeatedly with his distorted voice and Rhodes’ power chords. With Gabriel ultimately repeating “no” eight to the bar as the drumming became more and more agitated. finally leaving the drones as the final word in the coda.
Marotta’s marimba repeated a rondo figure that almost suggested a kalimba and then the nine, single piano notes added their glassy elegance to the intro to “Lead A Normal Life.” The entrancing mantra of the sound was broken 45 seconds in with more distorted, wordless Gabriel BVs which were the de facto Greek Chorus for this album. With a descending piano figure joining them for discomfort.
Then the sequence repeated with a glockenspiel joining in to herald that rarest of birds, the instrumental song with a vocal middle eight. The rhythms cut out entirely and we were left with just Gabriel on piano and the spartan vocal, describing a stay in a mental hospital. The impetus for Atlantic Records to wonder if this music had been the result of Gabriel having been “put away!”
After the brief lyrical interlude, the melodic theme restated itself, this time with distant tympani drumming also fading up with the marimba following the distorted backing vocal. And the suggestion that all was not quite right resting on the random wave peals of synths sowing chaos in the altogether darker coda.
The third single and final song was the lament for the death of Stephen Biko; a Bantu activist in South Africa who was killed in interrogation by the police force there in 1977. Hearing this song was an eye and ear opener in 1980. By the middle of the decade, South Africa’s apartheid system was under intense worldwide scrutiny, but the news of this was slow to reach my consciousness back then. I was only first aware of South Africa’s apartheid after watching a particularly pointed episode of the surreal [but not stupid] British comedy The Goodies a year or so earlier. I didn’t remember hearing about Stephen Biko’s incarceration and death at the time but after hearing this song, I imagine that many who listened had their eyes opened.
It began with a recording of African voices singing a song at at Biko’s funeral before a slow, methodical beat, as played by Phil Collins on a Brazilian surdo drum, which grounded the song like a world-weary heartbeat. A single guitar chord arced overhead across the horizon twice as a distorted scream shriveled in the distance. Gabriel set up the scenario with the economy of a reporter and the eye of a poet. He had been shocked and moved by the death of Stephen Biko three years earlier and had journaled in his diary on it and these entries were the basis for the song that eventually came.
What came three years later was nothing less than a social justice anthem that helped to focus the world’s eyes on what South Africa’s apartheid state was doing. With a minimal, and primeval beat with guitar drone, vocal chanting, and Fairlight bagpipes as played by Larry Fast. The song avoided any over-egging as it set a mood that began dispassionately describing the everyday conditions of Biko’s death [“business as usual in police room 619”] before internalizing Gabriel’s anguish over it in the second verse, and ultimately coalescing into a mixture of hope and defiance over the course of its seven minutes and twenty two seconds. Wisely showcasing the economy and power of Gabriel’s vocal and lyric. The climactic third verse is an all-time best from anybody, not to mention Gabriel.
You can blow out a candle,
“Biko”
But you can’t blow out a fire
Once the flame begins to catch,
The wind will blow it higher
The wordless coda was a thing of wonder as the melody expanded and rose to fill any space it ultimately bled into. The eyes of the world were indeed watching now, as the final lyric offered. Once more as the song faded, another song from Biko’s funeral played on the fadeout before two final drumbeats rang out like shots. Bringing the album to an end and echoing in reverse, the beats that had opened up the recording on “Intruder.”
It bears mentioning that this album loomed very large in my 1980 world, and like a few crucial albums I could also name, has only loomed larger with the passing decades. It was a stunning work that announced that Peter Gabriel was no longer the ex-lead singer for Genesis. The first album had been a tentative step forward, and the second was a more radical break which, at its best, telegraphed the progress that this album made as a matter of course. This was the sound of the artist growing by leaps and bounds and with it, Gabriel moved to the front of my musical queue for half a decade.
The album which his American label saw as commercial suicide topped the British charts, and sold very well in America, reaching number 22. Atlantic’s A+R man, John Kalodner, who had advised Atlantic’s Ahmet Ertegun to drop Gabriel instead of releasing this album as part of his deal then moved to the new Geffen Records label…and advised David Geffen to sign Peter Gabriel! And they did.
Gabriel for my ears, made one more album that was on par with this one. His fourth album, a.k.a. “Security” in America, who gave it the “disposable” title that was only on a removable hype sticker. After this, Gabriel’s only work that touched me was his film work with the music from Alan Parker’s “Birdy” being remixed material from his ’80 and ’82 albums, and Martin Scorsese’s “The Last Temptation Of Christ” soundtrack.
He managed to score a huge pop hit with his “So” album of 1986 and then settled into ever longer periods of making albums that didn’t manage to catch my ear. Really, there’s only been three studio albums since 1986: “So,” “Us,” and “Up.” And the last one was issued 21 years ago! He’s got a new one allegedly being released this year but I’ve not heard a note from it yet but that’s just fine with me. I’m still too busy soaking up the miraculous work that he released in 1980. Had he taken a vow of silence following this disc, it one alone would have been enough to have secured his position in the Art Rock pantheon.
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- Bloggery committed by chris tower - 2312.04 - 10:10
- Days ago = 3076 days ago
- New note - On 1807.06, I ceased daily transmission of my Hey Mom feature after three years of daily conversations. I plan to continue Hey Mom posts at least twice per week but will continue to post the days since ("Days Ago") count on my blog each day. The blog entry numbering in the title has changed to reflect total Sense of Doubt posts since I began the blog on 0705.04, which include Hey Mom posts, Daily Bowie posts, and Sense of Doubt posts. Hey Mom posts will still be numbered sequentially. New Hey Mom posts will use the same format as all the other Hey Mom posts; all other posts will feature this format seen here.
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