Tuesday, June 21, 2022

Prince, Pt. 1: Jones Beach

For some reason I never thought I'd get to see Prince live. Most of the acts I followed throughout the '80's and '90's weren't popular enough to be a difficult ticket to purchase. But Prince? I imagined having to mortgage my parents house and hold a few hostages in order to get a seat. 

It's hard to be a Prince fan. Seriously. He rubs people the wrong way, namely my hot girlfriend. I can understand that. If I were a girl he'd creep me out too. What could be stranger than having an effeminate tiny man bump and grind the top of his head into your midsection while telling you he wants to watch you touch yourself in the bleachers while he shoots hoops? 

His sexual come-ons are juvenile and obvious, he seems to think he's the only dude who ever talked dirty or wished his girl would get freaky. Oooh, you blowin' my mind Prince Rogers Nelson! How taboo! You like titties! 

But I just can't help it. I love the little guy. First of all, he's from Minnesota which accords him instant underdog status in just about every category you could possibly imagine. Second, he plays every instrument known to man. Third, he is the Bruce Springsteen of R&B, putting on legendary concerts that last all night long and often continue late night at a smaller club near the arena. 

My love affair with Prince started, like most of America, with 'Little Red Corvette' and blossomed into total obsession when 'Purple Rain' came out. Unless you were living off the grid and mailing letter bombs to city council members in 1984 Prince was ubiquitous. 

Has there ever been a stranger chart topping artist? '1999' and 'Purple Rain' are wack-fests of the highest order. You get the feeling that you've been sucked into one of Prince's dreams and not just listening to his songs. My friend Justin once complained of Prince that his music just doesn't sound alive and it is a criticism that can be flipped into compliment. 

The songs are soundscapes that don't correspond to any blueprint, no matter how consciously he's echoing James Brown, George Clinton, Hendrix, The Beatles, whoever. They don't sound human, they sound Prince. After 'Purple Rain' everyone wondered what he would do next. He made two more fictional movies that rank up there with 'Ishtar' and 'Waterworld'. 

'Under the Cherry Moon' is my favorite album of his but it could possibly be the worst film ever made. My main problem with it is that there is no live performance of music in the film. Which leaves us with Prince's acting/physical comedy skills which rival Chuck Norris. Imagine Chuck Norris trying to sing 'Papa's Got A Brand New Bag' and you'll have some idea of how bad Prince is in this movie. 

'Graffiti Bridge' was even worse, so bad in fact that I never even saw it. He fell pretty far from the height of 'Purple Rain'. Then he released 'Sign O' The Times' and all was right again with the world. If you've never heard this album get it immediately. He also released a concert film along with the album which is as good as 'Cherry Moon' is bad. Why? Because he leaves out all the parts where he's not performing music live. He runs through every number on the double album as well as a medley of his previous hits. It is a masterful film and a gorgeous live show. I thought that was as close to seeing Prince live as I'd ever get. 

Cut to New York City 1997. My wife (now ex) and I were expecting a child come October. We'd moved to Park Slope in anticipation of the big event. Actually, judging by the stroller congestion, moving from Manhattan to Park Slope after a pregnancy is a law of some kind. My buddy Andy, who would come to be known as Quasi Uncle Andy after my son was born, called me up to remind me that his birthday was coming up. July 25. 

Who was playing Jones Beach that night? The little purple dude. I was now enough of an adult to realize that tickets to popular events could actually be obtained if you paid attention! The ex is a big fan of Prince as well but couldn't be expected to boogie on down when she was looking as if someone had shoved a Volkswagen under her shirt. 

Jones Beach is a dramatic place to see music outdoors. I am not a big fan of the outdoor concert. I think that a roof to rock and roll is like a lid on a teakettle. It won't whistle without the pressure. But Jones Beach has a grandeur to it because it sits on a harbor. You see the ocean stretched out behind the stage and feel as if you are on some sort of cruise ship. 

Oddly the open sea creates a sense of intimacy. Our seats were floor level about 25 rows back. Yes he played every song you might think he'd play. Yes the band was tighter than a drum. Yes he switched instruments left and right, drums, bass, keyboards, piano, etc. Yes he changed outrageous outfits just often enough to give the show a theatrical flair. All of these things were memorable. 

But what I'll never forget, what I marvel at to this day, is his dancing. The mixture of execution and spontaneity were staggering. He'd be on one side of the stage soloing on his guitar which he would then throw offstage to a roadie while pivoting and twirling into a full on high step sprint which he detoured into a two-knee slide popping up at the last second to land on his knees on the giant purple piano's bench pumping his fist into the air at the exact moment the band cut away and finishing by playing some impossibly intricate piano piece. He was a special effect. 

He did not seem human, much like the criticism leveled at his music by Justin. After seeing him live, I understood why his music sounded so alien, so non-flesh-and-blood. Because he just ain't like the rest of us.

Sunday, October 25, 2020

The Great Nothingness. All systems down. Thrusters inoperable. The vista of the Virgo Stellar Stream system sprawling out before him. How long had he been sitting there? He could no longer remember. 

The SS LJOM65 had served him well. He had powered the ship down to the bare minimum in order to prolong the life of the solar batteries. Only the distress system and his spacesuit in effect. Mercury and Mars "Opus 2" drifting out into space, searching for an ear. So far in vain. Oxygen falling. "All this world seems such a bitter place..." 

He drifted off into fitful sleep. Roaring across Centaurus A was a giant freighter, headed for Canis Major Dwarf. A deadline in effect. As the corbine element churned, the massive thrusters pushed the ship through solar dust and sonic drift. The communications officer banged on the captain's door. Still asleep at first he wanted to ignore the news. But interstellar commerce laws dictate that distress calls must be answered. 

The system was huge but not so huge that they couldn't detour and respond. Pulling on his deck whites, the captain reluctantly gave the order to change course. By now, the refrain came from "Opening Day"..."We watched the waves roll in/Under Jupiter and Mars". 

Europa. Experiment failed. Evacuation complete. Demolition crews roam the surface of the moon looking for structures to destroy. There can be no trace left behind in case the Entity is able to recognize architectural structures. 

Driving around in her decked out demo-rover, several explosions down for the day, she spots a hi-rise off in the distance. Altering her course, she prepares herself for the work ahead. A song she recognizes in a deep distant way comes over her lunar radio. Instrumental. She turns it up and waits for the DJ to tell her it is Mercury and Mars' "Grey Eyes". 

Dropping the charges around the base, she thinks about long ago pain and suffering, suffering that left her alone on Europa, destroying what was left of a once-thriving moon. She set the timer which would give her just enough time to shake loose on her demo. She set the coordinates and reversed her seat so she could watch the structure go down. That was her favorite part. 

But she'd forgotten to sweep for life-forms. A pinging hit her ears, interrupting "Lady Afterhours". Shit. She'd have to go back. Barely enough time for an extraction. Oh well, if today was her day, today was her day. 

All he could do now was count shooting stars. So many. Cold even inside his heated suit. Down to last rations of liquid. Thank god for music. Rueful laugh at "Hey, It's True". It certainly was. Double-checked distress signal. Going strong. Still time. Still time. 

So far the rescue seemed a bust. They couldn't raise the subject on any communication system and most likely he/she/it was dead. But the coordinates were set and so the freighter rushed on. The crew bitterly discussed this latest set of events. Their bonuses were contingent upon deadlines. Other captains ignored distress calls, why couldn't theirs? The captain thought back to a time in his hot-rod traveler when he'd gotten trapped in an asteroid belt and needed assistance. 

He sat for eighteen hours staring at "Orient Point", desperately calling for help. Since then he never let one go by. 

She skidded up to the high-rise and threw her heat-seeker on. As she blasted open the massive glass front doors, she identified the source of the heat. One-hundred and sixty-seventh floor. She blasted open the elevator door and activated her jet-pack. The walls of the elevator shaft were easy to bounce off of so she was able to motor pretty quick, rolling "Whatever You Want" on her headset. She didn't have much time. 

Something was wrong with the astral stabilizers. He'd have to power up the generator and take a look. Time was of the essence. He'd have just under an hour to fix them or he'd use too much of the battery and not be able to leave enough for his spacesuit specs. He always worked to "Am or Pm", somehow it relaxed him, something he'd need as he performed the tricky over-routing necessary to re-engage the A.S. system. 

As the freighter rounded the Sagittarius Elliptical Dwarf Galaxy, fortunes changed. A squadron of Goozies lay in wait. With "Rose Gold" blaring on the deck, the freighter did her best to act like a fighter. But with little to no maneuverability, and even less firepower, she couldn't stave off the attack. The rescue would have to wait as the Goozies would board, inspect and off-load anything of value they could fine. 

They were huddled in a corner, squalid and emaciated. Of course they would choose a high floor. Ensures invisibility. They just got unlucky, that's all. But she didn't have time to worry about them or what might happen to them once she got them out. The charges were still winding down and she'd have to hurry if she didn't want to be caught in the incineration. As "Slowburner"snaked into her ear, she shot all four of them with tranquilizer jets. She gathered them up in her extendable arms and rushed for the elevator shaft. Adhering them to the back of the rover, she accelerated. Ten seconds later a massive blast behind her almost toppled the rover, but she was able to maintain control. The debris from the building engulfed her and she disappeared into the cloud. 

Back in the cockpit, he heard "Pine River" and wished he might someday go. But the batteries were almost gone, his suit was ever so cold and he was so tired he could no longer keep his eyes open to see the shooting stars. Someone might still come. Someone might still come. Someone might still come. 

for Cormac

Thursday, September 26, 2013

The Old Man, Clara, The Conducator


Last May my son studied the beginnings of the Holocaust in one of his high school classes. They were covering the ghettos when we talked about it. He said a few very interesting things.

First he said he was concerned that he wasn't more affected by it. He could understand it intellectually but he found it difficult to have an emotional response. As we talked about it it became clear that the reason his emotional response wasn't apparent was because the subject is so intense that there is no possible response that is large enough to be appropriate.

Second he said that he understood "deniers" because your mind cannot take it all in. The temptation is to dismiss the possibility.

Third he said that the only reason he felt like he could tolerate the discussion of the ghettos was because things were as good as they were ever going to be. What follows is unimaginable.

Fourth (and this is a film tangent) he referenced the Kubrick exhibit that we saw a while ago which chronicles a project Kubrick worked on and eventually abandoned that focused on the Holocaust. He said he was glad that Kubrick hadn't made the film because an artist as powerful as Kubrick doing a Holocaust film would be terrifying to behold.

I consider Scott Walker to be the Stanley Kubrick of song. He has written again and again about the brutality of various regimes. In fact, as he has increasingly distanced himself from the usual concerns of romantic pop, his work has turned ever darker and looked unsparingly at the depths that human beings will go to in order to maintain control over one another.

And just as that unfinished Kubrick project would have been almost unbearable to ingest, so do Walker's genocidal compositions defy any comfortable access to the listener.

On 1969's Scott 4, Walker had taken back his birth name to credit his songs. Noel Scott Engel wrote his first full length original album. It contained a song called "The Old Man's Back Again (Dedicated to the Neo-Stalinist Regime)" which was about what had occurred in Prague the year before and the Russian backed government that had taken charge.

Somehow Walker turned this into some kind of cool funk rock lounge dance track with a killer bassline...take a listen.

36 years later, he would write and record "Clara" for 2006's "The Drift". This song makes "The Old Man's Back Again" look like "I Want to Hold Your Hand" in comparison.

The title refers to Clara Petacci, Mussolini's lover who was executed along with the Italian dictator. Their corpses were strung up and desecrated by angry Italians. Walker recalls seeing a snapshot of this in a newsreel before a movie as a kid. It haunted him so completely that he made an almost unbearable work of art out of it.

Listen to "Clara". You won't be singing along too much. It is almost thirteen minutes long.

Just as disturbing is the track from Bish Bosch called "The Day The Conducator Died (An Xmas Song)". "The Conducator" is the Romanian word for "leader" and is what Ceaucescu called himself.

This tune is almost eight minutes long and is no walk in the park either. The lilting little Christmas coda is about as creepy as music gets and I am not even sure why. Check out "The Day The Conducator Died (An Xmas Song)".

Back to my son and his response to studying the Holocaust in school. And this is appropriate right now seeing as the new leader of Iran stood before the UN and said, "Yeah, we admit it HAPPENED in spite of what the last loser leader of our country hinted at over and over again."

See, we don't want to acknowledge our faults. Think about how truly difficult that is to do on a personal level. To say, "I did THAT. THAT wrong thing. I knew it was wrong and I did it anyway."

For the human race to do that on a global scale??? It is almost unthinkable. It seems impossible. But that is where ART comes in. Art doesn't have to be elected. It doesn't have to please constituents. It doesn't have to deliver food to the hungry or protect the weak from those who would oppress them.

But it can take the human race by the scruff of the neck and force it's stupid head in front of a mirror and hold it there until it cries and says, "I am sorry I have done such things."


Tuesday, September 17, 2013

Dr. Mars: Glamour, Clamor, And The End Of Time


For many of us, Dr. Mars represents everything good we used to count on. I say "us" and "we" as if there is some kind of organization but that really isn't the case. A few groups of threes and fours roam around, rarely sixes or sevens, mostly ones and twos. Nothing is constant these days but if you can locate a radio in an abandoned storefront it's a pretty good bet you'll hear Dr. Mars coming from it.

I remember tracking a group (not nice people from what I could tell) who were collecting guns from various abandoned armories. I thought maybe I could find a way to sabotage their progress, to do something that might convince them to change their ways. Then I saw them kill an old man for a rusty pistol and knew I'd better just let 'em go.

That afternoon I heard "Are You There" coming from a novelty radio from a toy store. The sound mimics what it feels like to be alive these days. It's so familiar, it feels like it was made long ago, but it has the urgency of an immediate performance. It also brings the hair up on your neck the way you get when you sense something important ABOUT to happen. If you're clocking tenses, that's past/present/future all in one.

When Dr. Mars says, "I've been searching so long/Are you there?" you know it could be about a certain girl but you also can't shake the suspicion that there is more information woven in that is not so easily identifiable.

Indeed, in the very next song "Personally", Dr. Mars talks about "encounters of the fourth kind" and says we should "take it personally" but also talks about taking Manhattan and outer space. The desire to boil everything down to the love of one girl being enough to make it on this crazy planet gains a massive layer of melancholy when you take into consideration how few of us there are left and how impossible that kind of dream can feel in the face of obvious mass extinction.

Later in a dusty old roadhouse bar with a flashing jukebox powered by some solar cell, Dr. Mars gives me "The Ashtar Command". If I had enough time with a pencil and paper and a few cold leisurely beers, I KNOW I could decipher it, but trouble has been in the air today and I only get one quick listen. Tension seems to be running high for whatever reason and I decide to skirt the city, nestling my nocturnal journey between the abandoned high-rises and the scorched forest.

I don't know where they broadcast from. Sometimes the sound comes from up in the hills, they must have a generator up there because I can hear the amplifiers. I've been skulking, hoping for some kind of signal that something might have changed somewhere important, that they have news I need from a place I can never access again.

Along the way, I meet a wayward damsel. We hole up in the Presidential Suite of some swanky relic. Sure enough, the bedside radio brings more Dr. Mars to light, "I'll Have You Anyway", which serves as a dirty backdrop to our furtive embrace. She's on her own path, headed in the opposite direction and the temptation to alter mine to match hers is strong. But I have my own unfinished business that somehow still feels important in spite of everything I've lost.

Somehow there is glamour woven in among the gloom and doom. All kinds of treasures are just lying around waiting to be picked up and used. I rounded a corner on Highway 54 and found a cabin tucked behind a row of forsythia bushes. Whoever built it must have seen the writing on the wall because they put a solar powered gennie in the garage. There was a tricked out '32 Ford Hot-Rod sitting there, gleaming under a layer of dust, dying to be aired out and let loose on an open highway. As I gunned it up to 120 MPH the radio static transformed into another transmission from Dr. Mars, "The Last Ride". Those falsetto background vocals hang over the driving rhythm section like thunderclouds over a plain.

You drive a rig like that around and you're bound to attract company. Especially of the femme fatale variety. Sure enough she stuck her thumb out and I dropped from 120 to 0 and watched her fold her long legs into the passenger seat. Sure her hair against the sunset streaming behind us made a pretty picture but her idea of fun was shooting windows out of abandoned cars as we zoomed past. Having spent many months living inside a car like that, I had to put my foot down. The silence was punctuated by the strains of "Whatever I Say Goes" drifting up from a shopping cart piled high with anything and everything, a detritus sundae topped with a transistor radio of a cherry.

The confrontation left her shaken. She wasn't used to people sticking by her AFTER a fight like that. We camped out next to the '32 and I stroked her hair as she cried. I remembered the Dr. Mars "Neptune's Daughter" song and thought about telling her about it but she was so muddled up it might just have made things worse. I settled on helping her focus on the crickets. She drifted off to sleep. But I told her the refrain..."You don't have to keep it all to yourself."

In the morning she was gone.

So was the '32.

Easy come easy go.

I backtracked and found that shopping cart. It made for slow going but whoever had put it together knew what they were doing. Water purification, dehydrated foodstuff, military rations, basic toiletries, a few simple tools, and best of all, five pairs of brand new boots, just my size.

And that transistor on the top. Remember, it's all static now except the few pockets of pirate radio. All they have is Dr. Mars last offering, "Stars In Our Favour". As I pushed my cart in my new boots, "The Golden Age" didn't even sound ironic. Sad, yes, but still somehow hopeful.

Are you getting the picture now? As I trudge I hear "You Had The Same Dream Too", some sort of elegy bound up with a tragic romance. Then "The Capsule" blasts off out of that emotional wreckage, giving me the impression that I'm not trapped here, that I can leave any time I want, that I'm not pushing a wire cage on wheels.

Where would I go in that little ship?

What coordinates would I punch into the interstellar destination locator?

Rumors from hobos hiding underneath every dusty junkyard mattress to machine-gun-toting guards at impenetrable compounds hint of colonies on some moon somewhere. Just when I scoff at the thought, Dr. Mars comes crackling out waltzing me out into that deep beyond with the desperate longing of "Europa". How could that song exist if we couldn't get there? When the horns come in I can't help but imagine Dr. Mars stepping out of a hatch onto a welcome platform, thronging masses of well-adjusted peace-loving human Europans cheering as one.

Just when that vision becomes too much for my poor little abandoned heart to take, "The Sweetheart Deal, Part Two" slides out of my radio and I think, maybe Jupiter is out of the question, but isn't it possible I could track Dr. Mars down and join? Like that old spiritual says, "He don't say nothin' but he must know somethin'".

But that's where the fear comes in because all I know about them is the way they sound. If I can believe what I hear, there must be something good happening in some secret locale. Some Hobbit hole with books and records and good wine and long stupid conversations punctuated by deliberate hilarity. I mean, somewhere you can really relax and feel like everything will be okay.

That's a big if.

Because everything is most definitely NOT okay. Whatever will be has not come to pass yet, if it ever will. You think "Europa" is hard to get to, what about the FUTURE? Only way to get there is one slow second at a time. So I push my cart and wear out my five pair of boots and wait for another cypher from Dr. Mars to tell me where I ought to be going.

Monday, May 6, 2013

Scott Walker and Catherine Deneuve


In 1964 a film was released that catapulted Catherine Deneuve to international stardom. If you haven't seen "The Umbrellas of Cherbourg" I urge you to make it a priority. But don't watch it on a tiny laptop with interruptions. If you must watch it at home make sure it is on a big screen and commit to the whole kit and kaboodle.

It is a musical unlike any other. Every line of the film is sung. Small talk, conversations between incidental characters, shopkeepers and customers, how-do-you-do's and pardon-me-ma'am's are scored as lushly as the songs that erupt from the existing musical landscape.

On top of this layer of unreality, director Jacques Demy manages to create a palette consisting entirely of primary colors, every blue the same blue, every red the same red, green to green, until this impossible scheme forces you into a world as idealized and imaginary as any Disney cartoon. The double whammy of these two unreal elements (music and color) juxtaposed with the melodrama of a young shop girl pregnant by her young lover sent off to fulfill his duty to his country - well, you wind up with just about the saddest most romantic movie ever made.

I won't give much more away than that. I only explain that much to put this next link into the proper context. The Walker Brothers were on fire. They'd had two number one hits in England, both of which had also done quite well in the United States, and they had come to be seen as their own unique brand of brooding doomed romantics. The pairing of their Gothic sensuality with the European lilt of the signature "song" from "The Umbrellas of Cherbourg" is, in a word, transcendent.

Now, Scott Walker was already chafing at this kind of cover song. More and more he was writing compositions that rival this one in scope and beauty and melodic power. Regardless of how he views the songs that he was "forced" to interpret during this period, I (heavy stress on that I) feel that his vocal work on these covers places him in very rare company, company you can count on both hands. Frank, Judy, Dean, Tony, Ray, Nina, Ella...I'm sure you could argue any number of folks in that pantheon but if Scott Walker had never written a song he would still be one of the greatest singers of all time.

Listen to The Walker Brothers soar to impossibly sad romantic heights in their cover of the theme song to "The Umbrellas of Cherbourg" in the song "I Will Wait For You". I picture thousands of English high school girls (and boys) closed up in their rooms, tears streaming down their cheeks, wishing and dreaming of the eternal devotion promised in this gorgeous song.

Next up, Scott Walker solo sings more Michel LeGrand...

Friday, May 3, 2013

Scott Walker "Miniatures"


In audio taken from one of his BBC TV show broadcasts, Scott Walker introduces the song "Winter Night" from Scott 3 as a "miniature". The late '60's rock scene was all about excess. Everyone was trying to out-epic everyone else. The two minute thirty second hit single was seen as teeny-bopper fodder and artists were looking to move rock into uncharted territory, both in subject matter and length.

Scott Walker, as usual, was operating in another sphere altogether. Some of the song lengths on Scott 3 (of his own composition, not the Brel songs that close the album out) are as follows:

We Came Through 1:59
Butterfly 1:42
30 Century Man 1:29
Winter Night 1:45

Then on Scott 4 there is On Your Own Again which clocks in at 1:48 and 'Til The Band Comes in has Jean The Machine at 2:10 and Cowbell Shakin' at 1:06, barely a snippet.

This seems to be a trend in his work of the period. When compared with the work he's been doing over the past two decades they seem like thoughts that flicker across his mind. Song lengths from his past three albums routinely start at seven minutes at least and stretch to over twenty on Bish Bosch.

But these miniatures as he calls them are not underdone. They are fully realized. They are exactly as long as they need to be. Nothing superfluous, nothing redundant, no need to reiterate.

In fact, if I didn't point out how short We Came Through is you would undoubtedly classify it as an epic. I am linking to a video that pairs the song with a car driving up a parking garage ramp. Ground floor to roof and the song is over. The lyrics posted on the video are incorrect in one crucial spot so I'm going to post them here.

Watch Scott Walker's miniature epic "We Came Through" from Scott 3.

We Came Through

We came through
We came riding through like warriors from afar
Our black horses danced upon the graves
Of yesterday's desires
Haunted by our visions framed in fire

I greet you
For you still believe in what's behind the door
You see children freeze upon their knees
And praying to the wind
To send their grey Madonnas back again

Fire the guns
And salute the men who died for freedom's sake
And we'll weep tonight but we won't lie awake
Gazing up at statues dressed in stars

We won't dream
For they don't come true for us, not anymore
They've run far away to hide in caves
With haggard burning eyes
Their icy voices tear our hearts like knives

We came through
Like the Gothic monsters perched on Notre Dame
We observed the naked souls of gutters
Pouring forth mankind
Smothered in an avalanche of time

And we're giants
As we watch our kings and countries raise their shields
And Guevera dies encased in his ideals
And as Luther King's predictions fade from view

We came through
We came through
We came riding through

All that in under two minutes.

Miniature? Hardly.

Monday, April 29, 2013

Scott Walker Scares An Empty Studio: Rosary


After 1984's "Climate Of Hunter", Scott Walker seemingly disappeared again. "Climate Of Hunter" was a challenging work laced with a strange funkiness. The advent of English New Wave seemed to put Walker's style in a position to possibly connect with a wider audience again. But again, this didn't happen. He did a few awkward TV and radio interviews in support of "Climate" but the slick shallow newly formed MTV aesthetic was a terrible fit for him.

Eleven years pass. 1995's "Tilt" makes "Climate Of Hunter" sound like Lionel Richie in comparison. Walker clearly had decided that any kind of clinging to traditional song structure or attempt at pop melody was no longer part of his palette. He'd been there, done that.

"Tilt" is, in a word, intense. Dense jarring drum noises, gorgeous string orchestral sections laid over horribly violent imagery, a vocal approach that dispenses with verse/chorus/verse/bridge predictability and a headlong rush into a new kind of song where comforting structure simply no longer exists. I don't make distinctions between the "Old Scott Walker" and the "New Scott Walker". It all seems consistent to me. The staggering thing about it is the wide disparity between works of art that come from the same mind. It is as if Samuel Beckett spent years writing popular television, backslid to empty formulaic made for TV movies and spent the last third of his life writing his avant-garde plays.

The commercial landscape had changed so drastically between 1984 and 1995 that "Tilt" actually performed quite well, reaching #27 on the UK Album Chart. Noisy music was finally in the mainstream. Somehow Scott Walker had finally arrived at what he probably should have been all along. An idiosyncratic avant-garde boundary dissolver with a cult following. The massive success of "The Sun Ain't Gonna Shine Anymore" had finally settled to an appropriate level.

This "arrival" wasn't heralded by any kind of shift in how Walker did things, however. He didn't embark on a world tour performing all his old hits in a tux and an orchestra while performing his new material with a crack punk band. He merely began the process of waiting for his next album to come to him. Which wouldn't happen until 2006.

He did, however, agree to one momentous occasion. He agreed to perform live on a television program called "Later...with Jools Holland". Jools Holland was a founding member of Squeeze, has a very successful post-Squeeze solo career, and has been hosting a music show for almost twenty years featuring interviews, live performances and impromptu collaboration.

Walker agreed but only if they allowed him to tape his performance without an audience. The clip shows how "Later" handled this, making it appear as if Walker was in a packed studio.

"Tilt" is filled with noise as I said before. The one exception is the song that closes the album, "Rosary". It is also the only track on the album where Walker plays an instrument as well as sings. It is this stark confrontational difficult song that Walker chose to perform. He COULD have chosen anything from the album, brought an impressive bizarre orchestra to showcase the ambitious sonic scope of the album.

Instead Walker chose a song that is so bare, so stripped of recognizable traditional song structure that the result is almost embarrassing, like watching someone in a private moment that they would never want you to see.

I almost never read comment threads but I perused these just to see what people thought. Old fans were dismayed that he was abandoning melody and beauty, those unfamiliar with him wondered how a man who couldn't sing or play guitar got on a TV show and even new fans wondered why he would choose THIS song to sing.

But again, Walker wasn't interested in presenting some IDEA of himself. He'd lost the ability to do that years ago. He was only capable of the performance that was as close to authenticity as he could possibly muster. It is a very disorienting performance. The music seems to be barely written, as if some kind of savant had discovered an electric guitar sitting next to him at a moment of great crisis.

I am not sure of the origin of the following quote but I recently became aware of it through Ricky Gervais' twitter account, which I highly recommend. The quote I refer to is, "If you want to lead the orchestra, you must turn your back on the audience."

Scott Walker took it a step further. He made them leave the room.

Watch Scott Walker perform "Rosary" live from 1995.