One Minute Forty One Seconds Of Infinity

The documentary that kicked my Scott Walker obsession into being is called Scott Walker: 30 Century Man which is the title of a song off of 1969's "Scott 3".

The song is an anomaly in the Walker catalog. The first side on the vinyl Scott 3 LP consists of seven lush orchestral impossibilities. Each seems to be more beautiful and sad than the last. Each is dense to an almost pathological level. They are hothouse rainforests of melody. They envelop you in such a complete sonic landscape that you almost feel as if you are suspended within them.

Now flip the LP over.

30 Century Man cuts everything away. A simple acoustic guitar strum. A song that is as basic as they come. When I learned it on acoustic guitar I was shocked at how basic it was. The chords in it could be learned in 20 minutes by someone who had never played guitar. Compared with the strings and horns and complexity of the first side, this song is like a flat rock on top of a flat rock.

The lyrics are equally gigantic and immutable. There is a philosophy at work here that cannot be denied. Walker deliberately strips all distraction away from the words. He sings them without inflection, without emotional resonance, another flat rock on top of the slab. Posting lyrics as a way to explain the ideas contained in a song usually seems like a perfectly acceptable way to convey an opinion but in this case there just is no way to approach the MEANING of this song without the whole package working together.

Here's what happened to me while listening to it.

I'd heard the song dozens of times and didn't pause to consider it much. It works on such an obvious level that it is easy to underestimate it. But after a while, it slowly turned in my heart like a key inside of a secret lock. It spun in my orbit like a satellite, catching varied imagery from some distant unimaginable place and filtering them so I could understand.

In short, I got religious about it.

To put this into context and perspective, I am not really religious about anything. Except my own pursuit of art. But this song pierced my atheism and brought me to my knees. Not in despair but in supplication.

Why? Who knows. I could try to describe my conversion to you. But I know how I respond to like descriptions from others. I respect that they experienced something but I cannot begin to climb inside of their response. When I hear this song I feel comforted in a way I imagine a parish to feel while fire and brimstone rains down on them from the pulpit. The content is terrifying to behold but the faith you contain is strengthened through the fear.

My father used to wonder whether Vincent Van Gogh actually saw the world the way his paintings look. A friend of an ex scoffed openly at this notion, claiming that it robbed Van Gogh of the credit he rightly deserved for his genius. I thought she missed the point which was that everyone has a specific vision of the world. But not everyone can articulate it so perfectly.

This song is Starry Starry Night or The Potato Eaters. It synthesizes the human experience into a microcosm. I don't mean to go even further out on a limb but 30 Century Man, to me, makes the most sense when you imagine that God is singing it to you. The trick that Walker somehow manages to pull off is to leave the song so open-ended that it can hold whatever that brings to mind. God will sound differently when speaking to different people.

AND I DON'T BELIEVE IN GOD.

But somehow, through this song, I achieve a kind of faith, I travel forward to the time Walker evokes so effortlessly with the simplest three chords in any writer's arsenal. If this song were an invention it would be the wheel. Just think what we could do with a wheel.

Listen to 30 Century Man and inch us towards infinity.

Scott Walker Sings A Show Tune

Scott Walker's parents divorced when he was quite young. His father worked in the oil industry as some sort of geological engineer which led to a vagabond youth. One of the stops was New York. Here Walker made his first foray into professional entertainment. Between the ages of 11 and 13, Walker (then named Noel Scott Engel) acted in two Broadway musicals, neither of which lasted very long or are remembered at all.

Pipe Dream ran from November 30, 1955 to June 30, 1956. Plain and Fancy ran from January 27, 1955 to March 3, 1956.

This is a footnote at best in his career, something that is barely remarked upon. But as a professional actor I know how hard it is to book even ONE part, let alone several in succession, especially in the almost hermetically sealed world of Broadway theater.

Within a year of these appearances, Walker had recorded almost an entire album worth of teeny-bopper rock and roll, clearly influenced by the swagger and croon of Elvis Presley.

But what was that year of professional acting like? A typical Broadway show rehearses for a couple of months, then goes through an out of town run to gauge audience reaction, followed by a short preview period and finally opening night. Then the play runs as long as it is financially viable.

Pipe Dream ran from November 30, 1955 to June 30, 1956. Plain and Fancy ran from January 27, 1955 to March 3, 1956.

Obviously Walker couldn't have originated whatever role he played in both shows as the runs parallel each other. But IBDB (the Broadway version of IMDB) lists him as acting in both.

To double back to my earlier point, the fact that Walker managed to audition for and execute actual performances of these plays is a testament to his musical gifts. This is no talent show where any sort of effort is rewarded. Marks must be hit, blocking executed, musical scores to fulfill and whatever story element he was involved in done properly. This was Broadway, after all, and you simply do not roll out of bed and wind up there. You pursue it wholeheartedly and once you get there you must deliver. The fact that Walker did that for two different productions within the same year is actually quite an accomplishment. I've been an Equity actor for almost twenty years now and it still hasn't happened for me!!!

I can't help wonder what that must have been like for a young boy on the verge of puberty. The backstage world, for the uninitiated, is unrelentingly ribald, filled with open emotional display and intensity. I recently did a play with a ten year old and no matter how hard the cast tried to censor themselves the boy was still witness to many adult interactions that he never would have been without being in a play.

The psychological effect notwithstanding, he certainly grew up to record many songs that could be considered "show tunes". Where most of his contemporary pop competitors were discovering scratchy old blues LP's, Scott Walker was going back to that other great American song book...the show tune.

Here are a few great examples from the album he released containing songs he'd sung on the BBC on his own show:

You're Gonna Hear From Me
The Impossible Dream
Lost In The Stars

In just a few numbers, he established himself as one of the finest interpreters of this sort of highbrow material. But rock and roll was storming the world, leaving all other forms in the dust. Thankfully Scott Walker left a few breadcrumbs on the trail back to Broadway.

Bowie, Fatima Mansions & Walker Brothers: 3 Versions of Nite Flights: Original/2 Copies

Only one way to fall.

The title track of The Walker Brothers swan song is the incredible "Nite Flights". While it doesn't open the album, the fact that Walker doubled it as the name of the album speaks volumes about the importance of this particular song.

The song on its own merits is stunning. A sleek propulsive bass line propels the rhythm, descending against a rising layer of keyboard shimmer. Cymbals hiss, the snare pops, and the overall effect is somehow like something out of a science fiction film.

Put in the context of the musical landscape of 1978 and the song takes on even greater significance. England was exploding into punk rock and new wave, both of which are left in the dust by the genre-less edifice this song effortlessly erects.

In the hands of a media juggernaut, this album could have been some kind of international blockbuster. It was obviously blazing new sonic ground and combining this with the unlikely history of The Walker Brothers seems like an alley-oop. But the company was folding and the album made a brief appearance, affected a few of the cognoscenti, and that was that for The Walker Brothers.

I can only make analogies to somehow explain what this might look like were it to happen today. Imagine that Hall & Oates released an album tomorrow that alienated all of their fans from back in the day but that in 30 years would be looked upon as the pinnacle of musical achievement of the era.

After all, in the film 30 Century Man, Brian Eno holds up a copy of "Nite Flights" and says, "We've come no further than this. It's shameful!"

Listen to the original "Nite Flights" off of 1978's "Nite Flights" by The Walker Brothers.

The album did not have the kind of commercial success to match the critical lasting effect it had on musicians.

Elsewhere on this blog you will find my 50 Greatest Albums series. One of these is "Viva Dead Ponies" by a little-known Irish band called The Fatima Mansions. They had a moment in the sun in the early '90's and "Viva Dead Ponies" is one of the great political manifestos ever put to sound. On the follow up "Lost In The Former West" is a cover of "Nite Flights". I've had the song for almost twenty years but never knew it was a cover, let alone that it was written by Scott Walker. It was my favorite song on the album.

Listen to "Nite Flights" by The Fatima Mansions off of "Lost In The Former West".

The second copy of the original comes from David Bowie who has honored Walker as one of his heroes. He executive produced the movie about Walker and it is obvious that much of his singing style was influenced by him as well.

Listen to "Nite Flights" off of David Bowie's "Black Tie, White Noise".

Again I must return to the element of fear that is somehow present in Walker's work. The imagery is so startling, so perfectly realized, and so unlike anything you are used to witnessing in pop song form that there is a kind of vertigo that ensues. This sensation when juxtaposed with the aural oddity is unsettling in a way that is impossible to quantify. Walker has said that he starts with the words and that they inform his melodic choices. Read "Nite Flights". I don't know what it means but it terrifies me.

Nite Flights

There's no hold
The moving has come through
The danger brushing you
Turns its face into the heat
And runs the tunnels

It's so cold
The dark dug up by dogs
The stitches torn and broke
The raw meat fist you choke
Has hit the bloodlite

Glass traps open and close on nite flights
Broken necks
Feather weights press the walls
Be my love
We will be gods on nite flights
Only one promise
Only one way to fall

Glass traps open and close on nite flights
Broken necks
Feather weights press the walls
Be my love
We will be gods on nite flights
Only one promise
Only one way to fall

On the nite flights
On the nite flights
On the nite flights
Only one way to fall

On the nite flights
On the nite flights
On the nite flights
Only one way to fall

SDSS14+13B (Zercon, A Flagpole Sitter)

I don't need my music to be intellectual. I'm as much a sucker for melody as the next guy and I have no problem with a catchy tune even if it is about the silliest of topics.

But I also am fascinated by the boundary pushers, by the fringe dwellers, by the writers who will risk alienating the listener with atonal progression or with lyrical subjects that go beyond what is traditionally covered in mainstream pop music.

No one goes further in this direction than Scott Walker. Until 1995's "Tilt" his catalog is bizarre from time to time but there is always a melody to hang your hat on. Lyrically he might be challenging or difficult but his singing and the orchestration could always be counted on to settle into something pleasing at the very least and achingly beautiful at the best moments.

From "Tilt" onwards, Walker has been steadily exploring areas of music that are farther and farther away from traditional song structure and melody.

Atonal music can seem the refuge of the melodically challenged. So when someone with the melodic gifts of Scott Walker goes down that road, it carries more weight for me. It's like Charlize Theron in "Monster". When you consider how she COULD have looked to play the part, how she COULD have portrayed herself, the invisible absence adds power. Scott Walker is simply no longer interested in traditional melody.

Many of his original fan base find this trend to be deliberately off-putting. They long for the killer combo of challenging lyrical content with impossible orchestral beauty.

But Scott Walker has other things in mind.

Take "SDSS14+13B (Zercon, A Flagpole Sitter)" from last year's "Bish Bosch". I would post a link but it is almost twenty two minutes long. It opens with Walker's voice alone and then goes places that are so out there that they seem alien, past humanity. The difference between this and a normal song is like the difference between an episode of "Seinfeld" and Matthew Barney's "Cremaster" cycle.

I won't even attempt to describe the sounds. To really grasp what Walker is after, you must know the intellectual underpinnings that keep the song from collapsing in on itself. The SDSS14+13B in the title is actually the name/location of a brown dwarf, the "SDSS" standing for Sloan Digital Sky Survey.

Zercon is the name of an actual human dwarf, a jester in the court of Attila the Hun. He is not a fictional character. His name is contained in records kept by Chinese emissaries sent to engage in diplomatic negotiations with Attila.

And "flagpole sitting" was a fad in the early 20th century where someone would make a platform on top of a flagpole and sit up there for as long as they could stand.

How are these three disparate things connected? Walker doesn't leave this to your imagination. In the liner notes to "Bish Bosch", he explains his thinking. Zercon is performing for Attila. The conditions are heinous. In spite of his exalted position, he is still exposing himself to derision and scorn with each performance, his master is one of the more brutal figures in history and any kind of escape to comfort is impossible.

Zercon, while enduring taunts and jeers,through his imagination attempts to raise himself out of the Hell on earth he is trapped in. He projects himself forward in time, searching for a higher position. He manages to locate the early 20th century, becoming a flagpole sitter. But here too he must endure the taunts of onlookers so he projects himself higher and higher. Eventually his despair propels him so high that he is transformed from a human dwarf into a brown dwarf.

But the irony is that brown dwarves are stars that have cooled to the point that they no longer emit light. Or, in other words, they are dead. His attempt at escape, while spectacularly successful in a variety of ways, is ultimately his undoing.

So now that you've been properly warned, here is a link to a youtube video of the whole song in all of its twisted glory.

Scott Walker's "SDSS14+13B (Zercon, A Flagpole Sitter)".

Ingmar Bergman and Scott Walker: The Seventh Seal

The year was 1969. Scott Walker had been on an incredible creative streak. He'd released three albums in quick succession, each a massive success. "Scott 3" had consisted of ten Walker originals with four Brel songs, dispensing with the show-tune standards and country croon. Sales had dipped slightly but there was no reason to assume that was anything but a small hiccup. His next was to be his first entirely original album. He was primed for his masterpiece.

He delivered.

And no one was listening.

The liner notes to "Scott 4" contain a quote from Albert Camus, "A man's work is nothing but this slow trek to rediscover, through the detours of art, those two or three great and simple images in whose presence his heart first opened."

Twelve years earlier when Scott was an American teenager crooning silly love songs underneath a pompadour, Ingmar Bergman's "The Seventh Seal" was released to international acclaim. Perhaps Walker's teenage heart opened upon seeing it because he opens "Scott 4" with his own version, a lyric masterpiece that somehow rhymes the entire film to a great melody.

Walker has said that he was most excited about moving to Europe so that he could be in the midst of European cinema, and that one of his heroes was unquestionably Ingmar Bergman. This album, for Walker, was not the tail end of a period of work, it was to be the beginning. He was finally out from under the shadow of "The Sun Ain't Gonna Shine Anymore", he'd shaken off the silly trappings of fabricated boy-band fame and now he was about to declare himself as a writer for the ages.

The tragedy is that he did so in such definitive fashion that he alienated whatever fan base he had left. His musical vision is uncompromising, academic, intellectual and foreboding. In an era when male sex symbols in music were delving into the blues and allowing audiences vicarious hedonistic pleasure, Walker was writing about fascism, existential angst, the political fallout in post Holocaust Europe and the magnification of personal pain by larger societal forces.

Not exactly "come on baby light my fire".

To wit, listen to "The Seventh Seal". If you haven't seen the film, know that this is a spoiler of the most drastic sort since it somehow tells the entire movie in five minutes.

In some other universe, this album would have sent Walker into the stratosphere of worldwide success. Instead it was a penultimate swan song of sorts, and it's failure meant that it would be his only all-original album until 1984's "Climate of Hunter".

This gives the music a tragic tint, the slight tinge of what might have been, what never was.

Time Operator/Answering Machine: Westerberg and Walker

There are almost no musical connections between Paul Westerberg and Scott Walker. Aesthetically they could not be further apart. Westerberg is all rawness and emotion, Walker is all finesse and intellect. Westerberg rarely does more than one take because he literally loses the meaning of the song if he has to recreate anything, Walker is so meticulous that you can listen to his entire oeuvre and not hear a single intake of breath.

There is only one moment of intersection. Each incorporated a pre-recorded message from the phone company on a song.

Fifteen years and a continent apart.

On 1970's overlooked masterpiece "Til The Band Comes In", Walker wrote a song called "Time Operator". Given the mystical nature of most of his work, the first thought the title invokes is some kind of exploration of temporal dislocation in the face of modern alienation. But, no. In England, you could call a certain number and a "time operator" would literally tell you what time it was.

The song opens with a recording of the BT Speaking Clock over a lonely late night string figure which segues into a sax trill. Walker begins his trademark croon and the song shifts into a piano bar shuffle in which he asks the time operator to meet him since they are both awake. It is a sexy lonely tune. It ends with Walker saying "I wouldn't care if you're ugly/'Coz here with the lights out I couldn't see/You just picture Paul Newman/And girl he looks a lot like me".

This might be the first reference to phone sex ever recorded. The picture Walker paints is that of a lonely brooding man unable to connect with anything concrete. He calls the anonymous speaking clock and tries to seduce the voice he hears. Buried deep here is a kind of humor, since clearly there isn't an actual woman on the line but merely a recording of one. Walker is essentially talking to himself.

In Westerberg's "Answering Machine", as might be expected, this whole situation is inverted. Westerberg is calling a specific girl, she isn't there, he gets her answering machine. He always gets her answering machine. He has so many things he wants to say. Knowing that he will merely be putting his voice on tape leaves him lost and lonely. He wails, "Try and free a slave of ignorance/Try and teach a whore about romance/How do you say I miss you to an answering machine?/How do you say good night to an answering machine?/How do you say I'm lonely to an answering machine?/Message is very plain/Oh, I hate your answering machine".

As this sentiment snarls inside of the distorted guitar figure that propels the song, an impersonal female voice emerges, asking "if you need help if you need help if you'd like to make a call please hang up and try again".

The effect is devastating. It moves past the literal occurrence of trying to reach someone and gets at the panic and loss that you feel when you are isolated. The song becomes the inner monologue of someone contemplating the end of something, not the pain of trying to get in touch. The guitar sound is anthemic and soaring. The sound of it immediately cries out for drums, for a guitar solo, for the song to explode into the rock and roll triumph that is obvious in the melody and singing. But it never comes. Westerberg is alone at the heart of it.

These two writers are about as far apart stylistically as you can get. They are also my favorites.

Listen to Scott Walker's "Time Operator" off of 1970's "Til The Band Comes In" and The Replacements "Answering Machine" off of 1984's "Let It Be".

I'll Be Home, Cowboy: Nilsson, Walker, Newman

After years and years of dwindling interest in music, 2011/2012 brought a double whammy of melodic obsession. First I discovered Harry Nilsson through the documentary "Who Is Harry Nilsson?" which is still on Netflix and you should see if at all possible.

I spent the next few months buying used cheap versions of his albums, reading all about him, and generally freaking out that I hadn't really even known who he WAS before. His career seems unthinkable when you examine it for even a split second and if you listed everything he did and everything that happened to him, you would think he lived to be 150 years old.

Nilsson inadvertently led me to Scott Walker. Here's how that happened.

I was having trouble watching narrative film. I had been spending most of my time either listening to or reading about Harry Nilsson. But I was too tired to read and it was too late to play my guitar. I had a mini realization. Hey, I liked that documentary about Nilsson. Maybe there's another cool music doc about someone I don't know much about.

The Walker doc had been on Netflix for a short while and I'd noted it in passing without giving it too much thought. The name rang zero bells. At least with Nilsson I knew the NAME even if I had no idea what songs he'd sung or written. With Walker it was a complete blank.

I watched it and obviously it had a large effect on me or you wouldn't be reading this.

However, it took me several months before I realized there was more of a connection between Nilsson and Walker than just ME watching the documentaries in quick succession.

While delving into everything Nilsson, I bought his landmark 1969 album "Nilsson Sings Newman". Nilsson had shot to prominence a short time earlier when The Beatles had named him their "favorite American band", which is hilarious when you think of it. So what does Nilsson do with this megaphone he's got pointed at a giant audience? He decides to sing an entire album worth of Randy Newman songs.

To put this into some kind of perspective, this would be like Adele deciding right now to record an album of MY songs.

The resulting album was not a giant success. It seemed out of step with the times which were getting louder and more rock and roll than ever before. This album was as far from that as you can get. Newman plays the piano, Nilsson sings. That's it. No jams, no psychedelica, no extended drum solos, nothing trippy. Were you to sit a family around the piano in 1903 (like the song on the album imagines), and have them sing all these tunes, they would hardly seem out of place.

What's all this got to do with Scott Walker, you ask? Well, after his career had been torpedoed and he was coerced into abandoning his songwriting, occasionally Walker seemed to put his foot down and demand a level of quality in the song choices. Granted, he sang some terrible songs. But mixed in with the dreck are some gems.

Two of these gems are songs taken from the Nilsson/Newman collaboration.

Clearly Scott Walker had heard it. So forty years before I would become obsessed with these two artists almost simultaneously, they were already connected.

The two Randy Newman songs that the Nilsson and Walker catalogs share are "I'll Be Home" and "Cowboy".

I love both versions and am including all four here for you to enjoy.

Nilsson "I'll Be Home"
Nilsson "Cowboy"
Scott Walker "I'll Be Home" (Skip to 11:25 of this link)
Scott Walker "Cowboy"

Scott Walker: The Next Great Crooner, The Last Great Crooner

By the time Scott Walker left The Walker Brothers to go solo, the tradition of the tuxedo clad handsome man standing in front of a similarly clad orchestra singing "standards" was so all-pervasive that YOUTH REBELLED AGAINST THE VERY IDEA OF IT. It had somehow come to represent the status quo, it had taken on a political meaning, and that meaning wasn't of the forward thinking radical, it's meaning was more the cop showing up to bust the party than the party itself.

Make no mistake, Scott Walker was being groomed to follow in the footsteps of those men, of Sinatra, of Dean Martin. The success of "The Sun Ain't Gonna Shine Anymore" catalyzed a vast swath of teenage girls who were now as open to Walker singing softly as they were to the hip-shaking beautiful vulgarity of Mick Jagger. Whatever Walker had tapped into went very deep and the people in charge of his career smelled the proverbial blood in the water. Here was a mystery man, here was a person with the rare combination of sheer physical talent and impossible-to-quantify charisma. Add that to the strange songs of his own writing and you can see why they thought they had a gold mine on their hands.

When you say the word Sinatra, a certain style is automatically evoked in your mind. It involves red velvet walls, light glinting off ice cubes perspiring with brown liquor, evening gowns held lightly by gloved fingers to ensure that high heels don't snag, all class, all sophistication. Now, you can puncture that vision with any kind of deep gaze but Michael Buble is proof that the pudding still exists. Scott Walker's record company saw gold in them thar hills and Walker was their claim to it.

Thus, his first three solo albums are peppered with standards, with songs that wouldn't be out of place in a set by Judy Garland at The Rainbow Room, or from Sammy Davis, Jr. in the desert of Las Vegas. As that style of music must be, these recordings are immaculate. They are intricately staged set pieces of romantic imagination. Taken on their own they are some kind of pinnacle, but when paired with the OTHER work Walker was doing and would do, they become almost talismanic, they ARE the fantasy and they EVOKE the fantasy at the same time.

Watch him sing "When Joanna Loved Me" on the Dusty Springfield show. The song is from Walker's debut solo album "Scott".

The sound of this falls into some vague adult contemporary category, the world where Mel Torme and Englebert Humperdink live, the world where Steve and Edie sing the classics side by side and everyone's fears about the future are assuaged. There is no room for the radical there, the edges, the underbelly. The audience who was clinging to this type of music was desperately AFRAID of rock and roll, found it to be threatening in a fundamental way.

But Walker was a hybrid, the ultimate beatnik, a crooner who could pull off the formal emotional sweep of a show-tune like "When Joanna Loved Me" but who could also write his own material stranger than any experimental rock and roll anthem.

For a few short years, Walker seemed on the cusp of becoming a superstar combination of the two mutually exclusive genres. But the culture was rocketing away from the croon faster than Walker could work. By 1970 and the two albums that I consider to be masterpieces, he was seen as outdated, square, for parents. In a terrible perverse irony, he then spent eight years making music that was just that.

For a brief moment he'd been Sinatra in front of the orchestra. He paid for it by having to remain there as Mel Torme.

A Murder In Ostia

In Ostia, Italy on November 2, 1975, a seventeen year old hustler named Giuseppe Pelosi climbed into a car owned by Pier Paolo Pasolini. At the time, Pasolini was one of the most celebrated radical filmmakers in the world, certainly the premier director in Italy. Pelosi ran over Pasolini. Then he ran over him again. Then he ran over him again.

Roughly twenty years later, Scott Walker released the harrowing album "Tilt". It was his first album in eleven years. His last had been "Climate of Hunter", released in 1984, a slick strange pop collection of macabre funk laid over sensuous bass lines and even stranger melody.

"Tilt" would make "Climate of Hunter" seem like a Hall & Oates record.

The first song on "Tilt" is called "Farmer In The City (Remembering Pasolini)". Walker takes a translation of a poem by Pasolini and modifies it, layering it over an orchestral composition that can only be described as bleak. I don't know what he was trying to say about Pasolini, I don't know what the hell he is talking about in this song. At several points he seems to be an auctioneer and a bidder at the same time..."I'll give you 21/21/21/Do I hear 21/21/21". A further couplet states that he "can't go buy a man in this shirt", either referring to actual slavery or to purchasing the services of a male prostitute.

Again, I have no idea what Walker is talking about here. All I know is that by including Pasolini in the title, by referencing the name of the town where he was brutally murdered, and by invoking the specter of human trafficking of one degree or another, you are placed in the uncomfortable position of being a denyer, of having a truth-teller grab you by the back of your neck, forcibly keep you from turning away from what you most desperately wish to avoid, and having them snarl at you, "Look. Do not turn away."

But all the while, their voice is hypnotic. The bed of music that cradles it is epic and lush. No matter how many times I hear it, I am unprepared. I cannot take it in.

Nothing is mentioned in the song of what the young hustler felt as the wheels crushed the life out of the body of a great artist. No attempt is made to link the lyrical content of the song to the occurrences that led up to such a horrific end. Walker doesn't try to feel the pounding in the chest of the murderer shifting the car into reverse to increase the damage to the corpse. Shifting it back into forward, heart pounding with what? Exhilaration? Regret? Triumph? Relief?

The song might not even be about that occurrence. Walker isn't saying. He makes a bunch of sounds in a recording studio and forces us to say it for him.

Watch "Farmer In The City" off of Scott Walker's 1995 masterpiece "Tilt".

Dusty Springfield And Scott Walker: Velvet Perfection

The clip opens with Dusty Springfield in close-up, grainy black and white so that her blond bouffant seems to be dissolving slowly around her head, her facial features blurred, her speaking voice emerging from the confusion like a long high-heeled leg out the slit of a tight skirt.

At first blush she seems nervous until you realize that she is breathless, excited. She says, "Mm, there's a funny thing, when you've been working with two other people, as I did, with The Springfields, to suddenly leave and try and do something on your own, for a change, and this is exactly what's happened to my guest tonight, and I'm sure, this is practically, I would imagine his first appearance on television on his own, and I think he's really marvelous, we sometimes sort of pass in corridors of recording studios and that's about as close as I get to him which is a pity. His name is...Scott Walker."

The text hints at what is obvious in her delivery. Her voice quavers. She seems caught in a private moment. If you weren't looking at her on the screen you might think you'd inadvertently opened the door between hotel rooms to find her writing in her diary about an illicit kiss.

The camera pans left to a strange set that seems like the inside of some kind of darkly glittering dome. Walker emerges from behind Dusty and the dome brightens, sparkling to life with his arrival. Even though Walker is quite tall, he seems like a little boy in a Lord Fauntleroy suit. With skinny legs that always seem on the verge of buckling beneath him, he hurtles toward the microphone, alone in this cavern of light, and proceeds to sing one of the most deceptively upbeat songs of all time.

His hair is all wrong, he seems vaguely uneasy, but then he starts to sing and it is extraordinary. There doesn't seem to be enough time in the song for all the words he says and yet he is never out of breath, never enunciates anything less than perfectly...so NOT out of breath is he that you don't even get the impression that he is breathing at all.

Watch Dusty's scorching intro and then Scott Walker singing Jacques Brel's "Mathilde".

Springfield and Walker were labelmates on Phillips, an offshoot of some German conglomerate that had mostly been releasing classical titles but was moving into the pop arena. The classical catalog paid great dividends for Walker as he had access to arrangers and producers who could achieve the sophisticated compositions he was about to undertake. The lush nature of Dusty Springfield's catalog would not have been possible with some ragged rough rock and roll recording environment. Her stuff, like Walker's, is IMMACULATE.

Her BBC show which this clip is from was a smash hit and must have paved the way for Walker's a short while later. The format was simple. The artist hosts the show, sings a couple songs of their own, invites a guest on who performs a number or two, they team up for a duet and then the host finishes on their own. It was a way to keep the artist in the public eye without the rigors of touring, which at the time was almost medieval in its crudeness.

Later in the show, Dusty invites Walker to sing with her. There is no video of this clip that I can find, the BBC in their infinite wisdom never saved any of these shows, taping over everything because, shoot, why would anyone care that Dusty Springfield's work be preserved?

There is, however, audio.

The exchange is playfully flirtatious and deliberately humorous, with the two of them talking about how these kinds of scripted conversations usually go and how much they didn't want to do anything like that. Then they launch into a wonderful duet of "Let It Be Me".

At this point in time, Scott Walker appearing solo was giant news in the UK. It would be almost as if John Lennon announced he was leaving The Beatles and then appeared singing a duet with Shirley Bassey. Legions of young fans bemoaning the breakup of their favorite boy band now got to see Walker and Springfield seduce each other on live TV.

This kind of sophistication and craft were battling with The Stones, The Who, The Kinks and other rock and roll bands for the cultural mountain top. At this point, the pinnacle was in sight for both factions. In a few short years, however, Walker and company would still be looking up at the snow-peaked apex where the rock and rollers hung out, where those rough and tumble bands grabbed onto low flying jets and took over the world.

But for a brief moment captured between the sultry beehived English chanteuse and the slim-hipped mysterious American, velvet perfection almost jumped the line.