Scott Walker In The '70's: 8 Years In Easy Listening Hell

In the three years after The Walker Brothers broke up, Scott Walker wrote, produced and recorded five full length albums. Most artists of the era tended to release an album a year, a pace which Walker almost doubled even though he was also hosting his own weekly BBC show during one of the years in question. Now, volume doesn't necessarily equal quality so there is an element of subjectivity here, but the sophistication and intricacy of these albums is, to my opinion, staggering.

The first three albums each charted quite high, with "Scott 2" reaching number 1, no small feat in an era dominated by The Beatles, The Rolling Stones, The Who, and countless other foreign acts. The special compilation compiled from the BBC program was released while Walker was preparing his first fully original album, the first three having been peppered with standards and Jacques Brel translations among his own compositions.

"Scott 4" was released in November of 1969. "Scott", "Scott 2", "Scott 3" and "Scott Walker Sings Songs From His TV Series" hit #3, #1, #3 and #7 respectively.

"Scott 4" didn't chart at all. His next album "Til The Band Comes In" was a compromise for Walker as he was forced by his record label to record songs that he didn't write in addition to his own material. It, too, failed to chart.

This hardened the resolve of the record label. There was nothing in Walker's contract that gave him the right to decide what songs went on the albums. He has never described exactly how this unfolded but the result was devastating.

In the five years spanning The Walker Brothers career to the failure of "Til The Band Comes In", Walker wrote upwards of fifty songs.

From 1970 to 1978 he wrote none.

Eight years. None.

Oh, he sang. Quite a bit. The label was attempting to rediscover the romantic niche triggered by the swell of "The Sun Ain't Gonna Shine Anymore", trying to tap back into the repressed female English libido that had sent legions of young girls hurtling at Scott Walker's frail tall body as he tried to sing through the screams.

Walker disconnected JUST enough to be able to do the job, to sing the treacle. Sure he was still involved in the studio and arrangements but his fire had been dimmed. These eight years see Walker release four solo albums and two with the oddly reunited Walker Brothers. A total of sixty four tracks. None of them original.

Now, there are factions within Walker's fans, as with any artist of note. Some followed him into the treacle and incorporated it into their view of him. These fans are invariably downright disgusted with his output since then, wishing that he'd return to the lush melodies that he wrote in the '60's. Then there are the modern punks who have no use for the MOR (middle-of-the-road) product he churned out during this cruise control and who are thrilled at the avant-garde boundary that he has sped past into uncharted waters.

I find the easy listening period fascinating, like watching a great actor in a terrible movie. These are not crude productions, they are lush affairs with perfectly executed string sections, brass trills, orchestral bombast. Walker's signing is impeccable and quite stunning. It all sounds effortless but if you try to match him note for note you are out of breath in an instant and he just keeps going and going and going.

There is an extra layer of meaning that these songs have accrued over time when you factor in what COULD have been. The weight of these weightless confections is somehow painful because you can't help but wonder what he would have done with all those resources in excavating his OWN strange and eerie vision.

Imagine Fiona Apple hidden inside a Celine Dion album.

It reminds me of the end of Being John Malkovich, with John Cusack trapped for eternity without a voice, doomed to watch all that he had loved just outside of his grasp.

And yet, somehow, against all probabilities, beauty remains in the trap.

Listen to Sunshine from 1973's "Stretch".

James Bond and Scott Walker: You Only Live Thrice

In 1967, The Walker Brothers were superstars in Britain. Their concerts seldom lasted very long because raging hordes of English teenage girls stormed the stage and tried to love them to death.

The fact that they were American boys who had chosen England as their adoptive country made them mysterious, the deep moodiness of their balladry opened other unlocked secrets in the hearts of these mostly female followers. They were a band but they weren't really rock and roll. They weren't rough and rowdy but there was something dark and dangerous about them all the same.

So it wasn't surprising when the James Bond team of MGM, Albert R. Broccoli and Harry Saltzman asked the band to sing the title song of the next James Bond flick, which was to be titled "You Only Live Twice".

The Walker Brothers declined.

On listening to Nancy Sinatra's version, it is now impossible for me to stop imagining what this song would have sounded like with Scott Walker's airless croon instead of Nancy's perfectly acceptable but pedestrian performance. Take a listen to the theme song to You Only Live Twice with it's incredible and instantly recognizable violin decrescendo.

The match of material to talent would have been electric. If The Walker Brothers had decided to record "You Only Live Twice" for the film they might have shot to international superstardom. Why did they say no? I have only read one book on The Walker Brothers called "The Impossible Dream" which is full of anecdotes but when it comes to the real inside scoop it seems to be as in the dark as we are.

Stranger still is the fact that that same year a film was released starring Elke Sommer called "Deadlier Than The Male". Scott Walker wrote the theme song of the same title. The movie is about a female spy. This song is also fantastic. In some perfect universe this film would have been a box office smash in the United States and the song would have broken the group in their homeland. But, as you can see from the opening sequence, "Deadlier Than The Male" has only one good thing in it. The song.

So. One year. Two spy movies. The Walker Brothers turned down covering "You Only Live Twice" to sing an original song for "Deadlier Than The Male." All in the same year.

It would be 32 years before James Bond and Scott Walker crossed paths again.

1999. David Arnold is putting together the soundtrack for "The World Is Not Enough" with the fantastic title track by Garbage. He writes a song called "Only Myself To Blame" and seeks out Scott Walker to sing it. In Arnold's mind, this song was the fitting conclusion to the failed romance between Bond and Elektra King, who winds up trying to kill 007.

Arnold saw the song as the finale. Director Michael Apted felt it was TOO somber, too down. The song is relegated to the soundtrack. Once again, the blast of recognition and distribution that normally accompanies a song from the Bond canon eludes Scott Walker. In fact, so obscure is the track that I just tried to find a youtube link to a video with the song and it is blocked by Sony in a copyright dispute.

It is worth the .99 cent download to hear Scott Walker sing a terribly sad song over a piano, an upright bass and a delicately brushed snare drum. He seems to be singing back to his younger self, back to that strange time when his band turned away from the spotlight and refused to become part of film history. They would never come that close again.

The Cognitive Dissonant

Cognitive dissonance is defined as the feeling of discomfort when holding simultaneous conflicting beliefs. In music, the meaning of dissonance hearkens back to the Latin, whereby a "dissonant" chord is considered "unstable".

The work that Scott Walker has been producing since 1978 is increasingly dissonant, it increasingly contains contradictory elements that are impossible to assimilate in a unified way, and it has become increasingly more terrifying to behold.

Most modern purveyors of fear in musical form attempt to achieve their desired result through intimidation, volume, or the shock value of violent lyrical content. Examples include Marilyn Manson who creates giant spectacles of fascism, Slipknot who dress like they are all meeting at Hellraiser's house later, and a whole gaggle of gangster rap artists who brag and boast about how cold blooded they are.

These are sunny walks in the park compared to Scott Walker.

Now, don't get me wrong. I actually KIND of like Marilyn Manson and I have plenty of gangster rap on my iTunes. Slipknot I have no use for because their aesthetic is so juvenile and stupid and so devoid of humor that the only appropriate response is laughter. I mean, is anyone really frightened by Saw XVIII?

But the brand of terror that the above dole out is inclusive. The result is more a prurient vicarious thrill witnessing someone instilling fear than truly inspiring actual fear. Actual fear is not thrilling. Actual fear is messy and humiliating. True fear results in a reversion to infancy, to a state where you cannot control your bodily functions, to the feeling you get when you know that you have absolutely no control over any aspect of your existence.

This is the kind of response that Walker achieves.

His is a fear born of ideas.

The indie record label 4AD is one of the most influential record labels of all time. Their most famous client is The Pixies. In the mid 1990's they signed an aging former crooner to a record contract. Outside of England no one cared. They have essentially insured that Scott Walker could attempt the masterpieces that were floating around in that terrifying brain of his.

In 2006, 4AD planned a compilation called "Plague Songs" with various artists each writing a song corresponding to one of the ten plagues of Egypt. For whatever reason, Walker drew the Plague of Darkness.

Does Walker use volume and bombast to affect us? Does he use thundering drums? Distorted screaming guitars? Violent imagery? No, there are only three elements used in the song.

A tambourine. A female chorus. And Scott Walker.

Terrifying.

Take a listen.

Darkness.

The Strangest Pop Hit Single In History

The Walker Brothers had broken up at the height of their fame. Their run only lasted from '65 to '67 but the breakneck pace of recording and touring made it seem much longer. Tensions in the group were high for all the typical reasons, but a crucial one was the burgeoning songwriting talent of Scott Walker. He'd started writing B-sides to singles as a way to increase revenue for the band. It worked. But it also showed that Walker was the true visionary.

Still having a Japanese tour to complete as a vestige of their contract, The Walker Brothers broke up. Walker immediately set to work writing and recording his debut, simply titled "Scott."

Walker had, through a German Playboy bunny he'd met at London's Playboy Club, discovered the music of Belgian superstar Jacques Brel. The first song on "Scott" is an incredible cover of "Mathilde" which Walker sings as if he is belting out the finale of some strange musical where a skinny American kid winds up on the BBC in love with a supermodel who drives him mad.

By default, the second track on the album is Walker's debut as a solo writer. It is also, as the title of this post states, the strangest pop hit single in history. (Get used to hyperbole; it is really the only appropriate response to the eccentricity of this man's work.)

This video is not an official one, someone matched old post-war Europe footage to the moody strains of Walker's imagination. The result is fascinating.

Watch "Montague Terrace (In Blue)".

The album was a smash, rising to # 3 and staying there for seventeen weeks, an eternity for an album. "Mathilde" and "Montague Terrace (In Blue)" charted as singles but the ALBUM was the thing in those days and Walker had a massive hit on his hands. This sent his career into the stratosphere, immediately dwarfing the one-hit-wonder nature of The Walker Brothers. He became a cultural phenomenon, a cult-hit who also achieved mainstream success.

"Montague Terrace (In Blue)" shows why. But what makes it work so well? Is it the strangely dissonant string figure that way back in 1967 felt like a sample but was obviously organic? Is it the harsh consonant clash of the lyrics against that lush bed of violins? Or is it the gunshot crack drum explosion which kicks off the soaring drama of the chorus?

As usual, with Scott Walker, it is impossible to put your finger on just what is going on and why it is so effective. I am also struck by how ENGLISH this song seems, how BRITISH. It animates a cloudy fog-ridden England in the mind's-eye, ancient, foreboding, sexy. It was written by a 24 year old American.

Scott Walker had arrived.

Blue Bell to Bish Bosch: Engel to Walker

In 1958, a teenager from Hamilton, Ohio named Noel Scott Engel arrived in Los Angeles to pursue pop stardom. He cut 20 tracks or so for the tiny Orbit label and achieved regional success with the single "Blue Bell".

In 1965, The Walker Brothers had a # 1 hit in Britain with the moody ballad "The Sun Ain't Gonna Shine Anymore", sung by bandleader Scott Walker. They briefly had more fan club members than The Beatles. None of them were brothers. None of them were named Walker.

In 2013, a seventy year old man from London, England, named Scott Walker released the song "Epizootics!" from his fourteenth studio album "Bish Bosch". "Epizootics!" is a term which refers to epidemics in the animal world. The song is over ten minutes long with a video directed by Olivier Groulx, an Icelandic director who has worked primarily with Sigur Ros.

Noel Scott Engel and Scott Walker are the same man.

Scotty Engel, 15 when he recorded "Blue Bell", washed out as a teen idol by the early '60's and found himself playing bass around Hollywood in "discos" and nightclubs. One of the outfits he joined was a band led by a tall handsome guitar player who lived across the street from Brian Wilson. His name was John Maus but for some reason he'd begun to call himself John Walker. Scott Engel must have figured, why not, and they began appearing as The Walker Brothers.

Then they did something even crazier than that. Signed to a small recording contract with a company that had a London office, they pooled their funds, packed up, and moved to London. The London office didn't know they were coming. They shared an apartment and started recording.

Since then, Scott Walker has been in the United States for less than three months.

I discovered Scott Walker through a documentary that was briefly available on Netflix called "Scott Walker: 30 Century Man". As this post shows, that documentary was a rabbit hole that I have not emerged from over a year later. His career is so strange that trying to describe it all in one sitting feels like what it must feel like for true believers to try and chip away at atheism.

In fact, the three links that I show above completely ignore the period from 1967 to 1970 when Scott Walker left The Walker Brothers to go solo. His fame skyrocketed and the five albums he released in those three years are, in my opinion, unparalleled. As in, if I had to put my money on a Mozart/Salieri outcome, Walker is Mozart and everyone else is Salieri.

He has unquestionably become my favorite musical artist of all time. And it is not even close. In the 1980's, a British musician named Julian Cope put together a compilation of Walker tracks to help restore what was by then a career that had faded into obscurity.

Cope called the compilation "The Godlike Genius of Scott Walker".

So, heathens, non-believers, look upon his works and despair. The Beatles gathered the world together in worship. The Rolling Stones led the hedons in revelry. The inscrutable voice of God emerged through one man only.

A man named Scott Walker. A man NOT named Scott Walker.

30 Century Man, Or How Scott Walker Stole My 2012

I have always been drawn to the fringe, to the almosts, to the trailblazers who never got their commercial due. In most of these cases, the artist toiled in near obscurity, plying their trade for a small but rabid fan base who felt that their champion was unjustly overlooked by the masses. The best example of this is The Replacements, who, if critical praise were album sales, would be in the same league as The Beatles or The Rolling Stones. But somehow the public never caught on, leaving a strange question mark hovering over their output. Early in 2012 I stumbled across a documentary on Netflix titled "Scott Walker: 30 Century Man". I had never heard of Scott Walker, or The Walker Brothers, the band he led in the 1960's. The Netflix notes used words like "mystery", "enigma", and "reclusive" to describe Walker. I had literally NEVER heard his name before, let alone a song. My curiosity was engaged and I decided to watch. To give you an idea of the impact this film had on me, I now own everything Scott Walker has ever made, except for a film score he composed in 1999 and a 1972 album that has gone out of print which can only be bought on vinyl for hundreds of dollars. Walker has prevented the album from being reissued because it came at the beginning of a period he calls his "lost years". Very quickly, however, it became clear to me that Scott Walker was hardly an almost, hardly unappreciated commercially, hardly obscure. In fact, the opposite was true. He was at the center of a kind of fame that very few have ever experienced. We Americans simply never heard about it. His fame was contained, held on the island, eternally British. Scott Walker, however, was not British. Scott Walker was born in Hamilton, Ohio in 1943. And his name wasn't Scott Walker. His name was Noel Scott Engel. I should say his name IS Scott Walker because he is alive and well and living in London. In fact, Scott Walker just released his fourteenth full-length album, Bish Bosch, in December of last year. How did Noel Engel American teenager become Scott Walker British legend? "Scott Walker: 30 Century Man" tells the tale.

The American Beatle

"Nilsson is the best contemporary soloist in the world. He is It. He is the something else The Beatles are. He is The One." - Derek Taylor

You are standing in what used to be South Dakota. You stare at a beautiful mountain vista rising up out of the forest and plain. As you take in the natural perfection, a voice from Heaven says, "You think this is special? You should have seen it with the giant heads carved into it."

I discovered Harry Nilsson just last week so forgive me if I wax a bit rhapsodic. I mean, I guess I knew Nilsson but I didn't KNOW Nilsson. He holds a unique place in pop history. He's not a one-hit wonder although most people know him from "Without You" or "One". He's not a maverick underground unknown who has a catalog that gains steam over time, eventually becoming an accepted part of the retroactive zeitgeist (i.e. Tom Waits).

Today? I feel born again, waking up to a new world, one where Nilsson has emerged. Was I holding him at arm's length before this? Did I blink and miss him? Did I change? Why Nilsson? Why now? How could I have ever lived without him? And what the hell happened? Why is this the saddest story in American pop history?

Perhaps Nilsson knew all along that one day he would lose his gift. Perhaps that is why he so unflinchingly followed his muse. Perhaps he knew the expiration date on his genius would precede his own death. Perhaps that's why he raced to destroy himself before his magic evaporated. But it didn't work. He survived. And spent the last fifteen years of his life a mere mortal.

Derek Taylor's words above were not merely coughed up in order to serve as liner notes on Nilsson's 1968 album "Aerial Ballet". No, Taylor introduced Nilsson's music to John, Paul, George and Ringo. They then famously touted him as their favorite American artist at the press conference announcing the formation of Apple.

The image that comes to my mind of what happened next is of Nilsson donning a motorcycle helmet emblazoned with the Stars and Stripes and then being shot out of a cannon across the next 15 years of the American landscape. He is simultaneously a perfect success story and a tragic failure. He has faded from memory. His biggest hits were the least representative of his particular brand of genius, as great as they are.

Let's back up a second and look at a fraction of what he did.

Doesn't it seem as if "you put the lime in the coconut you drink it right up" is a song passed down since before the dawn of time? Nilsson WROTE it. It's a god damn cave painting. Oh, the theme song to "Midnight Cowboy"? That's Nilsson the interpreter singing someone else. Randy Newman's winning Oscars with Pixar? Nilsson recorded an entire album of Randy Newman songs before anybody knew who the hell he was. 1970 for pete's sake.

Children's album with animated TV show? Check. Crooning standards with the London Philharmonic for a BBC Special? Check. Blood on the microphone rock and roll debauched screaming with John Lennon? Check. Oh man, you gotta tell it all at once and it's impossible.

England has a couple of thousand years on us so I guess they cultivated four of them. We're young over here in the States. We got one. The loneliest number.

I will be writing about Nilsson forever.

Jackass 3: Meaningless Bravery

I once saw a portion of a documentary about a South American tribe. Part of their ritual passage to adulthood involved elaborate stunts designed to bring the youth face to face with fear. They stood on top of tree trunks that had been shorn of all branches. The trunks were held in place by guide wire. Which were then removed. The teen had to scramble to hold onto the falling trunk. The philosophy behind it was to prepare the teen for the perils of adulthood and hunting.

I studiously avoided "Jackass" while it was on television and by the time they'd transitioned into movie theaters I was full-on into parenting and was only seeing Pixar films.

Oh, I'd seen snippets here and there and knew who all the reprobates were but I'd not been IMMERSED.

My outlook on them, I'll admit, was shaped in large part by the traditional media response. They were degenerates, this was everything that was wrong with America, these no-talent attention-whores needed to be stopped.

I was reminded of how much heat skateboarders took when that craze started hitting the streets. Apparently it was okay to join a group of kids and pursue an activity but going out and doing it ON YOUR OWN IN PUBLIC was beyond the pale.

So I am a bit ashamed of the knee-jerk conservatism that I was espousing.

Imagine my surprise when I finally watched the movie "Jackass". Melody was bartending and I was in NYC for a few days visiting. The bar had a downstairs private room with a TV and VCR. Yes, vcr. The only tape? "Jackass".

I figured I should watch this piece of trash. An hour and a half later I was exhausted from crying and laughing and recoiling in horror. They changed my mind entirely that night.

Human beings love to witness acts of bravery. We re-tell them, we fictionalize them, we invent them in order to shine a spotlight on the best facet of human behavior. Our willingness to ignore peril if need be.

The image of the firefighter rushing into a burning building is the perfect example. An act like that reassures us that we are NOT simply beasts, that we have a higher level of morality, that we can operate heroically INSIDE of fear. In fact, this might be one of our defining characteristics. Animals do amazing things in response to danger but they don't have the same knowledge of mortality that we do.

I find there to be a deep beautiful philosophy at work in the "Jackass" catalog. And I am one-hundred-percent serious.

They isolate that characteristic - the human ability to face grave danger with aplomb and they REMOVE THE CONTEXT FROM IT. I find this to be endlessly fascinating.

In "Jackass 3", Johnny Knoxville does a stunt called "Invisible Man" in which he is painted to fit perfectly into a mural of a rainbow spread across a field with a tree in it. Knoxville stands in front of the mural and the camera is lined up so that he essentially disappears.

A bull is then let loose into the corral. The hope is that he will be "invisible". But of course, the bull isn't perfectly lined up like the camera. Bulls can't see color. Knoxville is a sitting duck. He successfully evades a goring but then the bull sneaks around the back of the mural and roars out at Knoxville. He leaps to avoid the bull but the bull rams his legs, sending Knoxville head over heels into the mud, receiving a nice kick in the head for his trouble.

As Knoxville is standing there and hoping against hope that the bull will not see him, his fear is palpable. The charming thing about all of the "Jackass" crew is that they allow us to see their fear. They don't hide it with false bravado like so many of the youtube pretenders who intentionally hurt themselves for attention.

And that is why I can occasionally find myself very moved while watching instead of just horrified or grossed-out. It is as if they are showing us that we don't have to be so afraid of pain, that we are stronger than we think.

If you transplant these staged stunts into real life, a whole layer of respect and admiration would come into play. A man was inadvertently left in a corral and withstood a brutal bull charge! The strength! Two members of a marching band were attacked by a ram! The trumpet player distracted the ram from the tuba player who was almost unconscious on the ground!

Meaningless bravery.

And total acceptance of your friends. There is a running gag in "Jackass 3" called "Rocky" in which Bam Margera sneaks up on someone from behind. He throws water at one side of their face to distract them and punches them from the other with a boxing glove.

Do fights ensue? No! The person rolls around on the ground in pain for a while and then they laugh and hug.

I know it sounds stupid but for me, it accentuates how capable we are of forgiveness, how willing we are as human beings to incorporate flaws into our relationships. The acceptance of these ambushes is very telling.

My favorite portion of "Jackass 3" comes when we see Ryan Dunn sitting in a comfy leather chair in a re-enactment of the famous speaker ad. He seems to be in a comfortable living room. The air from the speaker becomes so intense that he is actually blown from the chair. We then see that the "speaker noise" is being generated by the tail end of a jet airplane which is about 30 feet from Dunn.

He is blown across the airfield. He attempts to get up. He is blown further back. He is blown along the ground for several yards. He struggles to position himself so that he can even attempt to stand up. After a few agonizing moments he achieves upright status. But it is clearly taking every ounce of his will to do so.

After that massive effort to stand up, what does he do?

He jumps into the air so that he will be hurled backwards again. Because he knows it will make his friends laugh. What I was left with was the image of a small creature buffeted about by a force impossibly greater than its own. And that creature didn't crawl away in disgrace. He got up time and again to continue to face it. And tried to get a laugh doing it.

Consider me a jackass.

Too Late For Stitches

So I sliced my finger open at the Hollywood Bowl while waiting for Dolly Parton to come on stage to do the second half of her incredible concert. I was attempting to use a bottle opener to pry a bottlecap off of a large Stella Artois. The cap took a layer of glass with it and my finger met this jagged terminus in a lusty embrace.

I moseyed on down to the First Aid Center beneath the Bowl. A drunken older female fan who could never have gotten away with the length of her skirt anywhere else in the world was up on a table while a nice EMT dabbed her bleeding knee with Hydrogen peroxide. Her daughter paced outside the room on a cell phone in an even smaller outfit. One too young, one too old for their respective skirts.

My EMT was a burly guy who gently daubed at the cut, told me I should go to an Urgent Care facility for stitches, and then told me that HE wouldn't go if the same thing happened to him. So I let him wrap the cut and I headed back up to my seat.

Melody was waiting, worried.

Dolly was transcendent, playing about 10 different instruments, cracking jokes left and right, and pouring her heart out in song.

Cut to a couple of days later and I begin to be convinced that there is still glass in the cut. My doctor reassured me that there was not. But when I asked if I needed stitches, she said, "Oh no, it's too late for stitches."

This statement has been bouncing around in my brain ever since I heard it. It seems apropos in all areas of my life. I am healing. I ought to have sought help earlier than I did. Therefore, I will heal from the damage the best I can.

I am not viewing this in a negative way. It is really a jolt of gratitude that is prominent in my thinking. Because how could I ever wish for a different life than the one I've got? To trade even the darkest of detail for some unknown lighter possibility is to deny the brightest of the bright spots that I have had access to. And that is simply not honorable.

So yes, it is too late for stitches. Yes, I let injury go untreated. But like Dolly at the Bowl, what a show I've gotten to see.

Earth, I love ya, babe.

I Have Tried To Remain Positive

But man, do I hate Janis Joplin. And Van Morrison.