How was Here Come The Warm Jets received upon it's release?

Alicia OTM.

This is a key point. The neo-girl group backing vocals swathed in echo evoke the passive but oversexed splendour of the Shirelles and the Ronettes. It's as if the Eno character is nostalgic for a time he knows is (a) gone; and (b) a chimera anyway.

haha i had just noticed that the other day! the first stanza of that piano motif is TOTES the same as seger!

i totally agree with this

not to be a prick, but i really don't think eno was serious about ANYTHING on this album, lyrically. he even screwed up the obvious rhyme for "maracas" ("Caracas") by putting in the lame-o "tobaccos", a botch job which still angers me a lot more than any "anti-feminism" here.

And he's justifying his taunts by specifically addressing himself to the (supposedly) mushbrained suggestibility of young, upper-middle class women.

But it's way too easy to disparage difficult ideas (like feminism) by attaching them to target groups that no one will leap to defend (like overbred debutantes).

I love Eno, but this song bugs me. And the defense that he's being self-mockingly ironic in some kind of convoluted sense just doesn't wash. If anything, the "mustardy" vocals work as a snarky underbite to the song's superficial compassion more than its core message.

Eno's a guy of some accomplishment and significance in the world, and therefore his fruity (no, I don't mean gay) tut-tutting comes across as cheap and reactionary.

Heh. Which is why I don't think much about the broader implications of "The Paw Paw Negro Blowtorch."

And yet on Baby's On Fire the last lyric before the multi minute Fripp ejaculation is "they said you were hot stuff, and that's what baby's been reduced to." which strikes me a particularly about SOMETHING.

Christgau:
The idea of this record--top of the pops from quasi-dadaist British synth wizard--may put you off, but the actuality is quite engaging in a vaguely Velvet Underground kind of way. Minimally differentiated variations on the same melody recur and recur, but it's a great melody, and not the only one, and chances are he meant it that way, as a statement, which I agree with. What's more, words take over when the music falters, and on "Cindy Tells Me" they combine for the best song ever written about middle-class feminism, a rock and roll subject if ever there was one. My major complaint is that at times the artist uses a filter that puts dust on my needle. Grade: A

-- Haikunym (Haikunym), Friday, July 7, 2006 3:57 PM (1 year ago)

Here, for comparison (because I'm just that geeky), is the original version of that review:

ENO: Here Come the Warm Jets (Island) The idea of this record--top of the pops from quasi-dadaist British synth wizard who makes out with the Soft Machine--is a lot worse than the actuality, which engages the ear and the mind in a vaguely Velvet Underground sort of way. Minimally differentiated variations on the same melody recur and recur, but it's a nice melody, and chances are he meant it that way. Some good words, too. B PLUS

"Minimally differentiated variations on the same melody recur and recur, but it's a nice melody, and chances are he meant it that way."

Sentence kinda interesting in light of Eno's later ambient music.

Always love this interview:

http://www.moredarkthanshark.org/eno_int_nme-feb74.html

I don't understand, he meant it that way.

From the Stylus article, and thank you all for the reference and the link:

I guess it makes sense that this same person whose solo debut cover art contains a picture of . . . a nude playing card--the eight of spades to be exact--showing a squatting woman urinating (in what looks like a junkyard) as a dapper gentlemen holds up the back of her skirt, would take a humorous anti-feminism stance on a track from his first post-Roxy Music outing, Here Come the Warm Jets.

Actually, it does not make sense. Fetishism--even when it is as well known as Eno's--does not automatically equate to mysogyny or even "anti-feminism."

Although now that I think on it, maybe he did mean the lyrics more or less as explicated here: Eno's fascination with smoothly functioning (or smoothly dysfunctional) systems is no secret. If you consider then that each part must have a role within an operational system, it may not be such a stretch to go from there to "a woman's place is in the home."

This is why he could say something like "cities are places built for women," backing it up with something like, "In cities, you have the opportunity to do all the things that women are really specialized at: intense social relationships and interactions, attention to lots of simultaneous details"

http://www.indexmagazine.com/interviews/brian_eno.shtml

Still, given Eno's oft-stated preference for meaning expressed through sound over that transmitted through words, it may be dangerous to consider the lyrics to "CTM" as anything more than merely an exercise in sibilant phonoaesthetics

were there any bootlegs of that one and only eno solo tour, the one that got cut short after his collapsed lung from too much groupie-rooting? curious as to how these songs were rendered live - a 'studio as instrument' record like this can't have been expecially easy to do back then, never mind that the effect is pretty mild in context of his later work.

intrigued by posited medical connections between groupie-rooting & collapsed lungs

Was the tour with the Winkies as backing band? Or was that later? There is a Peel Session available with Eno & the Winkies, that might give some idea of what the live band sounded like.

tom i think you might be on the right track. i didn't know there was a peel session! there'll be a link around somewhere, doubtless.

jd, swear i'm not inventin' this one

Eno's brief career as a solo star started with Here Come the Warm Jets. Its startling variety, punk-prefiguring abrasions, and country melodies became his only solo Top 30 hit in 1974. But a brief period touring it graphically demonstrated his limits as a rock star. "Scuzzy," he'd call it later.

"I enjoyed screwing the girls for a while, but then that wore off as well." The collapsed lung which finished him was, Chic magazine claimed, the result of six such couplings in a night. Studio collaboration would give Eno safer, quieter avenues.

winkies peel session is pretty awesome. there is at least one other recording of a winkies live show I've got lying around somewhere.

peel session

http://punknotprofit.blogspot.com/2009/04/eno-winkies-peel-sessions.html

Got that on tape somewhere, so that link is useful!

this is the other recorded show, can be found in the usual places, terrible sound quality on it tho

Kings Hall
Derby, England, UK
February 13, 1974

The collapsed lung which finished him was, Chic magazine claimed, the result of six such couplings in a night.

well I'll be damned

fact checkers at chic magazine worked overtime on that one I bet

may we all suffer from similar injuries in the future, i say

you know what they say - loose women, impending breathing difficulties

how can a man with the maturity to write 'driving me backwards' have the gall to bonk six girls in one sitting

I would like to be able to claim that's how I got my collapsed lung, back in the day, but I can't

eno, j'accuse

golden showers of praise.
― cutty (mcutt), Sunday, June 5, 2005 7:18 PM (5 years ago) Bookmark

genius

Going by that recent bio and past interviews, Eno plays it very coy when it comes to his alleged sexcapades. On occasion he's claimed to have acted in porn and basically lived with sex slaves, but at the same time he was a Catholic-raised father rooted in monogamy. This is the same dude who may or may not have drunk his own urine, peed on Duchamp's urinal and fostered a fetish for bottoms, S&M, perfume and statuesque African women. Only Eno knows the truth, but I think he likes being perceived as the winking virgin/whore.

yeah, i think a lot of that was probably BS on Eno's part. maybe not *entirely* BS, but maybe 50/50.
anyhoo, those BBC sessions are essnetial! I might even prefer some of those versions to the Warm Jets versions, heresy though it may be.

wow thx for the link, didn't even know those existed

yeah the BBC sessions are easy to find and totally essential, also there are some good tracks from 1976 live shows that get tacked on to boots of the Peel sessions (e.g. Music For Fans). The one Winkies show that has surfaced is, as EIII notes above, almost impossible to listen to due to bad sound.

So what's notable about this record exactly? It sounds like John Cale jamming with some muppets. It's also unswinging as fuck.

john cale jamming with some muppets! i like that.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m-SG0g7T69c&feature=youtu.be

So what's notable about this record exactly?

just from memory:

guitar sound in Needles
drum sound in Needles
the way the solo comes in on Needles, mixed up louder
vocal delivery on Paw Paw
guitar solo in Paw Paw, freaky electro splatter
the cool little scrapy echoey guitar bit in the outro of Paw Paw
everything about Baby's On Fire

etc...

imo the genius of this record is in the sound of mix, the way the guest musicians are deployed/treated, and the melodic sense which is subtle and addictive.

argh sound of "the" mix, lost connection

i'm not a huge eno fan, but really 'unswinging' -- is that really what you were expecting from an early seventies art rock album? and a british one at that? swing?

Think he means "swing" in the xhuxk sense.

what sense is that? i'm not actually familiar!

vague and ad hoc

I was somewhat disappointed with the comparative un-adventurousness of the instrumentation, more of a standard rock record than the endless funhouse of Tiger Mountain.

I don't think the two albums are all that different really, my one tiny tiny minsicule insignificant complaint about "Tiger Mountain" would be that some of the songs are a bit longer than they need be

nahhh

TTM is for me an entire step up, whether in terms of songwriting or sonic ingenuity

P. surprised Hurting 2 doesn't like the "Baby's on Fire" solo!

I listened to Baby's On Fire like 6x because of this thread and that guitar solo remains one of the most sizzling ever. How else to describe? Honestly I have no idea.

some of the songs are a bit longer than they need be
agree!! i love true wheel and mother whale eyeless but they could both stand to be at least a minute shorter imo

"sizzling" is right. fripp really knew how to make the most of a guest spot back then. tho manzanera does the solo justince in the 801 live version...

Fave Fripp guest spot can't not be the last minute of A Plague Of Lighthouse Keepers tbh

there's probably already been a fripp guest spot poll?

Ha, I never knew that was Fripp on "Lighthouse Keepers"!

Tbh I wouldn't put it past Banton to extract that fearsome solo from one of his organs, but yeah, Fripp.

here come the warm jets is basically my dream of a ziggy stardust album - an alien using all of pop/rock's little musical and recording tricks and hooks to try and seduce listeners but from a slightly askew perspective. by comparison same-era bowie feels earthbound and stagebound, decent but more pretentious than actually surreal.

this is really otm - I like Ziggy a lot but it only felt like 10% as "out there" as advertised. Warm Jets does a lot of really crazy things in some fairly normal contexts which IMO is what makes it so fascinating. It's not easy to do that!

True wheel could be longer, agree re mother whale eyeless tho. Latter has some of my fave lyrics ever

This is for the fingers
This is for the nails
Hidden in the kitchen
Right behind the scales

^if Scott walker sang this it would be horrifying and obviously about torture; when eno sings it it's not obviously not about torture, and unnerving.

Then there's the "in my town" sequence which is just funny.

Slightly off-topic, but the new one, with Karl Hyde, "Someday World" is streaming here:
http://www.npr.org/2014/04/27/306161810/first-listen-brian-eno-karl-hyde-someday-world

I didn't really OTM him because he'd been OTMed a lot but yeah, croup hitting it out of the park on this one.

Um, the internet thinks it might have been Banton after all xps

there's probably already been a fripp guest spot poll?

― tylerw, Monday, April 28, 2014 11:41 AM (39 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Even if we did a poll already, would make a sweet Spotify playlist especially since there's 0 crim on there.

and if we ain't polled it we should

This thread deserves to have ITS title fixed.

so who/what is 'Sweetfeed'—backing vocals:
http://www.discogs.com/artist/288423-Sweetfeed ?

― nerve_pylon, Saturday, April 26, 2014 6:33 PM (2 days ago)

http://www.spectropop.com/FrontPorch/

I was the only one to continue with music. I moved to London in 1971 and stayed for ten years. I had some success as a guitarist-singer-songwriter. I had a group that went by the name of Sweetfeed and also Roberts, Rice, Bandell and Scott. We recorded with Roger Daltrey on his solo album "Ride A Rock Horse", and also with Brian Eno on his album "Here Come The Warm Jets". We never had any of our own recordings released or achieved commercial success, but our fans included David Bowie, Rod Stewart, Gary Glitter, Bryan Ferry, the Supremes and all of London high society, including members of the royal family.

but no actual punters.

(soz)

xpost Pretty sure that is Fripp on the VdG album. I know he pops up a couple of places on "Pawn Hearts."