031: Brian Eno - Here Come the Warm Jets (1974)

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“As a producer, I'm not just saying, Oh, let's get a good bass drum sound. I'm saying, OK, look, this thing you're doing now is hinting at a certain universe of things that I believe are connected.” ⁠

—Brian Eno

My, my, my! Brian Eno is the producer’s producer, so it only makes sense that Producer Mike would eventually get around to him. Eno is renowned for producing classic albums for U2 and Talking Heads, pioneering and naming the genre of ambient music, and composing the seven seconds that comforted Windows 95 users as they learned how to use the Start button. Today, Mike guides Dan, John, and Rich through Here Come the Warm Jets, Eno’s 1974 solo debut, released shortly after Roxy Music proved too small to house both his ego and Bryan Ferry’s. Warm Jets was composed and produced piecemeal in the studio, which Eno saw as its own instrument, and the result is a taped-together masterpiece filled with overdubs (one song contains 27 tracks of piano). It can take some time for the noisy blur of Warm Jets to coalesce into identifiable, hummable pieces, but we’re hoping to help ease you into the madness.

Miscellany

• As we said in the plugs, in our efforts to help with disaster recovery after Hurricane Dorian, we have a deal for our listeners: If you make a donation of any size to an organization working to help displaced animals, email a confirmation of your donation to discordpod@gmail.com, and in return we will send you a special bonus episode that won’t be available to anyone else. Our own Chris Willie Williams is producing a solo episode on Bill Callahan’s Sometimes I Wish We Were an Eagle, to be released in November to everyone who sends us their confirmations in September and October.

• There’s much more going on socioculturally behind “Cindy Tells Me” than “balding UK producer shakes fist at feminism,” but as a panel of four men, we wanted to be cautious about putting our foots in our mouths. Gender roles in the early 1970s were changing so quickly that it caused a lot of general confusion, and for more on the subject, we recommend Peggy Orenstein’s book Flux: Women on Sex, Work, Love, Kids, and Life in a Half-Changed World [Amazon affiliate link].

• “Cindy Tells Me” also contains the line “Left the Hotpoints to rust in the kitchenettes.” The Hotpoint was a revolutionary step forward in iron design, with its hottest point at the front and not the center, letting users iron between the buttons (much to the Rolling Stones’ satisfaction).

• The 1974 New Musical Express interview with Chrissie Hynde is linked below, but content warning: they discuss Eno’s love of pornography in much greater detail than our episode does.

• The show’s opener, with Rich and John getting frustrated as “Thursday Afternoon” plays in the background, was inspired by a terrific 2006 article from the New York Times Magazine, in which the author describes the experience of somebody (not the author) selecting “Thursday Afternoon” (an ambient album consisting of a single track that lasts over an hour) from the jukebox at a bar and seeing how everybody reacted to it. This article is linked below and is absolutely worth reading.

• In 1996, Brian Eno gave an interview in which, among other things, he discussed the creation of the Windows 95 startup sound and how it helped him break out of a creative funk. The best part is that he composed the sound on a Mac.

Other links

• Chrissie Hynde interviews Eno in 1974 (NME, via The Quietus)

• Stylus magazine on “Cindy Tells Me” (Gentry Boeckel, via More Dark Than Shark)

• Eno’s “The Studio as Compositional Tool” lecture (Downbeat, via the Hyperreal Music Archive)

• "Unhappy Hour" (Wendy McClure, New York Times Magazine)

• Q and A With Brian Eno (Joel Selvin, SFGATE)

• The Pixel Fund

• The Humane Society’s Emergency Animal Rescue Fund

• Discord & Rhyme’s Patreon

• Discord & Rhyme’s Here Come the Warm Jets playlist (Spotify)

Discord & Rhyme Roll Call

• Mike DeFabio (host)

• John McFerrin (moderator)

• Rich Bunnell

• Dan Watkins

Here Come the Warm Jets tracklist

1. Needles in the Camel’s Eye

2. The Paw Paw Negro Blowtorch

3. Baby’s on Fire

4. Cindy Tells Me

5. Driving Me Backwards

6. On Some Faraway Beach

7. Blank Frank

8. Dead Finks Don’t Talk

9. Some of Them Are Old

10. Here Come the Warm Jets

Other clips used

Brian Eno:

• Thursday Afternoon

• The Microsoft Sound

• King’s Lead Hat

• St. Elmo’s Fire

• Third Uncle

• No One Receiving

• The Big Ship

Others:

• Roxy Music - Editions of You

• Fripp & Eno - The Heavenly Music Corporation

• Cannibal Ox - Raspberry Fields

• Atmosphere - Homecoming

• Bo Diddley - Bo Diddley

• Buddy Holly - Not Fade Away

• Johnny Otis - Willie and the Hand Jive

• The Strangeloves - I Want Candy

• The Rolling Stones - Please Go Home

• The Who - Magic Bus

• The Stooges - 1969

• David Bowie - Panic in Detroit

• Bruce Springsteen - She’s the One

• The Fall - Dice Man

• The Clash - Rudie Can’t Fail

• Thomas Dolby - Europa and the Pirate Twins

• The Smiths - How Soon Is Now?

• George Michael - Faith

• U2 - Desire

• David Bowie - Joe the Lion

• The Residents - Seasoned Greetings

• Harmonia - Walky-Talky

• St. Vincent - Some of Them Are Old

Songs we mentioned but didn’t clip

Brian Eno:

• By This River

Others:

• Eric Carmen - Hungry Eyes

• Spinal Tap - Big Bottom

• King Crimson - The Sailor's Tale (live)

• David Bowie - Scary Monsters (And Super Creeps!)

• Roxy Music - Amazona

• The Beatles - I Want You (She's So Heavy)

• David Bowie - V-2 Schneider

• Talking Heads - The Great Curve

• The Beatles - Carry That Weight

• The Beach Boys - Let's Go Away for Awhile

• Bob Seger - Still the Same

• Frankie Valli and the Four Seasons - Big Girls Don't Cry

• Roxy Music - In Every Dream Home a Heartache

• Roxy Music - A Song for Europe

• The Kingsmen - Louie Louie

• St. Vincent - Kerosene

• John Newton/Traditional - Amazing Grace

• The Tornadoes - Telstar

• New Order - Ceremony

• Devo - S.I.B. (Swelling Itching Brain)

Band/album personnel

• Brian Eno – vocals, keyboards, snake guitar, electric larynx, synthesizer, treatments, instrumentation, production, mixing

• Chris "Ace" Spedding – guitar on tracks 1 and 2

• Phil Manzanera – guitar on tracks 1, 2 and 4

• Simon King – percussion on tracks 1, 3, 5 to 7 and 10

• Bill MacCormick – bass guitar on tracks 1 and 7

• Marty Simon – percussion on tracks 2, 3 and 4

• Busta Jones – bass guitar on 2, 4, 6 and 8

• Robert Fripp – guitar on 3, 5, and 7

• Paul Rudolph – guitar on tracks 3 and 10, bass guitar on tracks 3, 5 and 10

• John Wetton – bass guitar on tracks 3 and 5

• Nick Judd – keyboards on tracks 4 and 8

• Andy Mackay – keyboards on tracks 6 and 9, saxophone septet on track 9

• Sweetfeed – backing vocals on tracks 6 and 7

• Nick Kool & the Koolaids – keyboards on track 7 (pseudonym invented by Eno to describe his multi-tracking)

• Paul Thompson – percussion on track 8

• Lloyd Watson – slide guitar on track 9

• Chris Thomas – extra bass guitar on track 2, mixing

• Derek Chandler – recording engineering

• Denny Bridges – mixing engineering

• Phil Chapman – mixing engineering

• Paul Hardiman – mixing engineering

• Arun Chakraverty – mastering

Credits

“Discord & Rhyme (theme),” composed by the Other Leading Brand, contains elements of: 

• Amon Düül II - Dehypnotized Toothpaste

• The Dukes of Stratosphear - What in the World?? ...

• Faith No More - Midlife Crisis

• Herbie Hancock - Hornets

• Kraftwerk - Autobahn

• Talking Heads - Seen and Not Seen

• Brian Eno - Dead Finks Don’t Talk (this episode only) 

You can buy or stream Here Come the Warm Jets and other albums by Brian Eno at the usual suspects such as Spotify, Apple Music, YouTube, and Amazon [affiliate link]. Follow Discord & Rhyme on Twitter @DiscordPod for news, updates, and other random stuff. Follow Rich @zonetrope, John @tarkus1980, and Dan @DanSWatkins. Editing is by Rich, and special thanks to Mike for production. See you next album, and be ever wonderful.