Monday, September 5, 2011


Brian Eno- Here Come the Warm Jets (1973) / The Winkies (Bootleg) MP3 & FLAC


"Oh perfect masters, they thrive on disasters. They all look so harmless 
till they find their way up there."

Brian Eno on the random circumstances leading to his tenure in Roxy Music: "As a result of going into a subway station and meeting Andy [Mackay], I joined Roxy Music, and, as a result of that, I have a career in music. If I'd walked ten yards further on the platform, or missed that train, or been in the next carriage, I probably would have been an art teacher now." Although initially, Eno's role in the band was behind the scenes as "Technical Adviser" due to his lack of experience as a performing musician, it didn't take long for him to join his Roxy Music band-mates on stage where he quickly evolved into one of the most flamboyant figures on the British Glam scene (which was an achievement in itself). Truth be told, Eno was never going to last long as part of the supporting cast for a figure like Bryan Ferry, who was becoming more and more concerned with mainstream success just as Eno was trying to push the band in a more artsy, proggy direction. Eno: "My position in Roxy Music was always half-way between the musical and the theoretical. I was never the sort of person who could sit down at the piano and hammer out a song, or says, 'Here man, play this.' I'm much more interested in talking about the ideas behind the music. Working things out from the aesthetic." Things came to a head immediately following the tour in support of Roxy Music's second album, For Your Pleasure, when Eno as well as several other band members expressed concern over Ferry's increasingly domineering control of the band's direction. What resulted was Eno's June, 1973 departure from Roxy Music and the beginning of one of the most innovative and uncompromising solo careers of the rock era.


Brian Eno: "I'm always prone to do things very quickly, which has distinct advantages- you leave all the mistakes in, and the mistakes always become interesting. The Velvet Underground, for example, are the epitome of mistake-filled music, and it makes the music very subtle and beautiful." As would prove to be his habit throughout the remainder of the seventies, Eno took very little time after exiting Roxy Music to finish his first solo LP, Here Come the Warm Jets. Armed with a highly suggestive title, which, in an infamous NME interview with future-Pretender Chrissie Hynde, Eno hinted might refer to the dreaded "golden shower," the album was all but guaranteed to turn heads, but Eno's time in Roxy Music had also garnered him quite a following among critics; all of this helped make his debut one of the most commercially successful albums of Eno's career. The sessions for Here Come the Warm Jets included Roxy Music sans Ferry, Robert Fripp & John Wetton from King Crimson, as well as members of Hawkwind and Pink Fairies, and aside from taking over lead vocals (for the first time), Eno was apparently content to reprise his Roxy-era role of master sound processor, something which lends the album its uniquely manic feel. While in some ways the album is clearly grounded in the artier margins of the U.K. Glam movement, which had more or less defined the early seventies but by late '73 was beginning to lose steam, in other ways, its avant-garde flourishes and heavily processed sound are anticipatory of the Post-Punk and Shoegaze movements that would respectively punctuate the closing years of the seventies and the eighties. Among the album's many standouts, none is as instantly memorable and confounding as "Dead Finks Don't Talk," a song which Eno has admitted was, at least on an unconscious level, a riposte directed at Ferry. With its military drum beat, darkly humorous lyrics, lovely piano part, heavily distorted guitars, and multitude of vocal effects (including an Elvis impersonation by Eno), it is a tour de force in tension-building and integrating the unexpected. The loveliest song on Here Come the Warm Jets is "Some of Them Are Old," which sounds almost like late-period Beatles with its psychedelic organs and multi-tracked vocals, but what really sets the song apart is the off-kilter Hawaiian-style guitar solo that sounds like it's being played underwater. Eno's early pop-oriented solo albums are often a shock to those who are only familiar with his ambient work; however, they stand as some of the most inventive and prescient records of the Glam-era. Eno: "I'm more of a technologist, manipulating studios and musicians in a funny way. It sounds fantastic but one of the things I tried to do with Warm Jets was to bring musicians together who would normally never play together and to play a music that they couldn't agree upon. The music would come from the chemistry."

Here Come the Warm Jets   
(Astralwerks ~ 2004/1973 ~Remastered Edition)

Tracklist-
 1. Needles in the Camel's Eye  (3:11)
 2. The Paw Paw Negro Blowtorch  (3:05)
 3. Baby's on Fire  (5:19)
 4. Cindy Tells Me  (3:25)
 5. Driving Me Backwards  (5:12)
 6. On Some Faraway Beach  (4:36)
 7. Blank Frank  (3:37)
 8. Dead Finks Don't Talk  (4:20)
 9. Some of Them Are Old  (5:11)
10. Here Come the Warm Jets  (4:05)




The Winkies  
(It's Silver Baby Jones ~ ???? ~ Bootleg CD)

Tracklist-
 1. The Paw Paw Negro Blowtorch (John Peel Session- Feb. 19, 1974)  (3:26)
 2. Fever (John Peel Session- Date Unknown)  (5:18)
 3. Baby's on Fire (John Peel Session- Feb. 26, 1974)  (5:20)
 4. The Fat Lady of Limbourg (Live at Reading, Aug. 26, 1976)  (5:18)
 5. Third Uncle (Live at Reading, Aug. 26, 1976)  (5:31)
 6. I'll Come Running (To Tie Your Shoes) (1975 Demo)  (4:46)
 7. Golden Hours (1975 Demo)  (1:14)
 8. Untitled (Unfinished Demo I)  (0:43)
 9. Untitled (Unfinished Demo II)  (12:18)
10. Castro Haze (1994)  (5:38)
11. Manila Envelope (1994)  (6:53)




17 comments:

  1. Thanks!

    Any chance you have those "Eno Box" compilations?

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  2. Yes, Eno. I loved that quote at the end.

    Thanks for the post!

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  3. I still remember sitting in my car and listening to this album on 8-track and laughing out loud while "Baby's On Fire" screamed out of the speakers. It was then I became a Brian Eno fan.

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  4. "And all the laughing boys are bitching.." Some of the best lyrics and a bitchingly great guitar solo from Fripp. Love it! Already a devotee from way back. I'd worn out 2 copies of this album. Glad the CD finally came along. Thanks v, for the bootleg (which I hadn't heard) and shining a light on the sometimes forgotten early Eno.

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  5. ... Love this album! Couldn't believe that it was an Eno album at first (for me his name was connected to the ambient music he made ...) Discovering more of his discography was so exciting. It's fascinating to compare his stuff: Thank you for this post! (again ...)

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  6. Paulo X, I'll try to post the "Eno Box" comps on Plastic Palace People in the near future

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  7. radiocitizen, thanks for the link! Great archive

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  8. Revan0357, you're welcome! I love that quote too

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  9. scurfie, great image! I'm thinking of posting a bunch of the Eno material I left out of the luna series over at PPP. Eno box might be a way to start

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  10. bv, great great lyric- makes me wish I had stuck that one at the top of the post. Oh well, so many good lines to choose from on this album. Thanks for the comment!

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  11. Issi, this one is perhaps my favorite Eno album. These early albums are highly underrated. Great to hear from you!

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  12. Nice! The Winkies were quite a good band in their own right, in a Mott The Hoople/Stones/Lou Reed kinda way. I've played their one and only album a lot, all but worn out my vinyl copy. I've been hoping I would find a good digital version on the net. So far, no luck...

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  13. Dr Hank, a very interesting request- my favorite kind. I'll scrub the corridors of cyber space and see what comes up :)

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  14. Dr Hank, I came up empty. It has only been released digitally as a Japanese import, which is currently priced at $115 on Amazon. It looks like we'll have to live with old vinyl copies for the foreseeable future.

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  15. Looks that way I'm afraid... thanks for trying though!!

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  16. Dr Hank,no problem. I'll keep an eye out for it.

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  17. Having trouble downloading "Warm Jets". I get about 30%, and it just stops.

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