Free Brian Eno's Another Green World by Geeta Dayal Page B

band’s worst. Harmonia’s
Deluxe
and Neu!’s
Neu! 75
were paving the way for new German sounds. And, of course, there was Kraftwerk. “Autobahn,” the epic 22-minute-long ode to the joys of freeway driving, was recorded in 1974 and charted in both the US and the UK in 1975. The song had been hacked down to a more radio-friendly three minutes, making it seem more like a goofy gag than the marvelously expansive, visionary piece of proto-techno it was. But it would help open up American and British ears to a radically new sound.
    It was in 1975 that Eno launched his own record label, called Obscure, in addition to putting out three of his own albums in 1975—
Another Green World
,
Discreet Music
, and
Evening Star
, with Fripp. Eno convinced Island Records to fund Obscure (they did, on a shoestring budget), and Eno wore hats as Obscure’s A&R man, producer, chief evangelist, and curator.He had started Obscure to bring some of his favorite experimental musicians—many of whom were extremely obscure at the time—to a wider audience.
    “It was refreshing that someone who had got a bit of success was prepared to use it to propagate their ideas or give support to people who were finding it difficult to access,” said David Toop, who starred on the fourth release on Obscure in 1975,
New and Rediscovered Musical Instruments
, with his friend, the sound sculptor Max Eastley. “Brian had access at that point, and he used it in a very generous way, I think. If you look at Obscure from an A&R perspective, everyone who has been involved in the label has become pretty established in a way.” Gavin Bryars, the Penguin Cafe Orchestra, and Harold Budd were but a few names on Obscure who would go on to be major figures in their fields.
    One could also make a convincing argument that 1975 was the year punk broke; The Ramones released their first single, ‘‘Blitzkrieg Bop,” in November of that year, the same month that the nascent Sex Pistols played their first gig, at St. Martin’s College of Art. For every action, though, there was an equal and opposite reaction—Iron Maiden formed one month later, merging prog’s pomp and theatrics with a new wave of heavy metal.

“Honor thy error as a hidden intention.”
     
    While Led Zeppelin was busy inciting riots in the US, Brian Eno was feeble and bedridden. On one cold January night in 1975, a taxi hit him as he was walking home from a late-night recording session at Basing Street Studios in London. He was recording a song called “Miss Shapiro’’ with his former Roxy Music bandmate, Phil Manzanera. “At that instant my mind was operating incredibly fast,” he recalled in an interview with Arthur Lubow in
People
in 1983. “On one channel, I thought, ‘So that may be the last thing I do.’ Then I thought, ‘If I’m going to survive this, I’ve got to get up as soon as it hits me,’ because I could see another car following the taxi that would surely swerve around and run over my head. The third thingI thought was, ‘Who is going to get in touch with my girlfriend?’ And the fourth thing was, ‘Isn’t the brain an incredible thing? It’s like a 24-track tape with all these things going on at once.’ It sounds ridiculous, but in that moment I developed a theory about how my brain worked. Then I got hit.”
    David Toop was slated to record with Eno the morning after the accident, and heard the bad news. “I turned up at the studio in the morning and the session was canceled because he was in the hospital,” he recalled. “I went to go visit him and the place smelled like sour milk.” Some milk had spilled on the floor, and Eno was too weak to clean it up. Seeing Eno in such a sad state—lying down, immobile, with head injuries and a bad back—deeply worried his friends. But the forced solitude and contemplation led to a now-famous epiphany about ambient music, shrouded in 30-odd years of myth. In the
Discreet Music
liner notes, Eno wrote:
In January this year