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red rain
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"When I completed the Birdy soundtrack, I wanted my focus to shift to songs rather than to remain on rhythm and texture."
So represents the second major rethink in the Gabriel solo catalogue, with commerciality beginning to lurk in the background (and up the front too). Commerciality was largely successful, according to a 1986 Rolling Stone review: "Gabriel finally struck AM-radio pay dirt this year with the bouyant, funky Sledgehammer." The article however stresses that this wasn't pandering to the mainstream charts for its own sake, but rather a lure to attract listeners into the ambient, muti-layered and undeniably complex atmosphere of So.
Peter later stated that So had emerged from a difficult period in his life and represents the maturity and openness with which he worked through the difficulty. In 1975 Peter had all but given up in music, one prominent reson being to spend more time with his family. In 1983 his family left him largely in response to his immersion in work to the exclusion of all else. In that same year and again in 1984, Peter visited both Senegal and Brazil no doubt absorbing musical influences and rhythmic grooves along the way. During this time he expressed a desire to record a soul/blues record, cover versions of the songs he grew up with (Peter's teenage musical influences were primarily from the black music labels of the 1960s such as Stax and Motown). While away from his family (and perhaps "egged on" by various therapists), Peter also felt the freedom to express his sexuality more openly (ladies, please control yourselves). After a brief reconcilatory holiday with Jill and his daughters A|nna and Melanie at the end of 1984, Peter was ready to work at becoming a commercially viable product. In the Spencer Bright biography Jill recalled Peter's revitalisation: "...instead of going along with the idea that he is different, special, unique, precious, behind a wall, this last album was about him saying 'Fuck that! I am going to...allow myself to succeed,'...the challenge is breaking through."
Peter has often stated that the progression from the third Peter Gabriel record to So (and beyond) follows his journey through these personal experiences and the therapy he embraced to see it through. Therapy? Isn't this only a small step from wearing beads and khaftans and blathering on about whales? Perhaps, but the notion of "creation as therapy" has been especially fruitful to PG, spurring him on to produce some of his best and most universal themes, epecially prominent on So in the form of Don't Give Up, In Your Eyes and Mercy Street.
So what does all this mean? So Gabriel is a rather playful fellow indeed, in stark contrast to the moody and somewhat worrisome character from the fourth Peter Gabriel record. From Stewart Copeland's opening high-hat, the exuberance flows from this record, energy and joyousness erupt at every turn. More than any other Peter Gabriel record before or since So is fun. So also marked the first occasion that Gabriel resisted the urge to deface himself on the cover. Peter has joked that he always defaced his covers to annoy his mother and the urge to do something like the blurred cover above would no doubt have been strong. Interesting that, in discussing the PG catalogue, a flattering portrait on the cover is an unusual occurence.
Another change from previous records is in the troupe of musicians employed. Tony Levin and David Rhodes remained. Jerry Marotta and Larry Fast were out. Welcomed into the fold: Manu Katche. Peter stressed quite heavily over the decision to let Jerry and Larry go and there doesn't appear to be any knives protruding from anyone's back. The decision was a musical one and the difference is audible. The tension between Jerry Marotta's playing style and the sound Peter was aiming for is summarised nicely in Jerry's account of recording Big Time (watch this space). Both Jerry and Larry appear on So, but not consistently and neither have appeared in any susequent records or tours.
Simultaneously recieved on its release as a coming of age in a commercial reality and a cheap sell out (hence the title s.o.), So certainly demonstrates PG's determination (some might say pig-headed) to create a record that would enhance his bank account. Much of the argument at the time was whether this had been achieved at the expense of artistic merit. Time has largely answered this question. Twelve full years after its release, the songs which make up So sound neither crass nor dated. The delicate and precise production courtesy of Peter and Daniel Lanois sounds as fresh on compact disc as it did on vinyl.
It is with a wry smile that we now ask: is it possible that Peter Gabriel broke the mainstream recording industry, made megabucks and created a new fanbase (this author included), and came out the other side smelling of roses?
Anne Sexton (1928-1974) almost epitomises the cliche of the "tortured artist". She is the writer many after (and before) her have sought to be: highly successful despite indifference and occasionally hostility towards the established publishing world. Sexton almost stumbled into poetry at the insistence of her psychiatrist following one of four suicide attempts in her life. She took to poetry with gusto and used it as a medium to distill her life onto paper, often in a disarmingly honest and close-to-the-bone fashion. On of her most famous poems titled All My Pretty Ones deals with the death of both her mother and father in quick succession in 1959 and of Anne's inheritance of her father's alcoholism. scroll down this page to read the poem and an interview with Sexton on the genesis of the poem's first stanza. All My Pretty Ones, while stylistically far removed from Gabriel's Mercy Street, echoes the latter's dislocation and desperation.
Peter asserts that Sexton's search for a suitable father figure, as well as her poetry, fuelled a longer life than she would have otherwise had. This places Mercy Street at the centre of So's theme of "creation as therapy". In Anne Sexton's case, creation as therapy may well have prolonged her life, but it was ultimately unable to relieve her despair. Anne took her own life on the 4th of October 1974 as a result of carbon monoxide poisoning. Gabriel became facinated with Anne Sexton's work after chancing upon one of her books and, in his own words, being "struck that...she was writing entirely for herself." He took the title from Sexton's 1969 play 45 Mercy Street. Sexton was also working a poem (ultimately unfinished) of the same name at the time of her death.
Peter's lyric uses the father-figure images, but its focus is squarely on an increasingly desperate search, not only for a father figure, but for comfort, for familiarity, for peace and of course for mercy. Gabriel identifies strongly with Sexton's loneliness and her long shadows. He uses the image of water (a recurring theme through his entire career) as a metaphor for Sexton's ultimate aim. He refers also to darkness throughout Mercy Street alluding to Sexton's depression. Throughout the song, Gabriel's character (equated with Sexton, though not necessarily Sexton herself) becomes increasingly desperate in her search for mercy until it finally consumes her. The ending of Mercy Street is an undisputed highlight of Peter's concerts, often degenerating into a high pitched wailing scream, an emotionally intense moment skillfully captured on the SWL live ep and the POV video. Peter, however chooses to ultimately end Mercy Street with the hope that, in finally succumbing to the darkness that Anne has achieved in death what she could not in life.
This darkness is used to startling effect in the Matt Mahurin-directed video. A moody black and white affair, the video probably didn't impress those who voted for Gabriel's entry into MTV's Video Vanguard. Mahurin remains fairly faithful to Peter's lyrics choosing to offer simple stark images, often in slow motion. More a collection of compatible moods than a rock video, Mercy Street is outstanding for its perfect restraint and simplicity. Even though we are used to expecting much more, especially from Peter Gabriel, Mahurin's video transcends the music and completely avoids the garishness that must have been tempting in the wake of Sledgehammer.
Mercy Street is an emotionally exhausting, but ultimately satisfying experience that rises far above the "pop" artifice to something far grander. However Mercy Street began life very differently. After working on some grooves in rio with Brazillian percussionist Djaima Correira, Peter took a basic triangle pattern into the studio once back in Britain and wrote a complete song around it. That song was Don't Break This Rhythm, the B-side to the Sledgehammer single (for a more detailed description of the rhythm and its origin refer to the essay for Don't Break This Rhythm). However he wasn't satified with it and started from scratch again with the triangle and an English folk melody he had rolling around in his head. As an aside the vocal melody for Mercy Street has an incredibly wide range for a Peter Gabriel song, stretching Peter's larynx to its limit particularly in the lower part. This may have been the impetus behind the multi-tracked octaved vocal, one of the most beautiful aspects of Peter's arrangement. It was at this point in the writing process that he chose this song to be his homage to Anne Sexton. He played around with the arrangement adding and removing layers at will, including a never used piano part played by Richard Tee. Peter finally settled on the Fairlight melodies between verses, deliberately leaving in innaccuracies and mistakes for the "human, home-made touch".
In a career auspicious for its unique artistic merit, Mercy Street is literally stratospheric. Easily the centre of his work on So, Mercy Street could be argued as the centre of Gabriel's entire solo output. In the constant struggle between lyric and music, Mercy Street offers a perfect complement. Each element comes together to create a coherent and profound statement that is essential to grasping the impetus behind most of Peter Gabriel's music. What is incredible is that he has equalled the quality of Mercy Street in other recordings. Whether he could better it is something that could be debated until we're all in Anne's boat.
milgram's 37 we do what we're told
"The essence of obedience is that a person comes to view himself as the instrument for carrying out another person's wishes, and he therefore no longer regards himself responsible for his actions." - Stanley Milgram.
Milgram's 37 had its genesis at least six years before its release, while Peter was writing and recording tracks for Peter Gabriel. Note that, in attempting to cover the song's history where it has most commonly been referred to as "Milgram's 37", the title has been reversed here from the record sleeve (where it is titled We Do What We're Told Milgram's 37). The following account of the Milgram experiment was heavily paraphrased from Weiten, 1992.
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In a study published in 1963, Stanley Milgram of Yale University investigated the human tendency to adhere to other's wishes or orders, even when those orders directly violate one's own ethical standards. Milgram's study has become one of the most celebrated and controversial social experiements of our time. In the original experiment, 40 subjects were recruited from the community to participate in a "learning experiment" looking at the effect of punishment on learning. At the laboratory, the subjects were met by a grey-lab-coated experimenter and another "subject", a 47 year old accountant (in fact the accountant was an actor and an accomplice of the experiment). Experimental roles were then "randomly" designated, although the draw was rigged so that the accomplice always became the "learner" and the real subject the "teacher". The accomplice was strapped into an electrical generator with the subject watching. The idea was that whenever the "learner" made a mistake on the questions to be asked, the "teacher" would then deliver a shock through the generator to the "learner". The subjects were told that, while the shocks were painful, no permanent tissue damage would result. Once the "learner" had been strapped in, the subject was led to an adjoining room where the switches for the generator were housed, but where the "learner" could not be seen. There were thirty switches from 15 to 450 volts with rather helpful labels above stating at increasing voltages: "slight shock", "danger: severe shock" and "xxx". again all of this was phoney, but looked impressive and (more importantly) realistic, particualrly to the subject. As the experiment progressed and the accomplice continued to get answers wrong, the subjects were instructed to increase the voltage with each wrong answer. The accomplice would scream and yell more loudly with each successive shock. At 300 volts, he began pounding on the walls and stopped attempting to answer the questions. At this, subjects usually turned to the experimenter who firmly stated that no answer was the same as a wrong answer and that stronger shocks should continue, even though the "learner" was now silent. If a subject attempted to stop the experiment they were flatly informed that "It is absolutely essential that you continue". If the subject refused to cooperate further or once the maximum shock had been administered, the experiment ended and subjects were debriefed on what was really going on. |
The results of the experiment astounded Milgram. No subjects stopped before the pounding on the wall, although five stopped at that point. Only fourteen subjects refused to administer all the shocks. This left twenty-six who administered all thirty levels of the shocks! This directly defied the original expectations of the experiment (most colleagues of milgram predicted that fewer than 1% of the subjects would continue to the end). This does not show that the subjects were cold hearted or cruel. on the contrary, depite their willingness to obey, they suffered greatly in delivering the shocks, visibly horrified at what they were "required" to do.
Milgram made many variations to the experiment and it has been replicated on many different subjects at different times (including a study in Sydney in the early 1970s) with rarely any change in the results. It is most likely from one of these replications that Peter Gabriel discovered the number 37. The title comes from the number of subjects who delivered the full thirty shocks in the experiment (ie. the 26 from the original study).
Peter contacted Stanley Milgram to seek permission to use exerpts from a film of the experiment for use on stage or in future music videos. What facinated PG about the film is the ordinariness of the subjects in it, people you could buy a boat from. This film is a highly disturbing affair confronting a viewer's own tendencies to obedience. Contact your local university for a viewing of it if you can. Though initially intrigued by the request, Milgram eventually turned Gabriel down insisting that academia and entertainment make "unhappy bedfellows". This is an interesting reply since it is hardly likely that PG was going to "entertain" anyone with that footage.
Early studio versions notwithstanding, Milgram's 37 began with one line: "We do what we're told". In fact there are prototype versions of Milgram's 37 on bootlegs, but they are difficult to come across. The primary difference between prototype and released versions is the absence of the "one war...." ending, but still the mere idea of Gabriel's clever use of the song live is a testament to his art. Basically he created Milgram's as a singalong in various concerts in the early 1980s twisting the traditional song of crowd unity into something far more sinister. This was perhaps the point of the song's repeated lyric, a robotic football anthem without meaning to the participants, who were blindly following everyone else and thus obeying Gabriel himself who was conducting the singalong. After all no one at these concerts would have known the song and would have a limited understanding as to why they were participating.
The repeated lyric of "We do what we're told" was the source of Peter Hammill's criticism of the song. He argued that the song oversimplified a complex study into one of the very essences of our humanity and that "another Kafkaesque vision" neither inspired people to find out more about the experiment, nor did it change the perceptions of those who were aware of the study. While this is fair comment on the released studio version, the pulsating rhythms and the droning crowds of the original live versions may serve as a more relevant message: Whether it's an experiment, a rock concert, or a perceived atrocity, it could easily be you.
Written by Mercutio
while he had too much time
on his hands. Thankfully this has now been rectified.