Scott Walker: The First Solo Run - Originals

In 1967, the pop music world was set ablaze. The most important album of the rock era had been released and no one could believe what they were hearing. Journalists report that, wherever one went in London, one was sure to hear its music coming from the apartments one passed. Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band's only drawback is that it's been played too many times for anyone to be amazed by it again.

Oh, a half-year later, Scott Walker's first solo album, Scott, was released. It had nothing to do with The Beatles whatsoever.

That's exciting all on its own. The Beatles' influence drapes over pop history like a psychedelic hair shirt. Combine them with Bob Dylan and you've got the source for three-quarters of the rock music produced since 1965. Scott Walker sounds nothing like them or their influences. He doesn't fit into the history of pop as we usually understand it.

One reason that he's a cult artist is because he was based in Britain. The UK, of course, is not some distant outpost of culture but it's not always easy to remember that their pop scene, as transformative as it was for American listeners, came from very different sources than the rock'n'roll of the States. Rock'n'roll's origins were more or less spontaneous, a combination of high-energy R&B and similarly peppy proto-country music. When the sound came to the UK, it was just that--another sound. The older pop forms of music hall and the singer-with-a-big-band style took longer to fade.

Since this orchestral pop is what interested Walker, it makes sense that he found a home in England, staking out a claim to a fading genre. Keeping the flame of a dying style alive is not the only reason he's a cult artist. Like Frank Zappa, or Love, or the Velvet Underground, the individual parts of his music fit together in a way fundamentally different from that of the mainstream.

That lack of Beatle's influence is one part of the alien quality of his work. As written in the previous post, Walker's primary songwriting influence wasn't Chicago blues or Buddy Holly but Jacques Brel, the French chanson singer whose songs were semi-theatrical performances. Here's Walker's most Brel-like piece, "The Girls From the Streets," from Scott 2:

Not only is the piece far removed from the likes of Dylan and The Beatles, its removed from its next-closest Anglophone kin, the works of Frank Sinatra and Tony Bennett. The documentary 30 Century Man discusses the interest 60s-era Scott had in modern classical composition but that's something I know very little about. What I do know is that Walker takes a lyrical position that is profoundly horrified and disgusted at what it's portraying, a wealthy man taking a younger one out for a night of debauchery in a world where the poor are both desperate and depraved. It's not "She's Leaving Home."

Prostitution is central to another piece, "The Amorous Humphrey Plugg," which details the joy the titular Humphrey takes in escaping from his family to take up with whores, from the same album:

Take note of how Walker's music creates the sound of ecstatic rapture in the first song and joyous pride in the second, just as the johns are in the midst of their transgressions. Putting the darkest elements in the most thrilling and melodic points of the song is a technique Walker uses brilliantly in "The Electrician" a decade later.

The documentary makes a point of telling us that one key to Walker's success at this time was that his songs often depicted the parts of England that weren't Swinging London. He sang about the lives of sad middle- and working-class people whose illusory brushes with happiness damage them forever. Here's "Rosemary" from Scott 3:

It appears that the only happy moments in Rosemary's life is remembering the travelling salesman who bedded her, perhaps echoing the line in the Walker Brothers' "Orpheus:"  "Remember me/I've already forgotten you."

Even when the romance is at least intimate and ongoing, it's surrounded  by dirty vulgarity. In "Montague Terrace (In Blue)," from Scott, the couple shares an apartment building with a "bloated belching" man upstairs whose stomping "tear[s] the night," and a woman across the hall whose "thighs are full of tales to tell." The feeling one gets is not that their dreams of Montague Terrace are a future they expect but a fantasy shielding them from the filthy world around them.

Walker turns his everyday portraits of escape into the absurd with "Plastic Palace People," from Scott 2, in which young Billy floats above his town, held back by a string to his underwear. Beneath him, the "plastic palace people" dream too long and "Rip your face with lies:"

The theme that runs throughout Walker's work is that life is generally empty, with only waves of sexual rapture, memory, pain and existential dread punctuating the numbness. Take non-album B-side, "The Plague:"

Awake at night (another long-running theme), Walker's protagonist tries to remember "Lips on lips/And hips on hips/And ice and fire and gloom and glow." "When did they leave the man?," he asks.

With this attitude, it makes sense that Walker writes a song retelling the story of Ingmar Bergman's The Seventh Seal, albeit taking an amusing spaghetti-western musical approach:

"The Seventh Seal" is the opening song on Scott 4, generally considered to be his best album of this era. The previous albums (including one compiling music from his television series) were all very successful; Scott 2 was number one on the British album charts, temporarily displacing Dylan's John Wesley Harding.

Scott 4 was a flop. Many attribute this to it being credited to Walker's real last name, Engel. There's no denying that it was a serious personal blow to him. It was the first of his albums to be entirely original. Like the others, it's stylistically diverse. One standout is the jaunty "Hero of the War," detailing the pointless misery of a man who's been paralyzed in combat from the perspective of his mother:

One of the oddest cuts is "The Old Man's Back Again," a slinky number about the Soviet invasion that crushed the Prague Spring:

And here we start to see the legend of Scott Walker form. What the uniqueness of his solo work hides from the contemporary listener is that Walker was a fixture of British entertainment. The aforementioned television show was a variety program in which Walker sang duets with guests in front of stage sets. While it wasn't crass sensationalism of Sonny and Cher or the schmaltz of Andy Williams, Walker's show was in step with mainstream entertainment.

As one can imagine, the trappings of show biz success were troubling for a man prone to laying awake at night, trying to remember some moment of joy in his life. The failure of his first completely original work shook his confidence in his art.

He was able to write two-thirds of the next album, Til the Band Comes In, as he reexamined his career. Here's "Joe," a cocktail-lounge piano ditty about an old man dying alone:

The cheerfulness continues as Walker dissects all the shared misery that keeps humanity together as a war rages:

One of the most remarked-upon elements of the album is the way the Walker the man seems to vanish from the picture early on the second side. After one original tune after another, the last five songs are interpretations and of much lesser quality than his previous work.

This is what makes Walker's story so interesting. While his confidence was shattered and he turned to drink, he didn't disappear from the public eye. He simply stopped caring about what he was doing. He went through his paces, cutting albums of string-heavy MOR covers, holding a mid-level presence on the radio and obscuring the originality of his previous work with a thick layer of treacle.

Up next, Scott Walker's lost years.