Mike Oldfield's Saga Of The Tubular Bells

Gary Lucas, Zoo World, 25 October 1973

I HADN'T BEEN in London five minutes before I overheard two rock fanatics yammering about some concert that had occurred the previous evening. This was on the train from Gatwick Airport to Victoria Station and consequently the efficient hum of British Rail prevented me from accurately piecing together the loose threads of their conversation. All I got was a vague impression that the pair had just witnessed an Event on par with, well, if not Nixon's "greatest thing since creation" yardstick, at least something as noteworthy as Eric Clapton's comeback at the Rainbow a few months earlier. Phrases emanated from the lips of these earnest young men, a roll-call of names spoken with the same fervor accorded the recitation of the genealogy of saints by Pat O'Brien in Boys Town, plus a graphic chronological description of stage action — "and Stevie Winwood was there and so was Mick I mean Mick Jagger but he didn't do anything but watch but Mick Taylor played he's got short hair now and Robert Wyatt that guy from the Soft Machine I mean Matching Mole was gonna play drums but he broke his back last week he fell out a window at a party cos he was pissed man and it was incredible mate like it was much more far out than Hawkwind or the Floyd I mean it was allright!"

Well, it may have been all right for them but it was getting a bit much for me and if I had just missed the Big Cheese of the Year I bloody well wanted to know what I had missed. So I broke my studied American cool and leaned over to gently inquire about what the hell they were talking about. The one who had been doing most of the talking leaned over and with the smile of a man who's just indulged himself in some forbidden carnal delight, said:

"Why, don't you know? Tubular Bells, man...Tubular Bells!"

The mystery was cleared up when I reached the city proper and opened up a Melody Maker. Tubular Bells was the name of an album as well as a live concert of music from that album by Mike Oldfield, a name I recognized as the guitarist on several Kevin Ayers albums (Kevin Ayers of the original Soft Machine). Oldfield had gone into the Manor studio outside of London, locked himself in with a recording engineer and, by my count, 40 or more different instruments, and proceeded to lay down, through a meticulous and no doubt painfully boring process of overdubbing, a continuous piece of instrumental music. Called... Tubular Bells (he plays those too). Apparently he stayed there for about six months, prisoner to what Mailer calls the "bitch muse," and was allowed only three or four visitations, conjugal or otherwise, by some flutes, some string basses, ex-Bonzo and current sot Viv Stanshall, and "Sally Oldfield," some relation, let's hope, for Mike's sake, his wife. One other thing, probably the most crucial to Tubular Bells, was the small print at the bottom of the inside of the Sallyangie album which stated "The Sallyangie are Sally Oldfield, twenty-one years old, and her sixteen year-old brother Michael." Well, I guess that clears that up. Too bad Michael!

Anyhow, somehow, Mike Oldfield completed this album in the spring and Virgin Records, a retail outlet, released it along with a cheapo Kraut band album as part of their transfiguration into a major Record Company proper. And the British press, without benefit of subsidiary inducements excepting a free copy of the album, wetted their collective trousers in praising this album as the greatest new innovation in, the most successful fusion of, the most significant work of (fill in the blanks). Some of the smarter ones mentioned, in passing, the work of Terry Riley and certain similarities to the work of Steve Reich, but most seemed to think the work so original as to preclude any sort of criticism at all — it's so spacey, it's so fluid, it's so well-produced, failing to find any shortcomings whatsoever. (Just open up a current Melody Maker to the full page ad for the album — the kind of copy press agents dream about.)

Now I don't intend to play devil's advocate or anything merely because I assume that 50 million Englishmen can and are usually wrong — that's the kind of aesthetic that automatically rejects popular works of art since how can the thing be any good if so many jerks like it? (Maybe Grand Funk Railroad and Jonathan Livingston Seagull have more in common than you think they do.) And admittedly, I am a trashophiliac (I did, after all, purchase a copy of the Sallyangie — probably the only schlemiel that did). Yet if there is any canon I adhere to rigidly (and being a double Gemini it ain't none too rigidly) it is a statement made by R. Meltzer in the context of a discussion I had with him about the movies: "Nothing is ever better than pretty good." Not books. Not art. Not films. Not music. Not nuthin'.

And definitely not Tubular Bells, though I really have nothing against it or anything. I would in fact recommend it to anyone who is interested in more than three chords, or in electronic music, or in Vivian Stanshall — he gets a section near the end of side one where he gets to introduce various sections of instruments a la the old 'Intro and the Outro' Bonzo standard. It's just that I ain't as turned on as those other guys since I don't see anything really new or significant about the music or the concept. I mentioned Terry Riley a while back. His two best known pieces are In C (for which Paul Williams, the grand old man of the. subjective review, wrote the liner notes) and A Rainbow in Curved Air, both of which consist of an endless interplay of canonical figures which shift and develop ever so gradually and subtly. The effect is a shimmering aural landscape that evokes images of tranquil beauty — the pieces seem to exist, timeless, in medias res, outside the normal realm of music that has a definite beginning and ending. The secure, serene atmosphere the music generates is further reinforced by the fact that the music never shifts from the key established at the beginning of the record (this, of course, is what In C is all about). A lot of Tubular Bells is like this in essence, a "head record." Terry Riley gets a lot of airplay on late night FM rock stations who fade in and out other instrumental pieces along similar structural lines (Pink Floyd, Beaver and Krause, Tonto's Expanding Head Band, to name but a few and no doubt Tubular Bells when it's released here) to create an aural tapestry of sound. Some people can't tell where one piece of music ends and a new one begins. Some people call that electronic muzak.

But is that necessarily a bad thing? Fact Magazine once ran one of their typically fearless exposes on muzak which elicited all sorts of clever comments by dull-witted celebrities about how awful muzak was and if they had their druthers they'd rather go out gassed in the dentist's chair listening to Stravinsky than Lester Lanin. But the most fascinating part of the article was when the president of Muzak, Inc. got his chance at rebuttal. He made the obvious point that the purpose of Muzak was not to provoke any intellectual activity or start riots at the dentist a la the first performance of Le Sacre du Printemps but to relax the patient, the consumer, the elevator operator. Sound reasoning to me, and the Muzak people have gotten a lot more sophisticated than Lester Lanin. The Department of University Health at Yale now runs a Youth Program tape which includes small combo instrumental paraphrases of the Beatles and Carole King and James Taylor. That's progress!

And obviously the people who buy Tubular Bells aren't really gonna be interested in the nifty inaudible tape splices that signal a transition from one theme into another or anything cerebrally trivial like that — nope, they're gonna whip out the old hookah before puttin' it on and get so loaded that the fact that it took one guy six months and six million tape splices to put the thing together will become as important and consequential to them as the age old question of how many hairs make a beard. And then they're gonna lie back and let tinkling sounds of tubular bells and whatnot wash over them and close their eyes and forget about Watergate and absurdly high prices and existence in general and...relax.

And ain't nothing wrong with that, although I once read a scathing polemic in some bastion of contemporary avant-garde music, against Terry Riley, whose music, I would remind you again, is more than tangentially related to Tubular Bells. The proposition was advanced that all art is or should be inimical to pain or some sort of upward struggle. So since Terry Riley's music was universally described as "all beauty" (Riley himself does nothing to hinder this appraisal, writing liner notes in the form of quasi-Biblical invocations to a future Utopia and a New Order), it wasn't legitimately "good" music, merely syrupy pap suckled by the deluded masses in order to inebriate and thus insulate themselves against the harsh cruelties of a society out of control. I wonder what this same Red's reaction would be to something like Ornette Coleman's 'Snowflakes and Sunshine' from the Live at the Golden Circle album, which linernote scribe Ludvig Rasmusson describes as "pure beauty, a glittering, captivating, dizzying, sensual beauty. A couple of years ago nobody thought so, and everyone considered his music grotesque, filled with anguish and chaos." So maybe, applying Ludvig's relativistic axiom, in a couple years stuff like Tubular Bells and Hawkwind and Morton Subotnick'll be offed from late night progressive radio lists and you'll get things like Ornette Coleman and Captain Beefheart and Olivier Messiaen to get high or make out or nod off by. In the meantime, Tubular Bells should suffice nicely.

I wasn't in New Haven more than five minutes before I ran into a guy who was holding down the same radio shift I had held the summer before. We talked briefly about nothing in general and then the subject got around to music. With the gleam of the righteous elect about to convert an ignorant peon he swooped in for the kill:

"We just got this album from our import service in New York and we've been playing it to death nightly and our listeners can't get enough of it and it sounds a little like A Rainbow in Curved Air. It's called Tubular Bells. Heard about it?"

© Gary Lucas, 1973