My Life With Peter Gabriel: Part Seven

My Life With Peter Gabriel: Part Seven

By the time I got to writing or arranging my beats for what became Jawbox’s final album (called Jawbox, known as Self-Titled) I was working from a very different point of view. I had gone from trying to emulate my favorites to trying to integrate them into something else altogether. It started, though, as I’ve said previously, in my beats for Sweetheart. I think this sort of development is, in itself, a definitive leap in the working lives of many artists, moving from an imitative art to an innovative one. I’m not critical of derivative or imitative art. It is precisely these kinds of art that make genres intelligible and keep traditions alive. And being imitative in one area does not mean one doesn’t innovate in another, and further, failed imitation is a starting point for much innovation. What I was after, what so many of the musicians I knew back then were after, was precisely this sort of development. And for a handful of years there, it looked like the music business was interested, too. In this light, Jawbox’s era was no less subjected to its own limitations and necessities than any other. Much of our success in the music business hinged on audiences being able to understand us as alternative. In the end, of course, we weren’t alternative or else the market wasn’t, and in either case, our relatively short career at Rockefeller Center was over within four calendar years. But, as we say, I digress.

So what I wanted was to innovate, and the surest way I saw to do this was to incorporate influences from outside our cohort. There were a few reasons for this desire, all of varying practicality, and all rooted to their moment. First, I wasn’t confident playing other people’s music. My dynamic sensibility was usually off,¹ or I sped up or slowed down what the composer had in mind. I felt I wasn’t good at what we call “straight time,” 4/4 time played straight ahead. My shortcomings, as I saw them, were masked by adopting certain rhythms and feels that might accommodate slight shifts in tempo or feel. One eventually favored gesture was to move my snare hits, conventionally on the two and four of 4/4 time² to just before or after those beats. And although I experimented with this before I heard Manu Katché’s playing on the choruses of “In Your Eyes,” I had never heard it flow in the direction I was after. So when we got to writing “Savory,” which I might have mentioned previously as our best known song, I found a perfect opportunity to try the feel I’d been messing with. It didn’t fit the verses, a beat which derived from a contemporaneous Neville Brothers fascination, as I recall, but it did shape the choruses:

There are other examples elsewhere but these seems to suffice for the current purpose. As time went on, I came to further internalize these rhythms, to make them my own, to adjust according to our group’s needs and my own abilities. For further observation, I direct you to “Reel” (“In Your Eyes” again), and “Green Glass,” which derived from the choruses of “Shaking the Tree.”

These efforts didn’t result in rip-offs, I don’t think, in part because the contexts are so different, but also because my intention was more investigation that tribute. The point wasn’t to show how great Katché was, or how cool I was for knowing it. The point was to bring something I loved to something I did to see if there was room for both in the music we were making.