Brian Eno is a genius, and longtime readers (Ha!) will know how uncomfortable I am bandying about such a word. He’s so fucking good at making music that he even considers himself a “non-musician”! That’s how good he is!

Eno got married, had a child, and got divorced before his music career even began, and he’s got to be the only person in the music industry with such a pre-career backstory. Of course, he spent his high school and college days forming and participating heavily in experimental visual arts, music, and theater projects, so he was always interested and well-versed in left-of-center performance art. Eno got his professional start as a keyboard player for Roxy Music, but he only lasted two albums before leaving due to “creative differences”. This probably means he engaged in multiple noodle-armed fist fights with fellow arrogant musician Bryan Ferry. He is widely sought after in the music industry for collaboration projects and production work, and has notably worked with, among others, U2, Coldplay, David Bowie, Talking Heads, Devo, and Robert Fripp of King Crimson. So what makes this guy so great? Was it his weird glam mullet and leopard-print blouse fashion sense? Hardly! But good guess.

Brian Eno has a very analytical approach to not only music, but sound in of itself. His acute sense of how sound and noise hits the ears and gets processed by the brain was unmatched by any of his contemporaries, easily. The way he boiled sound down to its essence and used it like he had full control over it was simply revolutionary for the classic rock era. Eno’s interest in exploring minimalistic textures and ambient soundscapes was pivotal, and every single electronic musician in the last 50 years, whether they know it or not, was heavily inspired by his vision.

However, purely from a personal enjoyment level, I still think his ambient works are full of beans! Luckily, half of Eno’s ’70s solo efforts are pure rock albums, and Here Come the Warm Jets is an excellent debut kicking off an excellent string of rock albums indeed! I imagine the “creative differences” with Bryan Ferry that led to Eno storming out of Roxy Music were likely a lot of Eno wanting control over a band that wasn’t his to begin with. For his solo debut he roped in plenty of guess musicians, including three Roxy Music members (Phil Manzanera, Andy Mackay, and Paul Thompson), two King Crimson members (Robert Fripp and John Wetton), space rock group Hawkwind’s Simon King, and Canterbury Scene prog rock band Matching Mole’s Bill MacCormick. Eno’s plan was to get a bunch of musicians together with possible incompatibility, and maybe this incompatibility might perhaps lead to accidents, and these accidents might end up being interesting??? What a devilish little rascal! With full control over his own writing, development, and production, Eno could take advantage of unorthodox directing methods for his musicians and play around with mixing in experimental electronics. The results speak for themselves. And, contrary to a long popular belief, the title of the album does NOT in fact reference piss! Eno used the phrase “warm jet guitar” to describe how the guitar sounded on the closing title track. Disappointing! I wish it referenced piss!

Here Come the Warm Jets is probably my favorite debut of the classic rock era. I like it more than King Crimson’s In the Court of the Crimson King. I like it more than Led Zeppelin’s Led Zeppelin. I think I might like it even more than Frank Zappa’s Freak Out!, and I like that one a whole lot too so that’s saying something. Eno’s debut is brimming with confident energy, wild yet simple ideas, fantastic songs with a range of moods, and above all, it’s loud and embodies everything good about the short-lived glam era of the early ’70s. And while this may not be punk music at all, a lot of it sounds like punk music in attitude and spirit, and it’s not entirely outlandish to consider Eno an early punk. A lot of punks and post-punk acts likely took inspiration from this record, including Talking Heads, Bauhaus, Pere Ubu, Magazine, Joy Division, Wire, you name it.

Eno gets to flex his pop sensibilities as well, which are also fine-tuned. I’ll probably say this a lot, but Eno’s real genius (in my opinion) comes from his ability to push listenability to the very, very edges, teetering into inaccessibility but never, ever toppling over. Starting with “Needle in the Camel’s Eye”, a loud, slightly obnoxious repetitive riff washes over the landscape while Eno, low in the mix, sings an impossibly melodious bunch of nonsense in his distinct Eno-voice! You can just imagine the glitter sparkling over this glammy indulgence, although Bowie still takes the cake on glammy indulgence. Next is “The Paw Paw Negro Blowtorch”, which immortalizes the legend of a 27-year-old African American man named A. W. Underwood from Paw Paw, Michigan, and his fire-breathing abilities! Here, Eno sings with complete sardonicism with lyrics that, to me, sounds like his wife is cheating on him? “You’ll have to make the choice between/The Paw Paw Negro Blowtorch and meeeeeee!” I also like the “musical comedy” of sorts, if you will, during the bridge of the song, where the call-and-response, high-octane, electronic computer beepin’ and bloopin’ sounds equally as sarcastic as Eno’s vocal stylings. You can’t help but laugh! Ha ha ha ha ha ha HA! Like that, see?

“Baby’s on Fire” is the best song on the album, likely the best song in Brian Eno’s repertoire, and a contender for the best song of the early ’70s. The guitars are chunky, brash, and moody, Eno’s voice is just as sardonic as before but with a threatening edge to it, and, I’m saying right now here in this very paragraph, Robert Fripp rips the greatest guitar solo in recorded history. Friends, I have quite literally heard thousands of guitar solos in my day, and I have not heard a single one that even comes close to the stunning, sweeping highs, and the powerful stripped-back rawness that Fripp manages here. It’s literally perfect in every way. It can never be duplicated or improved upon. And I’ll fight anyone who argues with that.

With “Baby’s on Fire” being the clear climax of Here Come the Warm Jets, the rest of album, while not necessarily lacking, just…you know, it lacks a little bit! But now you start seeing Brian Eno’s gentler side with songs like “Cindy Tells Me”, “On Some Far Away Beach”, and “Some of Them Are Old”. With these mellow tunes he plays with atmosphere and sonic landscapes a bit; a precursor to his ambient exercises, but he was clearly already interested early on in the power of sound as mood. Not only that, but in the case of “Some of Them Are Old”, you get the bounciest, most kickass ukulele solo this side of, well, Hawaii? Surprises abound!

“Driving Me Backwards” betrays some of the old Roxy Music days, only gone a little berserk and creepy (and not “creepy” in a Bryan Ferry way, I promise). “Blank Frank” has another crunchy Fripp guitar solo that’s not even close to as memorable as the one on “Baby’s on Fire”, but this a fun, angular groove anyway, and some more of that punky edge comes out on this one via the lyrics (“His particular skill is leaving bombs in people’s driveways“). “Dead Finks Don’t Talk” defies categorization; the old rumor that it was about Bryan Ferry turned out to be untrue,  or rather it wasn’t deliberately about him…reportedly. On record. Anyway, the song is fantastically bizarre and it sure sounds passive aggressive to me with lines like “And these finks don’t dress too well/No discrimination/To be a zombie all the time/Requires such dedication“. I sure like those piano passages and hand claps!

OK, that’s about enough words on this. This is the first in a line of stellar albums that Eno released throughout the ’70s (and one boring shit of a snooze somewhere in the middle of it) and I’m looking forward to being needless verbose about all of them in future installments! Eno would never be this rough and boisterous again, which is a shame, but his reign of pumping out great music has only just begun.

VERY GOOD