1978: The Year After Punk

1978 is now more than thirty years behind us. The year after punk brought us a more experimental, eclectic Talking Heads as they moved into their “Eno Period.” One of the more inventive American songwriters — a kid from Minnesota calling himself, simply, Prince — appeared on the scene with his first album, For You. Rock luminary and transgressive icon Lou Reed made a startling turn with the jazzy orchestration of Street Hassle. Electronic experimentation took a broad step forward into the pop mainstream when Gary Numan and Tubeway Army put their thrashy style of punk together with refined synth-lines on their first record.

And electronic whiz-kid Larry Fast continued his synthesizer experimentations on Synergy’s classic third album, Cords. This final touchstone in our brief review of important 1978 recordings is yet another key entry in the history of electronic music during its most experimental and free-thinking heyday. When the seventies began, live Moog systems were massive structures that surrounded keyboardists in prog-rock and funk groups like Yes and Parliament. By the end of the decade, the instruments were becoming smaller and easier to use, but also capable of far more sounds. Thanks to a number of true believers like Larry Fast, Wendy Carlos, Kraftwerk and many others, these new instruments were pushed in every direction to help expand the scope of rock, classical, and experimental music.

Larry Fast was in from the beginning, and his solo albums as Synergy from the mid-seventies through the eighties are like a pocket history of the development of electronic music. Cords, one of the darker of these, marries his incredible compositional skill with the synthesizer to a driving pop format that gives listeners an early preview of where groups like Human League and Depeche Mode would be going in the years to come. Like most of Fast’s work, it is also prescient of eighties and nineties dance music as well as the recent upsurge in synth-laden indie rock. Cords has moments of world music styling as well, and any fan of Aphex Twin or Radiohead needs to go back and give the record a listen if they want to know what’s up.

The complex mechanical space of a song like “Phobos and Deimos Go To Mars” is a swirling electronic world of its own that makes contemporaries like Tangerine Dream appear simplistic. Some of the tracks, like “Presuming to Be Modern I & II” and “Trellis” create ethereal backdrops similar to Eno’s more ambient recordings. But most of the songs simply rock, albeit in a mind-bending synthesizer sort of way. Just check out “Deimos,” “Sketches of Mythical Beasts” and the raucously terrifying “Disruption in World Communications” for more evidence of this album’s brilliance.

Listen to “Phobos and Deimos Go To Mars: Phobos”
Listen to “Trellis”
Listen to “Disruption in World Communications”

I recently had the chance to discuss the album with Larry Fast, as well as chat about his development during the period and electronic music in general. His insights are a great capstone to this series, and anyone with an interest in music history should take a look at this exclusive Jamsbio interview:

Tell our readers a little about how you first got into electronic music during the 70s.

It really started happening for me in the late 1960s. I had been an electronic experimenter since I was a kid, building and wiring things since I soldered my first wires together in the 50s. I also loved listening to music and later took lessons on violin and piano, and later self-taught guitar and bass. Couple that with hi-fi and stereo, tape recording and the various aspects of audio circuitry and I was primed for electronic music. When the Moog products evolved into instruments systems from individual modules between 1964 and 1967 I wanted to own some of them. But still in school at that time there was no way I could afford those thousands of dollars. So I started building my own devices. Some from circuits I found in technical magazines and others that I developed myself from classic oscillator and filter circuits. One of my first oscillators was a modified Morse code practice oscillator.

By the early 70s I was building electronic devices for other musicians such as Rick Wakeman from Yes. But I had also started to write and record to satisfy my own creative leanings. And by then had managed to scrape together enough money to by some genuine Moog instruments which were superior to my own designs and construction. I used the combination of Moog and my own equipment to work with bands and on my own. After a short-lived band experience I was offered a record deal in 1974 for what would become the Synergy solo electronic project.

Between the introduction of the Moog in the 60s and the mainstreaming of synthesizers in 80s new wave, there seemed to have been an international ferment of experimentation in electronic music. Can you tell us what it was like to be a part of this movement and what kind of goals motivated you personally to push forward?

It was pretty simple. There were a lot of “switched-on” albums that followed Wendy Carlos’ 1968 masterpiece. Most were utter garbage with a few flashes of light here and there. But I wasn’t hearing what I wanted to listen to from almost anyone else, so I create it myself. Though I’m collectively a part of that movement, we were all separate entities just doing what we each did. Other than Wendy and just a few others, I had little to no interaction with the others. I’d listen to some of the recordings, but not very often.

One of the things that marked that era before the mass marketing of the electronic instruments, which picked up steam by the late 70s, was that there were only a limited number of us who has the collection skills to bring it all together effectively. We had to understand the technological underpinnings of audio so we could program synthesizers effectively, some level of compositional creativity, and the ability to engineer and produce our recordings. In those days, none of those tasks were trivial with the equipment available. My own approach was a modified version of how multitrack rock records were made coupled with electronic instruments. My motivation was that I wanted to create music, but I thoroughly enjoyed the technical challenges, too. I often designed and built custom circuitry to perform different tasks. My introduction to digital recording and synthesis at Bell Labs starting around 1976 was also an inspiration because I got a glimpse of the creative future very early on. The same thing with applying microprocessors to control my Moog and other modules. The challenge of writing machine code software to execute musical tasks was more fun than having a real job.

You managed to live a double life as both a musician for others (on IGTB & Peter Gabriel’s records) and a solo artist in a rather experimental field. Tell us a little about who listened to these more avant-garde works at the time and how the recording industry perceived them.

Most of the mainstream work that I did came about because of a chain that goes back to the Synergy recordings. I had never done a session as a hired sideman until I started the first Synergy album. Other acts in the studio heard what I was doing and asked me to contribute to their recordings. Almost all of those other acts were R&B or even disco (yes, really). My observation has been that most of the mainstream recording acts want a bit of the avant-garde and I could provide that. My own label was broadminded enough to let me record what I wanted and that became the calling card for other acts. That’s that path that led to work with Foreigner, Meat Loaf, Bonnie Tyler and others. Peter Gabriel and Nektar were looking for something a little more fundamental from my contribution to their work. Very little of this had any input from the recording industry at large. It was a matter of my contributing to many different album productions at whatever level was required for the record being created. I could take over an entire track or just provide a pinch of flavoring.

I don’t know exactly who was listing to my recordings as opposed to the massive multi-platinum success of the big acts. I suspect that a significant subset of the Gabriel fans also bought my recordings, but I doubt that electronic arrangements for Air Supply or later some of the Bon Jovi solo albums overlapped all that much with the Synergy fans.

Passport Records only occasionally was looking for a “hit” from me. “Classical Gas” released as a single came about because of this. But most of the time (1974-1988), they let me do pretty much whatever I wanted to and then they’d find a way to bring it to market.

You have lived in the New York area most of your life, and the gatefold of Cords shows you standing next to the twin towers. So much was happening in the NY music scene in ‘78. Where did your work, and the work of other electronic musicians, fit in all of this?

Even though I’ve mostly been based in New Jersey, New York is the dominant cultural anchor in my life. All of the important elements of my musical upbringing were there; classical concerts, regular pilgrimages to the Fillmore East, the clubs of Greenwich Village, later in the 70s, places like CBGB’s and others. It’s all been a source that contributed to who I am. As an historian, my field of study was the evolution of the modern urban structure and New York has always been my case study (with a little bit of a parallel view of Chicago).

Don’t read too much into the World Trade Center towers on the Cords cover. The photographer from Hipgnosis and I walked the crumbling West Side Highway, an abandoned elevated highway about to be demolished, which used to run along the Hudson River from midtown down past the towers. We were looking for some good, artful decaying highway structures for a backdrop, but nothing was as good as the mass of the towers.

Though there is a good electronic music community in New York with some of my friends like Wendy Carlos, Laurie Spiegel among others, we’re all solo practitioners with our own points of view and creative working styles. We interact socially, but not so much artistically. Still, New York is the place we share. My work, though, other than tons of sessions on rock and pop recordings at major New York studios, was done at my home Synergy Studio and at House of Music Studios. House of Music was a world-class facility similar to those in Manhattan, but located in New Jersey outside of New York. It made a nicer environment for my work with trees, fields, a pond with wildlife, and the pool and jacuzzi (though I didn’t have much time for that when I was recording).

Cords has a tough, dark edge to it, but also seems to be structured around a pop sensibility that would characterize your next album. What kind of influences did you bring to “Cords?” Do you feel you were reacting against the more atmospheric direction artists like Eno and Tangerine Dream were taking, or did it not matter?

I don’t think things through with that much of a game plan. I do what I do and if it’s different from another artist , then that’s more about the fact that I’m not them (and they’re not me). I tend to be rather self-indulgent in that I create music I’d like to hear and hope that it’s what other people would like to hear, too. If I’m in a darker mood, then that’s reflected in the music. I like large soundscapes so that affects some of the sweeping depth which comes from classical orchestration, but one of my strongest influences is the Beatles and many things in rock that came after them . There’s no getting away from that; pop melodies and even the rock and pop that preceded the rock revolution of the 1960s going back several decades earlier are what I grew up with. I have an appreciation for all of that and absorbed a lot of it. And that includes composers like Gershwin and music of the Big Band era.

How did using the first guitar synthesizer affect your composition style?

There were two important aspects. One was that the instrument was played with a much more fluid style than the more “angular” notes of an AGO keyboard. Sure, portamento and pitch bending is possible when playing a keyboard, but those actions are a deliberate departure from the basic keyboard style for every nuance played. The guitar synth on the other hand, responded to all of the normal pitch bending techniques used to make guitar soloing interesting. Equally as important, if not more so on Cords, I wasn’t playing all the instruments. Peter Sobel who played the guitar parts brought his considerable skill and his own personal performance approach to the new instrument. That broadened the way that the composition and arrangements went together.

Songs like “Phobos and Deimos Go To Mars” and “On Presuming To Be Modern II” create a depth of space with their complexity and energy. Both also call to mind a kind of literary quality, creating a full experience for the listener. Tell us how you approach music–as a primarily aural activity or something broader?

The purely aural experience is usually the basic driving force for me. I try to create what I want to hear and share it. It’s like creating a journey or a movie that evolves through time. I have my own set of likes and dislikes. Broad and complex productions appeal to me. I find putting them together like creating a very complex jigsaw puzzle. I have to work hard to create pieces that will work together to make a coherent composition. Generally there isn’t a prior thematic concept in literary terms. It’s far more abstract and based on the sonic quality rather than imparting any literary themes. Most of the time, there are no final titles associated with the works in progress. That comes later when the piece might suggest a title. An exception was the Metropolitan Suite which started off as a Gershwin-esque chord progression and grew from there. The nature of the music suggested a specific time period and a loose narrative evolved from there.

Finally, where do you see electronic music going from here? Are there any artists you would recommend keeping an eye on? Are you happy with the development in the last 30 years or would you like to see something else come of all this hard work?

At this point electronic music has become so much a part of the fabric of mainstream music that I don’t think most people see it as a distinctly separate genre anymore. There are a handful of people, mostly survivors from the Moog generation who continue to work somewhat within the boundaries that originally defined us. But the pervasiveness of sample loop and other “canned” drag and drop composition, which isn’t all bad, but now very easily used in all walks of making records and scoring, probably means the end of the composer/synthesist who also programs and creates most if not all of his or her sounds. That kind of complete control is extremely work-intensive and when an easier path exists to a finished electronic recording, it’s likely to be taken. In some ways it’s a little disappointing, but during the early Moog days many of us hoped for more sophisticated and refined sonic tools than the primitive analog modules. We certainly got those enhanced capabilities, but along with them came the laptop composing tools and sound libraries which can help just about anyone piece together some very impressive, if not all that original sounding compositions in a very short amount of time. It’s the price we pay for advancing technology. The early Moog days, a period that really only ran about a decade give or take a few years, was a very special time in the history of technology and the social fabric of the artistic culture which cloaked it. It might be that that time has passed.

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