Cut to Eno on the West Coast. It's Chinatown in San Francisco and he's shading his eyes to peer into the window of a small shop where stand displayed a set of postcard "stills" from a Red Chinese ballet-film called Taking Tiger Mountain By Strategy.
Freeze frame and roll the intro to "The True Wheel"...
"It was so exciting! I thought 'That's the sort of lyric I want!' There was 'Tiger Mountain' which gave it a medieval, almost folksy, flavour - and 'By Strategy', which was very up-tempo and modern.
"So I bought the set and started carrying it around with me and thinking about it. And when I got to New York I went to stay with this girl called Randi and fell asleep after taking some mescaline and had this dream where this group of girls were singing to this group of sailors who had just come into port. And they were singing 'We are The 801 / We are the Central Shaft' - and I woke up absolutely jubilant because this was the first bit of lyric I'd written in this new style.
"Because I didn't know what it meant - but I got the feeling of 'Christ, this means something, this is interesting'. Except it wasn't specific, you know?"
-- Brian Eno, quoted by Ian MacDonald, in New Musical Express, November 26th 1977
"This track started from a dream. I was staying in the Drake hotel in New York with a girl called Randi N---. I had a dream about her and a group of other girls (Randi and the Pyramids) and guys singing the song ... They were sort of astronauts, but with all the psychological aspects of sailors.
... The other strange thing about this song is its inadvertent links with the Cabala. I found out, long after I had written the song, that the number 801 means 'Alpha and Omega' or 'the first and the last' in the Cabala and that this entity is a circular concept ... The number 801 (which, with all the rest of the chorus refrain, was plucked unaltered from my dream) has another meaning which I find interesting. In the Cabala, the twenty-two Tarot cards are arranged such that they rest on the paths between the Tree of Life. Each of the paths has a number, and each of the numbers corresponds to one of the cards in the Major Arcana of the Tarot. The paths 801 describe a pyramid whose individual sides are STRENGTH, THE FOOL, and THE MAGICIAN.
"...Apparently, rumour has it in America that 801 derives from Eight Nought One, the initials of which spell... Very ingenious, I thought, although it had never occurred to me." -- Brian Eno (More Dark Than Shark)
― bb (bbrz), Tuesday, 23 January 2007 15:56 (eighteen years ago)
its evidently an awful lot like a pynchon book...hmmm, seems odd toms been listening to tiger mt.
its funny this comes up. i spent all last sunday morning listening to cale and eno and getting all worked up over them again and have been doing a bit of poking about the web. the way things are constructed on here come the warm jets and tiger mountain is simply mindblowing. how, when i 1st heard them in HS, i managed to get to thinking i couldnt care less about mr. eno's pop music is beyond me.
― bb (bbrz), Tuesday, 23 January 2007 16:04 (eighteen years ago)