The term “British Invasion” is such an overused piece of Boomer nostalgia that – as with Woodstock or the draft – hearing it is more likely to call to mind PBS specials than the subject itself. If one can cognitively push through this thicket of meaningless signifiers, one manages to project a highlight reel in the mind’s eye: Beatlemania, the Rolling Stones kicking off “Satisfaction”, The Who taking the stage emblazoned with the Union Jack, and so on. But this hardly does justice to the efflorescence of creative achievement produced by a small island over the span of less than a decade from the mid-1960s. For sheer artistic excellence on a per capita basis, only Jamaica during the golden age of rocksteady and reggae (roughly 1962-1977) can compete with the UK during this era.
The pantheon is well-known but, beyond the superstars, The Kinks and Small Faces were crafting psychedelic odes to a vanishing little England; Fairport Convention, Pentangle and the Incredible String Band were developing a distinctly British response to the American folk boom; and Pink Floyd and Yes were inventing progressive rock.
Meanwhile, tucked away in one of the more obscure regions of the UK firmament, and primarily remembered these days by the kind of record-store snobs depicted in High Fidelity, was the Canterbury scene, which included bands like Caravan, Gong, and Soft Machine. Its music combines elements of prog rock, free jazz, and psychedelia and sounds like what the residents of the Shire might come up with if they discovered a predilection for something stronger than pipe-weed.
Bobbing in and out of this stew was Soft Machine’s drummer/vocalist Robert Wyatt (born in 1945), who was on his way to becoming one of Britain’s great avant-garde drummers when he fell out of a fourth-floor window while inebriated at a friend’s birthday party. The accident that rendered him paraplegic, and should have sidelined him thereafter, in fact resulted in one of the greatest weird/weirdest great albums ever made, presently reaching its 50th anniversary: Rock Bottom.
The accident that rendered him paraplegic, and should have sidelined him thereafter, in fact resulted in one of the greatest weird/weirdest great albums ever made.
A wild man, who had toured with Jimi Hendrix and counted Keith Moon among his drinking buddies, had to reinvent his approach to making music, and came up with this strange collection of “drones and songs,” recorded alongside his Canterbury peers.
In light of Wyatt’s terrible accident, the album is probably doomed to be classified as a mainstay of the “catastrophe” genre —i.e. artworks produced as a direct response to some personal tragedy or other (Richard and Linda Thompson’s Shoot Out the Lights, J Dilla’s Donuts, Skip Spence’s Oar, and so on). But besides reducing the listening experience to a kind of aural rubbernecking, such a classification isn’t quite accurate in this case. Much of the album was in fact already composed prior to Wyatt’s accident, when he accompanied his future wife Alfreda Benge to Venice, who was there in her capacity as an assistant editor on Don’t Look Now (a film that, incidentally, takes personal tragedy as its theme).
Much of Venice’s marine sensibility permeates the album—the aqueous tones of Wyatt’s keyboard that introduce the first track (aptly titled “Sea Song”), the echoing pings like sonar that conclude the second. And the title itself, while referencing its creator’s personal circumstances, also calls to mind the floor of the Mediterranean mesmerizingly depicted on the album cover.
There is no getting around the fact that Rock Bottom is a weird album recorded by denizens of a musical demi-monde. Much of it has that Eno-ish quality of music you hear only in your head as you drift off to sleep and cannot later recall (it is probably not incidental that Brian Eno developed his ambient sound while also convalescing from a serious injury). Only the first two tracks have anything like comprehensible lyrics, with the remaining descending into a kind of e. e. cummings-like poetic gibberish (both in the sense that the words are not organized in a way that conveys normal meaning, and in the sense that some are just speech sounds and not actual words at all). And for that matter, Wyatt’s singing itself can sound thin and amateurish.
Usually, the trouble with weirdness in art is that it alienates—often by design. This can also be the source of much of its appeal, of course. As David Foster Wallace remarked of David Lynch’s films, there is something undeniably refreshing about a work of art that doesn’t seem to want from us the usual things we have become habituated to giving. There is integrity in that. Yet Wallace also insisted that one of art’s purposes is to bridge the great gap of loneliness and despair that surrounds us. And here strange art is off-putting not just because it’s “difficult” but because it evinces a solipsism that rejects empathy and connection.
Rock Bottom is suffused with empathy and an E. M. Forsterian drive for connection.
Yet Rock Bottom, dedicated largely to the woman who would become (and remain) Wyatt’s wife, is suffused with empathy and an E. M. Forsterian drive for connection. Wyatt maintained that his technical inadequacies were evidence of “painful sincerity.” Even the oddness of its lyrics suggests not obscurantism but the kind of private language that emerges among married couples, with their surfeit of references no one else could possibly understand—even where we can’t understand others’ such language, we can recognize it as a counterpart to our own version. Perhaps the lyrics read bizarrely on the page, but married to the music’s hallucinatory pulse, they communicate as sung oceans of melancholy and affection. And so, even after half a century, while it’s surely not for everybody, Rock Bottom remains one of the most curiously affecting records of the rock era. Give it a listen, and you may just find its lunacy fits neatly with your own.
