Bill Bruford: The Autobiography
By Bill Bruford
Jawbone Press 2009, $19.95/£14.95, pp352
If I remember correctly, it was the first week of 2010, and I was
placidly leafing through the most recent issue (December, 2009) of US monthly Down Beat, when I happened to see an
article titled: "Bill Bruford Announces Retirement, Releases Autobiography".
The piece, by Robert Kaye, started saying that "In early 2009, Bill
Bruford announced his formal retirement from public performance and recording.
The drummer's official statement coincided with the release of his first
book, Bill Bruford: The Autobiography." When it came to the actual
reasons that had provoked the artist's decision, the article chose to direct
readers to the just-printed volume: "Bruford's reasons for retiring
are spelled out in the book".
It was all quite bizarre. Of course, it's entirely possible that the tone,
and logic, of the article had been sacrificed for reasons of space, but
the end result possessed such a bureaucratic tone that I doubt it managed
to convince many readers that what had happened was, indeed, very dramatic.
It didn't convince me. And so, after I spent a minute or two thinking about
Bruford's drumming, which I had especially liked in the very old days of
"British" King Crimson, I turned the page, leaving the whole thing
behind.
Until the day, that is, when a dear friend of mine sent me a link to an article
titled "Bill Bruford: The Autobiography - A comment by Dave Stewart".
This was real news, Dave Stewart being, of course, the keyboard player
and composer in groups such as Hatfield And The North, National Health,
and Stewart & Gaskin. But also the one who shared many stages, and
quite some time in recording studios, with Bill Bruford: first, in an embryonic
version of National Health; then, in the group Bruford, the electric quartet
of which the drummer was the leader. It was a long, and quite profound,
review, with multiple interesting topics, many questions asked... A very
nice review! So I got my credit card out, went online, bought the book.
And the book is good. It's very well written, with a precise prose whose aim
is obviously to clearly tell it the way it is. Refined language, just like
one would expect from somebody like Bruford. The narration moves on different,
parallel, planes, through time and space, dealing with things such as music,
the actual playing, the organization of work in the life of a musician,
the economic side, managers audience and the media, the critics, those
interpersonal relationships that occur in the life of a group, and so on.
Those who already know the story will find here all the various chapters: beginnings,
the Yes adventure, the triumphs of Fragile and Close To The Edge, the jump
into the unknown that was King Crimson, the various sessions and the live
playing with Genesis, the group Bruford, then UK, King Crimson again, Yes
again, and King Crimson once again, Bruford's decision to dedicate himself
to jazz, the group Earthworks, and those drum clinics. It goes without
saying that here we can read many anecdotes and descriptions that have
as their main characters very well-known people such as Robert Fripp, Adrian
Belew, Allan Holdsworth, Tony Levin, John Wetton, Jeff Berlin, Jon Anderson,
Phil Collins, Chris Squire, and so on. There are no real revelations about
those figures, but we can see things from a different perspective.
A caveat that Bruford puts almost at the end of the volume (it's on page 343)
that readers will have to remember in order to avoid being disappointed
by their own unrealistic expectations reads thus:
"There are readers of this memoir who are probably lamenting the absence
of a track-by-track breakdown of my recorded efforts - which cymbal was played
where and when, who produced what track, and why did the Japanese version
contain three fewer edits than the European standard version? I can't remember
most of it - detail on that level fills me with ennui. Only the bigger picture
holds any interest now." (It goes without saying that those who've read
the book up to page 343 will already be past the point of expecting that
kind of approach from the book's author...)
But thinking that this book could be regarded as being interesting, and a fun
read, only by those who like(d) at least some of the aforementioned names
would be really, really wrong, given the embarrassment of riches one can
find here. (The only weak point of the book for this reader being that,
once in a while, one gets a kind of "macro" perspective with
more than a nod to works by people like Simon Frith and Richard Middleton,
with their banal smell of "Academia". Bruford's first-hand observations,
acquired while working "in the field", don't really need those
weak crutches. It's just a couple of pages every once in a while, so the
book does not get any serious damage from this.)
The first group of readers who will regard this book as being of much interest
comprises those who for reasons of age (let's say, forty-somethings - and
beyond) will consider this book like a "history book" that will
talk about the long journey from, say,
"post-Beatles" rock to today's music, but according to a perspective
that's "internal" to the profession - which is something that can
make all the difference. A good example of this being the discussion about
being a professional musician inside today's Web framework, which dramatically
changes the relationship between musicians and their audience (see pp247-250).
There are also moments when a first sketch of economy/politics nature appears,
as a possible explanation of today's irrelevance when it comes to objects
(curiously, Bob Dylan had already talked about something quite similar in
a classic interview by Paul Zollo), as readers can see from this brief excerpt:
"It's hard to escape the implication that there is already enough music
in Western society, and Western society tends to point out to the musician
through the market - sometimes quite brutally, because the stupid musician
doesn't get it - that it doesn't really want any more new music, that it's
stuffed with the music it's got."
The second group of readers who I'm sure will find this book interesting are
those who are interested in reading about the (internal, and also situational)
logic of the artistic creation. And this is a quite complex topic.
At the time of the aforementioned Down Beat piece, I wondered about the reasons
that had been the cause of Bruford's decision to quit, and given the fact
that Bruford was born in 1949 and that drumming is (was?) his profession,
I had thought of health reasons (which don't necessarily have to be grave,
but let's remember that bones and muscles are more important for a drummer
than for the average citizen). Reading the book I learned that things are
not, in a way, as dramatic as I had feared (his health's OK), while being
much more dramatic than I feared, in a different way. There is more than
a grain of truth in Pete Townshend's motto that goes "Hope I die before
I get old", but here it's apparent that factors concerning the personality
of the individual, and the situational logic, are important items. Those
factors have, in time, made the gap between "inhabiting art" and "seeing
art from the outside" wider and wider, until it reached a point where
process itself was made impossible. I'm afraid this side of Bruford's book
will make things difficult for many readers, and not because its tone is
excessively dark and heavy (the opposite actually being true), but because
it shows the mundane, ordinary implications of this.
It's at this point that every one of us (including Bruford) has to decide if dying
in one's sleep in Las Vegas after sniffing some coke in the company of
a hooker is really the better choice.
Beppe Colli
© Beppe Colli 2010
CloudsandClocks.net | Apr. 5, 2010
