Track Listing

1. Sea Song
2. Last Straw
3. Little Red Riding Hood Hit The Road
4. Alifib
5. Little Red Robin Hood Hit The Road

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #76677 in Music
• Released on: 2002-04-01
• Number of discs: 1

CD Description
This 1974 release was Robert Wyatt's first album after his accident: a fall from a window that left him a paraplegic. Over the years he has eloquently expressed how that accident saved his life as an artist, forcing him to reconsider his approach to music. Already a composer and singer of remarkable character (important previous works include the first three albums by his band Soft Machine), Wyatt shifted his role as a traditional trap-kit drummer to playing an assortment oftabletop percussion, as well as keyboards. Wyatt also has the advantage of working with highly sympathetic players, including, among others, Hugh Hopper, Fred Frith and Gary Windo. These musicians effectively create a highly personal worldthat seems to perfectly articulate Wyatt's musical vision. Gorgeous and evocative, Wyatt's music is practically a genreunto itself.

Customer Reviews

Dreamlike
Trying to explain what this remarkable album sounds like to someone who has never heard it before isn't easy. And I suppose that's unsurprising, as it's a record that demands more than a few casual listens before one can make sense of it. However, with patience and time, it seeps into the listener's brain as if by osmosis, and gradually reveals its condiderable beauty and charm.

More than anything, Rock Bottom is a record to be felt, and it feels like a dream. Swirling, drifting currents of sound wash out of the speakers, Wyatt's abstract lyrics coming accross like a poem that is difficult to understand in a literal sense, yet one instinctively knows exactly what is meant. It is remarkably visual music - it would be the perfect soundtrack to film of newly discovered creatures that live undisturbed on the ocean floor. Fittingly, as the sea and its inhabitants are recurring themes in the lyrics. I can think of few other albums (well, none) which namecheck brine, porpoises, baby sperm whales and starfish!

I won't dwell much on the merits of the individual tracks - the album is best appreciated as a whole in one sitting. However, my personal highlight is the exquisite Alife, Wyatt's deeply personal long song about his relationship with Alfreda Benge, who painted the beautiful album cover.

Love and hope abound on this album. Wyatt began writing the songs shortly before suffering the accident which left him confined to a wheelchair, and finished them during his long convalescence. Unsurprisingly, there is a palpable sense of uncertainty about the future in his fragile vocals, but ultimately the overwhelming feeling is one of positivity and acceptance. Maudlin self pity doesn't even appear on his emotional register.

Rock Bottom is one of the most thoughtful, beautiful and original albums of the 1970s. It is truly progressive music -groundbreaking and idiosyncratic - without any of the bombast that characterised so much of the musical output of his contemporaries. The only record I can think of comparing it to is Miles Davis' In A Silent Way, with which it shares a soothing, meditative quality. I would recommend it unreservedly to anyone wanting to have an unforgettable musical experience.

Nothing compares to this
This is one of those albums I daren't play too often, in case I lose the absolute sense of awe that it inspires on each playing. The fabulous piano, the clashing trumpet fanfares, Wyatt's unique voice, the lyrics, the whole melting pot....I can remember exactly where I was when I first heard this and I hadn't heard anything quite like it before, having very much come from a punk/new wave background with all those 3 minute 1-2-3-4 thrash songs (which I still love too) but this is something else. And I never knew any of the background to this album until recently, it has always just provided one of those 'instant connection' moments because this album comes right from the heart of Wyatt there is no bowing to other people's taste or opinions. This is the one I play when I'm really depressed because it is so uplifting without being horribly jolly. Now I know the guy had just been paralysed it has taken on a new dimension - the sincerity and soul searching is just so intense and honest, without any hint of self-pity or wallowing in misery. This is the one I'll take with me to the desert island

Wyatt's masterpiece - peerless
Two events hover over Rock Bottom and can never be disentangled from it, whether I mention them or not, so once more here they are. The first is Wyatt's expulsion from the group he helped form, which he loved with a passion, and which removed him the moment he became surplus to requirements: Soft Machine. The end was inevitable during the recording of Third (1970) when they were augmented by a brass section, as Hugh Hopper relates: "This hastened the demise of our commitment to songs because the brass tended to play Robert's vocal parts." The band were also stung by the artistic success of Wyatt's first solo album, End of an Ear, which unveiled his free jazz credentials. They'd laughed at it.

Wyatt went on to form his own band, the wonderfully named Matching Mole (a corruption of the French for Soft Machine, Machine Molle) whose two albums show him moving toward a more mainstream "Canterbury sound" jazz/prog. The first, by the way, is drenched in Mellotrons and all fans of the instrument should get it. The second was a disaster due to the ham-fisted production of Robert Fripp, but Wyatt was set to record a third Mole album - for which the material on Rock Bottom was prepared in Venice - when the second event happened. On 1st June 1973 he fell out of a fourth floor window at a party and ended up paralysed from the waist down.

Rock Bottom came together during his long convalescence at Stoke Mandeville Hospital and was recorded the following February, produced brilliantly by Nick Mason (old mates Pink Floyd having played some benefit gigs raising £10,000 for him). However, those who expect this album to be self-pitying are in for a surprise. The themes of Rock Bottom are freedom, weightlessness, the inability of language to communicate deep emotions, and vulnerability. "One of the things about lying around hospital for a year," Wyatt explained, "Was that I was free to dream." Indeed, the album feels like a dream, the dream of a man floating in the sea, or falling, or lying in intensive care, free of commitment, safe in the hands of others.

From the start the piano dominates - aptly, there is little drumming. The test of whether you'll get this album comes with the piano solo in the first track, "Sea Song". To those not versed in free jazz it may sound like Wyatt is hitting the keys at random, but after a few listens you'll hear through the structure to the emotion behind it. Rock Bottom is one of the most emotionally scarifying albums ever recorded - and again I stress, there is NO self-pity. "Sea Song" ends with a blur of synthesisers not played so beautifully again until Zappa's "Filthy Habits". "Last Straw" continues the ocean and floating imagery, hovering on the edge of hallucination. Ending side one, "Little Red Riding Hood Hit The Road" begins with the sudden clarion call of Mongezi Feza's trumpets which continue throughout. This is the best track of a phenomenal album, and in my opinion one of the most remarkable songs of the 1970s. The piece has the feel of constant ascension, as if continually struggling to become airborne, while Wyatt similarly struggles to bring sense to his words before the song abruptly flips and runs backwards. You'll probably miss it first time, so cleverly is it achieved. The song ends with the trumpets shimmering like heat haze over which Ivor Cutler delivers the first of his two monologues.

Side two begins with a long suite based around the rhythm of what sounds like hospital equipment. The steady mechanically-assisted breathing lulls the listener into a childlike sense of security. "Alifib" and "Alifie" are devotions to the artist Alfreda Benge whom Wyatt married on the release of the album, and who drew its original (and present) cover. Again the words struggle to deliver inexpressible emotions, Alfreda's own retort adding a wicked humour to the eternally downward drift of the music.

When it comes, "Little Red Robin Hood Hit The Road" shocks the listener out of this comfortable stupor. For the first time, here we have a recognisably mainstream rock track, at least briefly, and this is the first foreground appearance of the electric guitar. Indeed, Mike Oldfield's twin solo, ringing with sustain, is without doubt the best thing Oldfield ever did - better even than "Whatevershebringswesing" - and absolutely searing with emotion. For in a simple four lines of verse, Wyatt suddenly finds his voice and expresses succinctly the sadness and vulnerability at the heart of the album:

"In the garden of England, dead moles lie inside their holes The dead end tunnels crumble in the rain underfoot. Isn't it a shame?"

That Cockney choirboy affectation at the end, oddly enough, is the most touching thing of all. As Oldfield's guitars spiral away, we're left with Ivor Cutler on baritone concertina and vocals for the second of his deadpan recitations. The mole is a blind, helpless creature, and the hedgehog's reaction to approaching cars is to curl up hopelessly in the road, but here their symbolic weight astounds: both intensely vulnerable and fighting to the core of their being:

"I lie in the road, try to trip up the passing cars Yes, me and the hedgehog, we bursting the tyres all day!"

Fred Frith's viola sounds like bitter laughter, and indeed the last thing you hear is a sardonic laugh.

After its release, Wyatt and Mason collaborated again on a single version of the Monkees's I'm A Believer, though when it was a hit Top of the Pops kicked up a predictable BBC stink because they didn't want to show somebody in a wheelchair. Mongezi Feza, sadly, died of pneumonia in 1975; Rock Bottom is a stunning tribute to the man.

But should you buy it? Well, just remember that if you do, all your other records will become redundant. Compared to this, they'll sound like so much childish dross.