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On the Sound Practice of Achieving a

More Convincing Silence: Scott Walkers
The Drift and 30 Century Man

by Norman Ball



(previously appeared in Skope magazine May 23, 2011)
In his dreams he had been warned against this change, seen the dear face
and heard the unspoken words.from Samuel Becketts Ohio Impromptu











I seem to be enjoying a renaissance of sorts. Though I remain intent on my Original
Nightmare. It took me decades to hone it back to its primal terror (All that happened
in the cradleand before.) I was a product of the black pedagogy favored by Ohios
German community at the time. There was a struggle to break my spirit. Daddys big
black Teuton boot was the first instrument I ever suffered against.
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Before that, I was the tiny victor of a darker triumph of the will. Thats why the
uneven, shimmering specter of the twinless twin fascinates me. There is, in it, the
eternal absence, the unspeakable void, a mothers silent interrogation. Then, the
outsized need for spotlite. Beckett shared it with Bion. Elvis with Jesse. Liberace with
his embarrassment of sequins so clearly stitched for two. The North Tower for a few
moments as its uncemented alliance collapsed in a plume of smoke and ash. Who can
forget that image of the shocked survivors staggering beneath the weight of all that
ash, their twin nose-holes signaling the blackest drug, the antichrists euphoriaa
pure and perfect dread?
How Elvis bore this premonition, I will never know. When I met him briefly in 57, his
skin was an ethereal sheen of blankness. Call it innocence. Maybe it was the klieg
lights. I felt an eerie plasma holding him aloft above the pedestrian fray. As his
beloved Gladys would often say, a surviving twin carries the soul-power of two. On
that night, I could see how he believed her. Right then I promised his stillborn beauty
to music. But before any notes arrived, I would have to settle on the apogee of my
own consummating silence.

notes from an Unsung Stranger


Well, at least thats what the bedside pad said in the light of morning. Automatic writing. Im
a believer now. Some hands are driven into the hands of others because the devil requires
legions of playthings. This infernal age has no shortage of functionaries who barely rise to the
excitement of evil. Pop stars require minions. Though I held the nightstand pen, in this
instance, I did nothing consciously to drive it across the blank page. Yet strangely, I am no less
committed to the contents. The paragraphs are mine. I recognize the epiphanies. However the
time signatures and phrasing are the work of another. Movement cant be captured in a
paparazzi flash. But thats where this tension gets its legs.

Through the dominant wards and nurseries
A flugleman moves
In the lung-smeared slides and corridors
A flugleman moves from Cue (The Drift)

If an artist isnt moving, hes dying. Theres always an idealized or imagined end-point on the
lip of the horizon, a telos. The journey is an asymptote. It hints seductively at arrival but each
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step forward only splits the distance between where one stands and infinityor our own
personal stand-in for infinity, death. The seductive allure of a crushed-velvet litter kissed with
rose petals, the climactic ovation, keeps the artist moving. As for actually resting on ones
laurels, that locus is jealously guarded by the grave where hopefully therell be a way to pipe
in some applause. This is music enlisted for art; even at its best, a glorious thankless task.
Then theres music enlisted for product. I can already hear the wail of the aficionadas. Their
knee-jerk reaction is to hoot and jeer the shameless deformation of sound constructed for
profit. But the world runs on business. Businessmen want a template, a product that
reverberates against the last one, that doesnt require a whole new promotional direction,
that leverages sunk cost, etc. Familiarity, while perhaps breeding artistic contempt, lowers the
standard deviation of failure which in turn allows for a lower target ROI. Come on,
businessmen in the music business are not a crime against humanity. Lets ease up a bit. If
anything, its fatuous artists putting down stakes for a steady paycheck that seed the cash-
crap-crop. Theres more than a little hypocrisy in that half-in, half-out stance.
Some artists are savvy enough to split the difference and offer up serviceable product within
the business frame. Some succeed in productizing their variedness. Listeners will follow them
to hell and back. This speaks to a fearsome personal brand which is very rare. We have
probably seen the last of fearsome brands because record companies routinely discard new
groups whose second albums fail to match the sales of the first. The grand forty-year arcs of
the Rolling Stones, the Kinks, Clapton, Bowie, Elton, etcderive their satanic majesty from the
occasional stupendous failure. We will rue the death of creative mishap. Music enjoyment
owes much to evolutionary half-steps, though this hit-and-miss theme hardly preaches to a
choir of pensive moguls.
The replicating ferocity of the digital age has done much to erode the old-time record
company as patient father-figure. Shelf-lives have lost their shelf-life. No one can afford to
incubate. But again, if you were cultivating and investing in a product that, within days of its
debut on your shelf, was being proliferated madly on the street corner, how forgiving would
you be of bohemian invention? Hey kid, youre on your own for noble experimentsand Im
cutting your allowance.
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Otherseither through naivet or an unforgiving musesuccumb to restlessness and slit their
own commercial throats. Perhaps they are staunchly committed artists. Perhaps they are
befuddled narcissists who mistake their popularity for a birthright. Perhaps they come to
regret it deeply.
Contending between the twin-poles of business and art is this hugely deformed creature
perched on bar and staff. That would be the music celebrity or pop star, an amalgam with its
own toxic brew of priorities and agendas. At best, celebrity should be a by-product of
accomplishment and duly earned acclaim. Yet so many realms of art have been overrun by
celebrity and its tempting accoutrements. None of this is a great revelation, but the celebrity
meme is such a powerful one that it bears repeating. VH1 Behind the Music et al chronicle the
all-too-familiar, falling into and out of fame story, with its cathartically redemptive recovering
of fame in the final frame.
I said redemptive and cathartic only because the TV voiceover guy does. How did stepping in a
fresh pile of dog-shit, only to return triumphantly to the same pile of shit in the end, ever
graduate to an uplifting tale of human spirit and endurance? They beat the booze and got the
screaming chicks back in the endand not a moment too soon, if the liver is allowed its
pickled POV. Meanwhile the limo full of nubile wastrels and reconstructed rock gods
disappears into the Sunset Strip. Fame recovers another recovering band of alcoholics just in
time for a lucrative come-back tour. Lassie where the hell are you? Or was that your ginger
pelt we saw Ozzie snorting fleas out of? We warned you girl about the infernal wheels of the
tour bus.
The celebrity frame has routed all other achievement benchmarks. No one even questions the
primacy of the fame-objective. I mean, who in their right mind would discard screaming
chicks with cavalier abandon, not to mention the limos, the paparazzi, the flashbulbs unless
they are hopelessly drug-addled or hovering on the edge of sanity? Dont give us that
solitudinous artist shit. No one hands fame over unless the keys are demanded back. If the
fame split, then you lost your game, dude. Lights out.

The invasion of the childs soul is the first bullet fired. Its said Joyce put everything in
while Beckett took everything out. The ambitious apprentice masters the trade in
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order to subdue his master. I studied Spectors wall of sound and for a time
worshipped within that saccharine hall. It was the sixties. We were indulgent, man;
Steppenwolf on Tuesday. Sarte, Thursday night. Then, a farmers boy in Londontown.
The most acute stranger.
Through the gas-gas-gas phase, I remained a covert ambassador of the night. All that
made me who I am occurred under darknessof the womb, of the midnight hour. I
am the bearer of portentous nightmares. I resist all the received wisdoms: of groove,
of arrangement. The paradox of the composer is that he prepares holy silences. If he
succeeds, music invades like a drunken Cossack. I make craters in the earth. So do
you.
The calcium deposits of sleepwalk. Ive washed away bridges, torn out hooks,
banished melody. I want anxious craftsmen honing their trade like freshly seeded
infidels. After decades under tyranny of night terror and one unspeakable recurrent
visitor (who even now my carved-out space is powerless to coax forward), I suppose I
am prepared, like few others, for what is in the air. If I can deaden the silence, and
offer a low-slung stage of blocked-sound, my darkest friend with ink-bled eyes might
yet oblige us with his presence.

notes from an Unsung Stranger

In a low-bar form such as popular music, the guy who shows up with half-a-plan is a genius
in the same way the pigeon is eagle in a field of sparrows. Thats not to say the occasional
eagle doesnt flash his talons. But we should reserve the term for epoch-changers, Leonard da
Vinci, Mozart and the like, only the rarest birds. Like grading on a curve or selling brand-name
toothpaste, genius-minting sort of elevates everyone in the vicinity. Suddenly they didnt just
drop out of school at 15 anymore. I mean, they were misunderstood geniuses. So for them
gym class was a particular bitch. Thats why we hear the designation at least three times a
day. The label is good business.
So Im leery of all the inside-shop fawning over Scott Walker in the beginning of 30 Century
Man, the 2006 documentary. Theres more than a little celebrity value-distortion at work. A
goodly part of the reverence seems falsely tendered. We have the fame-game and its enlistees
expressing a mixture of incredulousness and inverted-narcissistic-admiration towards a man
who walked away from fame before fame was entirely done with him. Nobody does that.
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(Between the lines: Certainly we wouldnt.) Stop taking my picture or Ill stand under the
trellis where the lightings bad. Whoa, such forbearance. Such courage.
Who better than a mirror-gazer to miss a mirror pointing back? The silly mythos that has
sprung up around Walkers self-imposed exile seems culled from an insecure celebritys worst
nightmares: Bigfoot lives, that big shy hairy lug, but he has declined interviews for years and
only consents to grainy photos taken from 200 feet away. Not only that, he wears a baseball
cap. He watches dart-players in pubs. He runs a fish and chips shop. What if Walker is frying
haddock for a living? Quick, someone throw him a safety-line. With their heartsick
speculations, the musing narcissists give away the fish and chips shop. He could be one of us,
but hes relinquished the firmament to revert back to one of them. What the hell is he
thinking?
In fairness, there is some genuine musical appreciation going on as well. But as to where the
music ends and the hubbub begins, whos to say for sure? Quite apart from his fame
trajectory, Walker is deserving of musical esteem. That is the central feature of his narrative
arc. The musics the thing. Walker seems to genuinely believe this as well. That he may be just
an artist with ambivalence towards fame only makes him Joan of Arc in a roomful of preening
celebrities. There are a lot of magnificent, obscure artists. By celebrity-logic, perhaps they
should stop creating because the limelight will never single them out for applause. Others like
to distort in the other direction by defending obscurity as an unerring red badge of artistic
courage. However some people are deservedly obscure (i.e. they suck) while some compelling
artists manage a degree of popularity. Binaries dont work well, especially in art. Lights out.

I reject studio camaraderie. Dull easy comfort breeds cacophonous tangents. We
offend the silence by traipsing across it like storks without wings. A session guy once
mused misery clings to tape. How true! Perfection is the enemy of a ragged fear and
loathing. The silence wants you in and out. Your mission is preposterous anyway. By
all means come prepared and know the terror you seek. But dont mock the void. Itll
have you soon enough.
notes from an Unsung Stranger

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There are two revealing interviews, both on Youtube, where we find Scott Walker not so
much offering information as fighting uphill for his lifes narrative against a stubbornly
reductive celebrity frame. There is a corollary in
the narrative record. 1984s Winston sits across
the table from OBriens bright new lieutenant,
Simon Cowell. Cowell listens only for what he
needs to hear. Winston has long since forgotten
how to fashion what Cowell needs. The rats break
the impasse. Killing time, they have a nibble at
Winstons boyish, matinee-idol looks. Nero
doesnt fiddle cause he cant get studio time. The
celebrity template is a fog-horn not an aria. The one insistent note? Feed me.Harold Pinter
addressed the two silences. Juxtaposed, they make for awkward conversation across the
garden wall. In the interview above (starting at 2:49) the interviewers lingo is standard, ditzy
pop-star fare: come-back, single, video-track. Hey, Walker is in a pop-shop. What did he
expect? The interview is ill-considered and a contextual non sequitur. For that, you have to
blame Walker, not the inane interviewer as various Youtube detractors insist. If Hindemith
wanders into Top of the Pops, theyll skirt over his non-diatonic system and get to the
danceable part. Thats just the nature of the red shoes. Once again Scotts chronic tendency of
doing himself no favors is on abundant display. Night of Hunter (1984) is a brilliant album. (If
you find a better song that Sleepwalkers Woman, have it bathed and brought to my tent.)
Answering Pinters dictum, Beckett (whom Walker
likens himself to more than once) doesnt traffic
idle chatter. So why offend the bubbly moments
with pregnant silence? These are the sort of public
train-wrecks that drive a man to open a fish and
chips shop.
The second interview (below) circa 2005, is an
apparent promotional turn for The Drift and 30
Century Man. First, the credentials are established,
i.e. all the reasons we on Main Street should rightfully be copping a feel: no less than Brian
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Eno, David Bowie, Radiohead, Jarvis Cocker have approved this message. His pedigree beyond
reproach, Walker is straightaway cast into the Stubborn and Enduring Mystery that follows
him like a plague. The prison bars of this template never fail in their melodramatic insistency:
determined recluse, enigmatic, at the height of his fame when he had it all, the looks,
the voice, the stardom, he walked away. And so what is he now, a fume-meister, a nebbish?
Frankly would we give two shits for his current music had he not been who he isnt now?
Poor Scott. Ill have lots of vinegar on me chips, mate.
Admirably, Walker punctures the mythos every time he encounters it. He is his own patient
giant-killer: Generally if Ive got nothing to say or do, you know, its pointless to be around I
think. An admirable credo to be sure, but if widely adopted by the famous, a death-knell for
gratuitous self-advertisement and farewell tours; more hyperventilation: Did you really have a
mental breakdown and run away to a monastery? Nah, I went to learn Gregorian chant.
Gregorian chant!? Velvety baritone notwithstanding, this guy has a death-wish for all that
compels young girls to rub their legs together. Finally Walker, the consummate gentleman,
addresses the charge that he willfully courts obscurity on Tilt, [Rattle n] Drift: There are a lot
of people writing songs that are accessible. He could just as easily have said shitty. But he
doesnt. Scott is an unfailingly nice guy, one more clue to his hapless series of bad turns with
industry suits.
Walkers jaw-dropping exit from all things deemed most sought invites the famous to their
own version of a sickening, slow-motion accident. They cant take their eyes off him. Mainly
because hes as serious as a heart attack. Walker himself comes across as the least portentous
figure in 30 Century Man. He is devoid of affectations, almost eerily disarming, without guile
or calculation, a true celebrity-foil. Despite no shortage of help from his friends, he doesnt
buy in. Scott has a Keatsian penchant for negative capabilities, the indelible mark of the poet.
Music arrives. It cannot be forced. This innate shyness of the soul falls deaf on famous ears.
Throughout 30 Century Man the celebrity-project is to imbue Walker with all the poignancy of
a Garbo-esque exile, the celebritys last stand. Petulant absence has a certain cache. Walker
politely resists. Hes just low-key.
Indeed Walkers years in the wilderness would surely lend themselves to a Bowie-in-Berlin fry-
up. Wheres the canny publicist? Escaping the gilded cage of teeny-bopper asphyxiation and
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pop-star hedonism, Walker experimented with serial killing before opting instead to frequent
London BDSM clubs where he could be seen hanging from Gothic chandeliers yelping about
all manner of predations perpetrated on his Yank-bred, Spanish bum Nobody did the
listen-to-me-dont-listen-to-me two-step better than Bowie. In the hands of the right Svengali,
Scott could have managed his twisted cake and eaten with Lady Gaga too. Yet there it lies,
whole unused spools of inert narrative. Walker could afford to run a better music hall, or
perhaps there is a profound pathology infusing his reticence, even a subtle masochism; the
hopelessly asynchronous power equations are there in abundance: Cossacks, emblematic
agents of medieval savagery and calculated cruelty, dragging Ukrainian maidens across
pale monkey nails, hypnotic dictators leading innocent young mistresses to grotesque ends,
ardent torturers who bleed victims into lovers and back again. Perhaps on some level, Walker
takes perverse pleasure from the harsh deprivations his self-exile inflicts.
Too honest even to ply the defiant-artist-cursed-with-a-musical-vision malarkey (picture mad
Ahab, a windswept Gregory Peck, on the brow of the Pequod staring down the angry seas of
musical mediocrity), he muses aloud at how the Scott 4 album disappeared into an abyss.
Fame went right with it as did record company phone calls. Walker appears genuinely injured
by the uncaring gestures. Everyone wants to be liked, even Scott Walker. But not enough to
reprise The Sun Aint Gonna Shine Anymore like some kind of purgatorial Groundhog Day
ode.
Theres a flash of familiar, show business ambition when Walker consents to reprising The
Walker Brothers in 1975, long enough to give us No Regrets, and, even more crucial to the
future Scott Walker corpus, 1978s The Electrician. The latter is a Scott Walker song in a
Walker Brothers sleeve. It is also the signpost for the next thirty years of Walker output.
2005s Jesse is the return-leg of the same imperialist boomerang. American hubris perpetrated
against South America strikes back at the Great Perpetrator on 9-11. This is precisely the dark
doppelganger Elvis was channeling, the goofy jailhouse-dance with its iconic riff a harbinger
of todays prison planet. An impossible innocence. (Who even looked askance at prisoners 47
and 3, the implications of their odd coupling?) Pow pow. The one-two punch followed by the
dust-strewn wail of the North Tower in its plaintive role as Elvis impersonator: Im the only
one left alive. Though 27 years separate the songs, the prolegomena and preparatory sound-
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scapes are thematic twins; the ominous machine-hum of cattle prod and airplane share a
mission: to barbecue human flesh. Walker evokes a reckoning viewed, at least in some
quarters of the globe, as karmic justice. The retributive arc happens to span decades. Thats
poetic calling. What fresh and frightening chapters does this 68-year-old hold in store for us?
In the end, Walker deflates the great, dark mystery so many wish for him. He seems as
bewildered by his life-journey as the rest of us are about ours. Ah but the celebrities will not
allow him this fumbled denouement. This is all about self-projection, look-at-me by inference:
He is a deep, deep artist. By insinuating myself into his august company, I am deepened
too. Holding him over the abyss, they burnish their own seedy lamps by association. When
he is allowed to mutter his ill-considerations, the predominant tone is one of dejected self-
bemusement, even an overpowering sense of regret, at the loss of twenty years of his life due,
in large part it seems, to record company politics, the onset of the punk movement, his
personal frame of mind, in short, life in general. Hes just a guy saddled with a sixty-year
nightmare that pokes in and out of the public consciousness. Walker knows well the ebbs and
flows of public fascination. Refreshingly, he neither bemoans the ebbs nor courts the flows.
He seeks the perfect drift.
Scott Walker offers a vague ambivalence, dis-chords neither right-on nor right-off, the
bifurcated agony of twins parted at birth, real-life veered away from bright expectancy.
Because life, for most of us, is everything that happens; or if you prefer, all that prevented us
from being where we most wanted to be. Even if that favored place is a silly mirage. How
could the unflaggingly famous ever understand this slow, desperate slip between pedestrian
cracks? Scott is for us and not for them. 30 Century Man would have done well to enlist an
everyman voice or two. No doubt a bevy of marquee names secures plum financing. We may
fill seats better than we sell them. But we dont need a weatherman to know which way the
drift goes.
Two a.m. concludes all wakefulness. The next phase is a tossing-about in full recline. Nite
Flights. Moth-wings batter their black powder against the canopy of repose. This intrepid
correspondent lies at the readya dutiful Sleep Walker, should the midnight need arise.

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The year was 1982. I was rehearsing matchstick crypts at my kitchen table when
Beckett, my kindred dismantler and Ohio, my open-faced home, conspired with
happenstance to deliver Ohio Impromptu. I couldnt ignore the implied invitation and
began at once to carve the next notch in my own evaporating odyssey, Climate of
Hunter. Like you, I have my Listener. He fills my excavations, tapping out the hidden
tempos, halting my ceaseless attempts at orchestration.
I am a Reader who struggles with the usual stratagems. If I foster the proper climate,
the hunted will find the clearing. We are the bickering twins, Listener and I. Present at
the paradox of my inception, he is the enfant terrible of my night-form imaginings.
How his gurgled moan of death echoed through the stricken damp canal, convicting
me forevera bundle of joy lashed to stillborn loss. My destiny? To endure for him our
solitude, our ash, our towering famine.
notes from an Unsung Stranger

____________________________________________________________________________________
Norman Ball is a Virginia writer and musician. His two latest
books, How Can We Make Your Power More Comfortable? (Del
Sol Press, 2010) and The Frantic Force (Petroglyph Books,
2011) available on the web. The author neither assumes nor
implies any authenticity to the Unsung Stranger automatic
writings that appear sporadically throughout this article. More
than likely its just a nocturne cat. You can listen to the authors
own live version of the Jacques Brel song My Death (covered in
1967 by Scott Walker) on the right.