Caught in the Carousel

Peter Gabriel

Scratch My Back
EMI

Peter Gabriel

In 1986 Peter Gabriel headlined the Amnesty International concert (think Live Aid but to benefit people starved of rights as opposed to food). One of the more striking moments of that concert was when Joni Mitchell (nine years before flipping me off while driving on Mulholland Drive and Laurel Canyon) was performing some sleepy number and someone threw a drink at her and it hit the neck of her guitar and she said: "Not cool," which was a fine response had she not quickly added: "You know, I'm cool. My husband is in Peter Gabriel's band." I still wince when I remember that moment. Also of note at this concert was the late and rather legendary Bill Graham who introduced the headliner: "Ladies and Gentlemen, the innovative giant, Mr. Peter Gabriel." And, at the time, little could be closer to the truth. The event took place in mid-June of the summer that, musically, would belong to Peter Gabriel. "Sledgehammer" (song and video) was all the rage and would go on to become the most honored music video of all time (rightfully so); his aching love song "In Your Eyes" would soon become a psalm to all relationships (thanks in large part to John Cusack's boombox in Say Anything) and his album So garnered him several Album of the Year honors and introduced Kate Bush to a number of Americans who wouldn't have otherwise encountered her were it not for her brilliant vocal on the duet "Don't Give Up," a nearly pitch-perfect song (whose only crime was serving as an inspiration for a 1988 Donny Osmond comeback).

Perhaps, a year later, in 1987 when the shallow Grammys awarded male performance of the year to Robert Palmer for "Addicted to Love" over Gabriel for "Sledgehammer," the wound inflicted on Gabriel was never fully sutured and those innovative and creative juices so celebrated months earlier had started to drain away. Gabriel did soldier on and have a few flashes of sheer brilliance: 1988's Passion: Music For The Film The Last Temptation of Christ and, oh about 5 minutes from his next solo project, Us, mostly limited to the album's closer "Secret World" in which he penned the wonderful line: "In all the places we were hiding love/What was it we were thinking of?" But those flashes came at the tail end of the '80s and the infancy of the '90s. Since then, Gabriel has witnessed his ambitious projects never achieve the necessary steam to get fully off the ground. And so now, here in 2010 he has come out with a daring concept: an album of songs by other artists done with orchestral arrangements entitled Scratch My Back. The title is in reference to the second half of the project: a forthcoming album by those covered-artists doing Gabriel songs in return.

Gabriel being Gabriel, he opts for only one song that might seem familiar to all listeners: Bowie's "Heroes," which in this version lacks the strange inspiration I have always found in the original. What's worse is that "Heroes" is the only song I have been able to listen to the whole way through. It pains me to say this, but most of this album is as pleasant as tinfoil in the mouth. Everything else is such warbled sturm und drang that one feels that listening to these songs is a form of torture that a political prisoner for whom Gabriel was singing almost twenty-five years ago might have had to endure. To be fair, I don't know (nor do I really want to) if I could stomach these songs all the way through in their original iterations. Other artists covered range from the deserving: Neil Young, Radiohead and Randy Newman to the critically-adored but, frankly, grating Arcade Fire and the utterly annoying and hardly relevant Regina Spektor.

Gabriel has long been an artist whose every work demands serious attention. He is seemingly adored by his peers, and his built-to-specifications recording studio Real World is the Mecca of recording sites. All of which leaves me rather baffled by this "project." At album's end, the whole ordeal frankly reminds me of those Japanese businessmen who get perms: One has to admire the ambition but not the results.

—Thomas Cooney