Rock Bottom (1974)

Rock Bottom is the second solo album by the English musician Robert Wyatt. It was released on 26 July 1974 by Virgin Records. The album was produced by Pink Floyd's drummer Nick Mason, and was recorded following a 1973 accident which left Wyatt a paraplegic. He enlisted musicians including Ivor Cutler, Hugh Hopper, Richard Sinclair, Laurie Allan, Mike Oldfield and Fred Frith in the recording.

Background

Wyatt's band Matching Mole disbanded soon after the release of Matching Mole's Little Red Record in 1972, and he soon began composing the material that later appeared on Rock Bottom. The album's preparation was interrupted by an accident on the night of 1 June 1973, when, at a raucous party in Maida Vale, an inebriated Wyatt fell from a fourth-floor bathroom window and was paralysed from the waist down. He has used a wheelchair ever since. He later called the event the beginning of his maturity, and in hospital he continued to work on the songs that would appear on Rock Bottom "in a trance": "I was just relieved that I could do something from a wheelchair. If anything, being a paraplegic helped me with the music because being in hospital left me free to dream, and to really think through the music."

Within six months he was back at work in the recording studio and appeared on stage at London's Rainbow Theatre with Pink Floyd and his former band Soft Machine, who played a benefit concert for him. Although the music on Rock Bottom itself is intense and often harrowing, and the lyrics to the songs are dense and deeply personal, Wyatt has denied that the material was a direct result of the accident and the long period of recuperation; much of the album had been written while in Venice in early 1973, where his partner and future wife Alfreda Benge was working as an assistant editor on Nicolas Roeg's film Don't Look Now.

Recording

Having written most of the songs while in Venice, Wyatt went to record them a few months after his accident. By the time he and Alfreda "were stuck for somewhere to stay, and one of the people who helped was Delfina Entrecanales, who had a farm in Wiltshire around a village called Little Bedwyn". Part of the album was recorded there. They brought a "recording van and parked it in a field behind and put cables through the windows, so it wasn’t really soundproofed – a few donkeys and tractors going by are on the tape". (Delfina Canales is "the" Delfina who owned the "wineglasses", "tray" and "small battery" included in the "Personnel" section below as played by Wyatt). The rest of the album was recorded at The Manor Studio at Shipton-on-Cherwell and CBS Studios in London.

Music and lyrics

Wyatt recorded Rock Bottom with musicians from both the progressive rock and jazz scenes. Dissatisfied with jazz fusion as it had existed previously, which he felt typically took the "worst of both" rock and jazz with excessive "noodling," Wyatt sought to achieve a novel, "upside down" style of jazz-rock fusion on Rock Bottom. It combined the "looseness," rhythm section, improvisation and instrumentation of jazz with the song-form structure of rock or folk music. According to Chris Dahlen of Pitchfork, "It’s impossible not to hear the stretched-out time of convalescence in its drones and long melodies as Wyatt devotes himself to keyboards, whittling at his synths as quizzically as he hones his lyrics, which gnarl with surreal wordplay but temper the brilliantly grounded wit that flashed across his earlier work."

Artwork

Rock Bottom has been released with two different covers, both featuring artworks by Alfreda Benge. The cover found on the original LP and several reissues is a pencil drawing of a scene at an ocean shore. The upper area of the cover, inspired by a Victorian-era book cover, depicts activity along the beach and off to the horizon, while the bottom third gives an underwater view of strange animal and plant life in the sea. Details include three teenage girls playing at the beach, a faraway steamer, seagulls and sandcastles. Benge intended the cover's subdued style to strike a contrast with the dominant trend of fantastical progressive rock album art, best typified by Roger Dean's science fiction-inspired artwork for Yes. At a time when "all the covers were getting more and more complicated, competing with each other for pizzazz", Benge said, "the only way to counter that ... was to be absolutely minimal and quiet."

Release

Promotion

To promote Rock Bottom, a headlining performance by Wyatt was held on 8 September 1974 at the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane, a West End theatre in London. The concert was reportedly arranged by the Virgin Records executive Richard Branson, who told Wyatt that certain musicians had expressed interest in performing as Wyatt's backing band for a concert. Meanwhile, Branson also told the same musicians that Wyatt had expressed interest in recruiting them for his live band.