For some random reason, last night I pulled out Eno's first solo album, Here Come The Warm Jets, and gave it a spin for the first time in several years (yes, original 1970s vintage vinyl). What an amazing album. If you only think of clean, pristine, ambient music when you think of Eno, you should hear this one. It'll smack you around with space-age guitars, neolithic drums and lava-flow bass -- all at the service of what appear to be pop tunes, but with devious twists hidden in their structure. Reading the liner notes, I find that, hey! It was recorded 30 years ago, to the month -- September 1973. Somehow I doubt that this will be marked by the masses like the anniversary of a Beatles album. It may not have the "influential" rep of The Velvet Underground and Nico, but it's a monster of a record and certainly made a deep impression in some circles. It sure saved me from prog rock purgatory. I got my copy around 1975 and proceeded to play the grooves off of it. At that time, I didn't have the ears or knowledge to really absorb how it worked, but I at least knew it was damned cool stuff. Listening to it now, besides the inventive musical structures and absurdist lyrics, I'm most impressed by its pure sonic aspects. It's like a Jackson Pollock painting rendered as a sculpture in motion. Hefty, boiling complexities. Big chunky globs here, light airy spritzes there. And when it wants to scream, it screams. There were a lot of needles in the red in that studio. It simply tears the head off of so much alternative music that's rolled down the pike since then. I believe that the trick (other than tons of work) is that they broke all of the conventional rules of mixing and made it work. You can hear extreme EQ decisions and level choices that are a total inversion of the norm. Gutsy work that paid off totally. So mark this anniversary before it runs out. Track the album down on CD. Or better yet, pure analog vinyl -- it really makes a difference on this one (and no, MP3s cannot do it justice). Put on a good pair of headphones and give it the juice. It's a masterpiece of electric music.