Detroit News
January 4, 1996
Bowie's muse, Reeves Gabrels, riffs up a storm
By Kevin Ransom
In 1987, guitarist Reeves Gabrels was earning $8,000 a year, working in a Wurlitzer music store by day and slugging it out in Boston watering holes by night.
A year later, he was on stage with David Bowie, unleashing a thunderous, metallic racket as the guitarist in Tin Machine (along with ex-Detroiters Hunt and Tony Sales -- as in Sons of Soupy.) Ever since, Gabrels has been Bowie's guitar foil -- and, says Bowie, "an energizing influence" on the rock chameleon's music.
"Reeves encouraged me to be more adventurous again," Bowie said in an interview earlier this year. "I've always said I would only be fulfilled if I was experimenting ... and Reeves kept reminding me of that."
So it was fitting that Bowie was the guy who gave Gabrels the kick in the pants that he needed in order to finally make a record of his own.
"David came up to me during the recording of Outside (Bowie's latest release)," Gabrels recalls. "And he said, 'Look, you're always showing me these great things you've written, but you never do anything with them. What do I have to do -- get you a record deal myself?'"
Gabrels, who brings his own band to the Magic Stick in Detroit on Friday, replied by throwing down the gauntlet.
"I told David that if he'd co-write a song with me, and sing on it, I'd happily do a solo record," Gabrels says by phone from his home in Boston. "And he said, 'Sure.'"
On the resulting album, The Sacred Squall of Now, Gabrels stirs up a furious firestorm of avant-pop art-noise. Gabrels' squealing guitar peals, time-warp sonic loops and skittering solos channel the gleeful pop deconstructions of Frank Zappa and Captain Beefheart by way of Sonic Youth.
In addition to the Bowie project and his own record, Gabrels' dizzying improvisational flights can also be heard on Night In Amnesia, a recently released duet recording with David Tronzo, the slide-guitar phenom who's played with the Lounge Lizards and John Hiatt.
Gabrels first met Bowie when his wife Sara was working for the Bowie organization during Bowie's 1988 "Glass Spider" tour. When Bowie heard a tape of Gabrels' work, he recruited Gabrels immediately -- and later called Gabrels his "creative lifesaver."
Gabrels says he's always surprised when he hears Bowie speak so effusively about him.
"I've always thought of David as an innovator, and an experimenter -- especially on records like Low and Heroes and Scary Monsters," says Gabrels. "He was always moving, up until Let's Dance (1983). He said that the success of Let's Dance locked him into a pop-funk-dance thing that he wanted to break out of," reveals Gabrels, "so I just kept encouraging him in that direction."
The Tin Machine project -- a willfully abrasive, post-rock manifesto -- thumbed its nose at pop convention, alienating Bowie fans, Bowie's management and the record company alike.
"I just kept telling people, 'This is not a pop band, don't think of us as a pop band,'" recalls Gabrels.
After Tin Machine broke up in 1991, Bowie invited Gabrels to stay on as his guitarist for his subsequent solo albums -- Black Tie, White Noise in 1993 and the newly released Outside.
Despite his apocalyptic soundscapes, Gabrels declares that, on one level, he's a traditionalist.
"I find the fuel for what I do in Cream-era Eric Clapton, and Oscar Peterson, and the Allman Brothers," says Gabrels, who also credits his studies at the Berklee College of Music in Boston for his advanced harmonic chops. "Those guys were all pioneering players who took the music to new places.
"So, like those players, what I do comes from fairly traditional sources, yet it takes me completely outside of the tradition."
On Outside, Gabrels says he and Bowie -- both former art-school students -- tended to use visual-art reference points when creating song structures and guitar parts.
"David would say to me, 'Well maybe this should be more like a Jackson Pollack kind of solo,' or, 'This should sound more like a W.P.A. mural,'" says Gabrels. "We'd try to evoke the mood represented by a painting, or by the artwork of a certain era."
In fact, during the Outside recording sessions, Bowie and producer Brian Eno hung big swatches of fabric all around the recording studio in order to evoke certain moods. The visual/aural relationship was sometimes a long conceptual stretch.
"Once, Brian turned on David's microphone while David was doing charcoal sketches in the vocal booth," relates Gabrels. "Meanwhile, the band was jamming in the studio. So when we listened back to it later, over the top of the music, you could hear the swoosh of David's charcoal against the paper."