The Show That Never Ends

The Show That Never Ends

Let's discuss a long overdue subject to get a best-selling book, progressive rock. 'The Show that Never Ends' is certainly not the first book on the subject. I have read a couple of others, including but not limited to 'Listening to the Future', 'Rocking the Classics', and the best of the batch IMHO, 'Mountains Come out of the Sky', which is  oversized and concentrates as much on the illustrations as history. Let's face it, there are some great album covers, so it is breezy and informative enough to be worth a read.

I should also mention the innumerable books about individual bands, from Yes to King Crimson and Emerson Lake & Palmer, to name just the big three, as well as a handful of individual biographies and autobiographies. I feel like I have read them all. Mainstream rock journalism has always avoided talking about prog (the hated term that has stuck), so it has been up to the fans to carry the torch. During the years 1985 until around 2000, prog as a style had almost vanished, the old dinosaurs stumbling towards revival and mostly failing, only Yes and particularly King Crimson having any success.

So there's a new book out, and for once progressive rock is treated with respect, a major new study into one of the few areas of the past not yet beat to death by post-modern referencing. The best thing that can be said about the book, and overall it is a very good book, perfect for the casual fan, is that at 360 pages, it is too short. That means the subject matter is deeper than just one pass, and perhaps in the future there will be more authors delving into the musical genre. Even better, while the author, David Weigel, tries his best to give a quick overview of prog rock, he also has a thesis at the end that I couldn't agree with more, one that I had developed (slightly differently) on my own.

The first major issue when discussing this topic must be; where does psychedelic music end and progressive rock begin? Almost all the original players and bands from which the genre emerged came up through the psychedelic era and, shall we say, inhaled. The one major exception would be Giles, Giles & Fripp, the group that morphed in King Crimson, but then again one of the themes in 'The Show that Never Ends' is how Robert Fripp is completely outside the normal behavior pattern of the typical progressive rock musician, and how this helps him to stay above the fray and not make the mistakes that everyone did.

Frankly, it is an impossible task to separate psych from prog; the two blend into each other so seamlessly, and psych didn't end, as the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame official history of rock would tell you, in 1968. Great psych albums came out throughout the 1970s, there were major revivals by younger bands in both the 1980s (Dukes of Stratosphere) and 1990s (Porcupine Tree), to name a few, and there continues to be psychedelic music created to this day. Psych has remained cool while prog became an embarrassment, for whatever reason. Personally, I think the critics were too musically illiterate to get the references, and they were intimidated by artists who were their intellectual superior. Not to worry if you're discussing Iggy and the Stooges or the New York Dolls.

Another huge issue with progressive rock is trying to get a definition that encompasses the entire genre; good luck with that! Artists as diverse as the Moody Blues, Frank Zappa, and even the mighty Pink Floyd can fail any acid test for inclusion to the pantheon, yet almost everybody would include at least two of those three artists. It is classical references, or instrumental virtuosity? Long songs or concept albums? I can point to music created a long time before 1969 outside of classical that fills the bill. Any one ever heard of Duke Ellington or Sun Ra, just to scratch the surface?

We're starting to find one of the problems with prog; it has a very mushy definition. The term 'progressive' was bandied about by English rock critics a few years after the British Invasion landed in America, and was often applied to bands like the Beatles and the Who. Fair enough; the Beatles' musical history is one of change and refinement over time, and the Who were obsessed with concept albums from at least the 'I'm a Boy' single, although it took years for an actual thing to emerge, by which time the Pretty Things beat them to it, or for the real trainspotters, the psych-folk duo Nirvana created the first narrative concept album.

In short, progressing was a concept that was being pushed by the music press of the time (think Chris Welsh, for example). Cream were considered a progressive blues band, a contradiction in terms by today's critical standards. Everybody's next single was supposed to be somehow... more than the last one, a revelation, a new world opening up. Fair enough, unless you're Status Quo or Ten Years After. This kind of thinking lead Deep Purple to play with a symphony orchestra in 1969, a full year before Pink Floyd did the same, which may explain why Roger Waters hates 'Atom Heart Mother'. And I could give an argument that Deep Purple was as much a progressive band as they were a hard rock one, but I digress.

If I had to give any definition of progressive rock, it would be; 'A musical genre from 1968 through 1978 that exploited the instrumental technology of the day, especially with keyboards, while importing elements of other musical genres to create a more encompassing thematic structure to their music.' There weren't too many guitar-only true progressive bands (Peter Bank's Flash a notable exception, and Rush was as much hard rock as prog). If one tries to bring in virtuosity, both the Moody Blues and especially Pink Floyd go out the window. My personal opinion is that too much emphasis has been put on the borrowings from classical music while not enough attention has been paid to the influence of jazz.

Jazz was simultaneously going through its own period of change that has been loathed by the critics, fusion, the only musical form lower on the proverbial critical totem pole than prog. And there is some overlap; the Soft Machine and King Crimson being two bands that were frequently as much fusion as prog. But jazz had explored thematic albums since the creation of the long playing record, which any number of Dave Brubeck or Charles Mingus album will demonstrate, not to mention Miles Davis. Rock was playing catch up to jazz in terms of sophistication in the late 1960s, and this must have been a huge motivating factor to these musicians.

My point is; progressive music didn't emerge out of a vacuum, and it wasn't just Stravinsky and Ravel that were the influences these young prog musicians were borrowing from. Any half-awake listening to Keith Emerson will note the huge influence of Dave Brubeck, as well as Hammond players such as Jimmy Smith and Jimmy McGriff. Steve Howe's playing owed a huge debt to Larry Coryell, right down to the Gibson Jumbo Jazz; compare Coryell's 'Elementary Guitar Solo #5' to anything Howe did in early Yes;

As they say, if you're going to steal, steal from the best. Who cares, anyway; this was stylistic borrowing, not the wholesale larceny and cultural appropriation that Led Zeppelin was guilt of during the same time period. All musicians have influences, and those will inevitably show up in their work.

A big fork in the progressive road, and one not really covered in David Weigel's book, is which bands kept on jamming and which ones settled into a multimedia stage show that prevented any variation or deviation from their set. That's another reason why Pink Floyd are hard to fit as a progressive band; they jammed their asses off in 1970, yet were playing a note-perfect set by 1975, more about the spectacle of stadium rock than about the music per se. That does tie in with the conclusion of 'The Show that Never Ends', but I'm not quite there yet.

There are also the huge stylistic variations within the genre itself, and the artists who have tried to escape its confines, most notably Robert Fripp (as early as 1980) and Ian Anderson of Jethro Tull. I must confess to being a lifelong prog fan, from when I first stumbled across 'Aqualung', 'Tarkus' and 'Fragile' just as I was entering high school, and I've never turned my back and denounced my affiliation of the genre. But I abhor Genesis from start to finish, considering them light in the loafers musically (although strangely I do quite enjoy Peter Gabriel's work) and there are plenty of acts I've never warmed up to, such as Gentle Giant. It does become annoying when fellow prog fans insist that you like anyone in the genre from the classic age.

As far as technology goes, that is the most important point, as far as I can tell. The Mellotron paved the way for some of the earliest groups, and is the most hackneyed instrument in the genre. The Moog was even more important; even King Crimson utilized one extensively in their live shows 1971 to 1972, and they didn't even have one on stage! Beyond that, it was innovations like the Azimuth Co-Ordinator by Pink Floyd, enabling surround sound at concerts, and the traveling light show of King Crimson, which seemed to leave as much of an impression at the early concerts as the music did, that were the breakthroughs that have stood the test of time.

Progressive music was about making it sound great and putting on an impressive shows. These guys were amongst the first generation to play stadiums, at least the biggest acts. I saw Yes in 1975, and it was an overwhelming experience; I don't really remember the music, but I sure remember Roger Dean's set design. ELP had a baby Tarkus, cannons, and a revolving piano, Pink Floyd a flying pig and films synced to the songs. You went to a prog concert because you were going to see something that you had never seen before, spectacle on an arena level. When I saw Emerson Lake and Palmer play at Hershey Park in 1974, Keith, while wiping his ass with a ribbon synth, managed to crack the ceiling with sub-sonic vibrations. They waited twenty years for another rock act to play that venue. Believe me, it was worth it for the moment.

And that, I'm happy to say, is what David Weigel in 'The Show that Never Ends' gets right. Prog never died; instead, it morphed into stadium rock, and that is his conclusion at the end of the book. He notes bands like Styx and Asia, all pomp and show. I would go much further; I first noticed it back in 1992, when U2 came out with the 'Achtung Baby' album. The tour was so full of progressive rock borrowings, even in the presentation of the older songs. When the hell did these guys go prog? The moment they became a huge stadium rock band, in actual fact. They had to; the alternative is to be like the Rolling Stones, a very good group who always look a little embarrassing on a huge stage.

Queen would be another perfect example of this; their not a prog band exactly, but they borrow whatever they need to help them sell a concert to 50,00 people. Much of the template of stadium rock is from the prog era, so naturally it will show up in odd places. It can be invisible; after all, prog was one of the first post-modern musical forms, strip mining older forms, borrowing that which they wanted from other genres and discarding the rest. Now that is standard operating procedure. We don't even notice it anymore. It is expected.

Perhaps it was the wrong lessons that was learned from prog. So be it. I can still sit down and listen to some of those glorious 5.1 surround sound mixes from Steve Wilson and relive the feeling I had back in the day when these guys briefly ruled rock. Some were a train wreck, like Emerson Lake & Palmer, some moved out of the genre completely, like Pink Floyd or Genesis, some stayed true to their initial ideas, such as Yes, and some continued to create and evolve beyond mere progressive, such as King Crimson and Jethro Tull It is unfair to lump the all together, but life isn't fair. There is some fabulous music there, if your ears are sharp and your mind is open.

I'll end these ramblings with a piece of my own, 'Bongo the Magnificent'. First recorded in 2006 with some modification in 2007, it is a short improvisation between guitar and drums. When I started home recording, I didn't even own a bass, so about a year later I added the bass in one take. I got lucky. This is on the King Crimson side of the genre, all dissonance and fuzz. But there was a concept behind the song, however vague, and there are chord structures and repeats, so I wasn't flying entirely blind. I hope you can enjoy it in the spirit that it was created.