It took two separate genre albums in 2010 and 2011 before I realized that I was definitely heading straight towards prog rock. The eight albums between 2006 and 2009 were whatever I had managed to create without too much trouble bothering to sequence them, more about cramming as much sound onto a CD-R as possible. There was some pretty good progressive contained on those discs, but there was zero thematic coherence. Honestly, I thought that perhaps there were some hidden jazz tendencies in my music and that was about it.
A fine example of my early casual prog would be 'Sonata #WTF', done in 2007. It was tax season, and I had finished three generations of paperwork and needed to vent. I sat down at the piano and this thing came out in less than five minutes. There happened to be a drum loop that fit it perfectly, which never happened before or since. I worked out an arrangement in an hour, and within another two had the song finished and mixed.
The video was an attempt to pile up textures with bold black and white silhouettes in the foreground. There is enough graphics floating through it to make sure you know it is my work, and I keep the color palette consistent. There was a good introduction and conclusion and the performance nailed the song. For once, I got it as well as possible on the first try early in my career.
Sometimes progressive rock can be a statement or even a parody. While doing an album called 'Sloppy Seconds', consisting of a few leftovers from an even earlier dreadful album with nine new hard blues-rock songs, I felt the need to do a Beatles song that used every trick in the book. The inspiration was finding on-line the instrument breakdown of some Beatles songs; drums, bass, guitar, piano, vocals. You could make your own mix. The item that fascinated me was the orchestral build up from 'A Day in the Life', and I schemed up a way to include it, since it is more of a texture than any particular notes or melody.
Called 'Clichés of the World', the title alone should clue you in tot he self-mocking nature of the track. If the Rutles and the Dukes of Stratosphere could do it, why not me? I consciously tried to make it sound as much like the Beatles - sans vocals - as I could muster, and then climax with the orchestral crescendo. It is buried enough in the mix to make it original, and the song grew into something more epic than I had originally thought.
The video was more vacation footage; the beer at the end is Wadadli, an excellent brand from Antigua. This was a fun song to do, even if this is the first version. I did remix the song in 2016, redoing the bass in the process, but the first version isn't bad. There are also some of my very old paintings lurking in the background, the only time I tried that technique.
I have to include 'Science Marches on' if I am going to talk about prog from this era, since this one of the few times that I was aiming squarely at the genre. From 2008, the drum loop track was a good deal of work. The wah bass was inspired by John Wetton's playing in King Crimson in the early 1970s. It was one of the last times that I used the very old Casio keyboard; the only decent sound that I could get out of it was the calliope sound heard on this track.
This is the first version; the use of so much keyboard texture in the beginning and end really pushes this into progressive rock territory. It also builds nicely to a series of crescendos. The video was a master stroke, finding an old Reynolds Aluminum promo film, adding the money-oriented stock footage on top, and then sneaking in some meat packing images at the end. Overall, this was one of my most successful pieces, both in sound and vision.
It took doing a couple of attempted genre concept albums in 2010 and 2011 to find out just how much some of my music was heading in a psych/prog hybrid. The first was 'Jazzadelic', where I was obviously trying to meld jazz with psychedelic music. That style, often called acid jazz, is perhaps the most overused and misunderstood genre in electronic music ever, as well as the rarest. Only a few people ever did true acid jazz, and they only ever did it for a few years. Despite Miles Davis' brilliant 'Bitch's Brew' and 'Lack Johnson', the rock community didn't support him enough and the jazzbos either rejected it outright, as most did, or went into fusion, where they could exercise their chips more.
Just because I was aiming for that sound, which I had hit a few times before, most notably in a song featured on the first part of this blog, 'Miles Tones', didn't mean that I hit it consistently. For instance, 'Crux' was on that album, and as I demonstrated in the previous post, that was pure Floydian prog rock. 'Gazebo Logic' is another candidate that falls into the exact same category. And the following song, despite my attempts to put a very swinging 5/4 time under it, ended up perhaps too electric and driven to be acid jazz.
My main concern, as I have said previously, was trying to balance the keyboards and the guitar. Too often, since I am primarily a guitar player, it is easy to simply outplay whatever keys are in the mix. That's fine much of the time, but during this period I was trying, as in 'Crux' to get a better balance. That was pushed to the extreme here, using a very distorted sound on the organ, completing in the frequency range, and even doubling and harmonizing with the guitar. These are small things, but they were the prime motivation of this piece.
The video was a chance to dump some of the many medical moving graphics that I had, then changing it up during the chorus. Once I started doing that, finding the right vaguely pulsing background, the entire image became a giant amoeba, slightly disturbing but very organic. I decided to commit to that concept visually all the way, and it is a unique look. In the end, the song is an interesting experiment that lands somewhere else besides where I was aiming, but that's okay.
'Blues Askew' was my first blues album, and in retrospect it was long overdue. I was more than willing to throw anything into the mix, particularly jazz, but since I wasn't completely committed to singing yet (still aren't), there were some instrumentals. Those were sure to push the boundaries.
Make no mistake, there were enough blues on that album to qualify it as a blues theme, but the following song, 'Backdoor', falls more into the acid jazz category.
This song is totally in the sonic range of acid jazz; the sleazy beat, played on the brushes for a change. The organ blurting out short riffs and clumpy chords. The guitar with a very dark tone, sliding up and down the frets, chords running chromatically. In fact, there is less blues in this song than jazz and psychedelia. It would have fit better on my first progressive album done the same year, called 'Porno Sound Track.'
I did do my first full-fledged prog album in 2011, although at the time I considered it simply the instrumental stuff. The next year, I knew where that branch of the music was heading, but in retrospect, 2011 was when I did my first prog/psych album. Much of it is very good, as in the opening song below, 'Looptopia'. This was vaguely based on a John McLaughlin riff on his only solo acid jazz album, 'Devotion'.
It's a circular riff that builds, a construct that would be adopted more frequently in the future. Again, the guitar tone is strangely muted yet very distorted; I use an expression pedal to make it even hairier during the soloing. This one builds to an excellent climax without being too over-the-top. Despite all the raging fury, it still feels like a jazz song because of the rhythm section. Perhaps it is too playful to be called progressive, but it gets pretty far out by the end. The video is strictly playing with images in a circular fashion, following the music.
Another song from the same 'Porno Sound Track' album is 'Psycho Frazzle'. This one is pure progressive, perhaps leaning towards 1980s era King Crimson, but only in retrospect. This was built on the powerful bass line, with the lead lines building harmonies on top. I was careful to put a middle eight in this one, breaking up the steady beat with something danceable, creating variety.
In the next part of this extended blog, I promise to get past 2012. The problem is; there's so much prog that was done during this period that is it hard to move past. Even acid jazz was part of the mix in the beginning of progressive rock; King Crimson did 'Moonchild' and a version of Donovan's 'Get Thy Bearing', both solidly acid jazz, that are still being played in the live sets, with much sax wailing. Jethro Tull, to name just one band, had Roland Kirk's 'Serenade For a Cuckoo' as the highlight of their first album. Just as psychedelia blends imperceptibly into prog, so does both acid jazz and fusion. More on that later.
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