Prog I am, Am I Part 4

Keep in mind that for every video I have done, there are 5.6 other songs that I've never gotten around to doing a visual accompaniment. The videos were entirely secondary; I really don't like music videos as done in an MTV style. I wasn't too hot on them in the beginning, although when it was new there were some amusing stories told. As the music has become more pop and rap, the videos have become more ego-centric. If I don't care about the artist, I am certainly not going to care about their video.

The various companies that I worked for, including my one-man video firm, tried our hardest not to be involved in music video creation. First, the artist were always starting out, had no money, and wanted a 'favor' that they would repay later. That meant you weren't going to get paid and if they became famous (fat chance), they'd use a bigger production company in a bigger town. It was a lose/lose proposition.

I only did perhaps three in twenty years, the last two as a favor when I was working in state government. Those were so unlike the 'meat & potato' product that I was churning out; it was a challenge to adopt a radically different style. When I found myself, around 2012, drifting into producing them, usually for some reason in the coldest months of the year when you are house bound, there was only one goal; don't make these look like anyone else's material. In that, I think that I was successful, for better or worse.

When I was finished recording sixty songs in less than five months in 2014, I forced myself to take a year off. Despite that, I wrote two songs in airports going to and from vacation late that year but resisted recording them until the next new project. There was also the matter of my electronic drums; the kick pedal was in pieces and either replacing or fixing - and I tried both multiple times - failed. I let it slide, since I wanted a year off, and used the time to create and organize my music videos and start a massive inventory of all my digital data.

That inventory spiraled out of control, continuing into early 2017. encompassing eventually transferring over 5 terabytes of data, sorting it the entire time. I admit it; I was a digital hoarder. Growing up in a time when getting any good information was a challenge, I grabbed everything I could, not bothering to sort of even review much of it. The redundant material alone was staggering, not to mention the junk. Everything was moved, everything was looked at, and it was either thrown away or stored in an intelligent manner. This was overdue by perhaps a decade.

The good news was finding a great deal of recording sessions that I had previously thought lost. It would be possible to go back and remix, maybe even fix, without having drums. By 2016, I was getting itchy to do something with my music. The 'Big Addendum' project was conceived. Over 90 song folders, full of all the raw layers, were opened. Every one was an attempt at a remix or improvement. A few new outtakes/drum loops/discarded experiments were discovered.

The end result of the 'Big Addendum' was a seismic shift in my recorded output. There were five new albums, I discarded every album done before 2010 except one (which only had five of the original 33 songs left on it in the original mix), created two newly sequenced albums of songs that I did not remix for one reason or another, reduce almost all my albums to a consistent 11 songs (except some outtakes albums with really short pieces), and created two new outtakes albums. This musical part of the inventory alone was over six months of work.

The remixing was tricky; I have recorded on at least four software platforms that I no longer have. Syncing up multiple layers wasn't always possible. Honestly, some songs couldn't be done, some songs couldn't be improved. Everything was sorted and labeled, everything was opened, and a few things that were completely forgotten were found.

In the end, it wasn't a major new recording process, just a remixing and review of my earliest material, before I really had a process in place. There was a lot of bad stuff, but there were a few drum loops that I rescued and found new uses for. The following video, 'Funky India', has a drum loops from a song long since discarded. It's new, it's short, and it's fun.

I had fooled with Indian music tones and textures before, usually applying them in unexpected places on a cover song. 'Funky India' has the electric sitar to the forefront, even though the drumming is more electronica than Bollywood. The color palate of the video is over-saturated, like an Indian video, and more to my tastes than the muted monochrome used so much in Western film and video this millennium. The entire product swirls around in a pleasing way, making a statement without being specific.

The 'Big Addendum' allowed me to revisit the most experimental music that I had ever tried. The following, 'Laser Guided Democracy', is about as far out as I have ever reached. It was a guitar experiment, obviously influenced by Robert Fripp's Frippertronics. Done around 2007, I couldn't begin to reproduce the effects today. It sat unused for almost a decade until I could figure out how to add something as simple as a bass line that would act as an anchor.

The video is as creepy as the music. By the time that I uncovered the crazed guitar track, with all the strange stereo effects already in place, it was long forgotten. This was the type of thing unearthed by the 'Big Addendum'; not really front line, but so cutting edge that it is hard to believe that I actually did it. Yet I do remember spending some time and recording a few examples, and I did use one of those other guitar tracks, not nearly as weird as this one, called 'Hell's Bells' on the 'Zaftig' album back in 2012.

Keep in mind that all the material reworked and tweaked during the 'Big Addendum' was done previously to my self-discovered progressive tendencies. The following example is a reworking of a discarded song that was retreaded in a completely different manner. The original version had some serious deficiencies; badly recorded acoustic guitar, timing issues, and more. I replaced the guitar and bass, leaving a very strange drum track and keyboard pad. I switched the name around to 'Sunday Summer'.

This time around, the bass gets to play a more supporting role in articulating the melody, the guitar mostly sticking to chords until the chorus. The video, some old car informercial from the 1960s, is deconstructed, a perfect accompaniment to the spacey vibe of the music. it's still not a great song, too slow and a little unfocused, but it is better than the original from 2007. With visuals, it even reaches the enjoyable stage.

Perhaps the best thing about the 'Big Addendum' was that it closed the book on my first decade of recording. There were at least 40 retreads between 2012 and 2014, and the 'Big Addendum' itself was a deconstruction of my earliest material. The next year I was able to record 45 songs and not glance over my shoulder once. Curiously, while there was a return to a blues album for the first time in four years, I consciously avoided doing a progressive sequence.

I wanted to try new things while going back to the blues; after all, besides progressive rock, blues rock would be my most common genre. However, since most of those songs are cover versions, I rarely do videos. One album that I sequenced were love songs of a sort. The title song, 'Weird in Me', became a prog anthem by accident. It started out as a very intimate song, but the arrangement grew into something epic.

The video had a difficult trick to pull off; how to follow along an autobiographical song without showing images of myself? Fortunately there were some great gifs that I found on-line that graphically showed what I was trying to say. Manipulated together, the video becomes a satisfying accompaniment to a very revealing song, one that I dedicated to my wife for putting up with me for so many years. It is as psychedelic as anything that I have ever done, yet it seems curiously specific to the song. Wonder how that happened?

There were a bunch of lyrics written for this project. One of the more interesting ones were for a noir piece called 'Dropped a Dime', shown below. It is a piano piece, the guitar adding jazz touches. The actual song itself is a ballad, but somewhere between rock and something else. It is that quality that makes it progressive.

Another excellent video, this time using many period film clips to put the viewer in the right era. I love having at least two things moving in opposite directions on the screen, forcing your eyes to see in layers. The song itself was all about the bad side of love, so the images had a certain grimness. It was an interesting experiment, and it might lead to some other things in the future.

I also revisited some ideas, trying to improve them. One was the Floydian float discussed previously. This time the song was designed to be part of the 'Saragossa' album, a vaguely Caribbean/nautical theme. For once, while on vacation, I actually shot footage specifically to use in this video.

The idea was to do a piece with echo bouncing from speaker to speaker, in time to the beat of the song. It's trickier to do than you would think. I was able to build on the melody, adding layers of feedback guitar as the song worked towards a climax. There was also a defined intro/outro, making this a very complete work.

'Kraken Attack' was pure aggression, a lick that I had been tinkering with for years. This time, a complete arrangement was built around it, complete with a very different middle section and some very tasty chord progressions. This one is meant to be loud, hard and mean, and it fits the bill. At over nine minutes in length, it was the epic piece on an epic album, 'Saragossa'.

The video was a combination of old black & white footage of daredevils doing bad things and some crazed graphics. The whole thing is supposed to be a little frightening, as all good heavy metal should be. Prog metal is a genre that I only have some knowledge of; it came into its own during the 1990s, and I was interested in other types of music by then. But I wanted something huge to fill the album and to counter all the other good vibes on that album, and this fit the bill.

There are many other examples of progressive rock from this period, but those are the only ones to get music videos so far. I hope that this four part series shows just how ingrained the notion of progressive is in my music. It seems inescapable when I start creating; there has to be a blending or clash of styles, some expectation being challenged, some mashup being attempted. That is the joy in making music. I hope you enjoyed it too.

Prog Am I, I Am Part 3

Even though I effectively made a prog album in 2011, it wasn't until 2012 that I specifically set out to make one. I had already done 'Jazzadelic' in 2010, an exploration of alternate jazz stylings that often spilled into prog, and 'Blues Askew' in 2011, the first of five blues albums, both specific genre pieces. The other 2011 album, 'Porno Sound Track', was all the instrumental material from those same sessions, and it was nearly all straight prog or fusion. There was a third album that was mostly pop and rock, so it was easy to segregate songs.

By now I realized that it was prog, not jazz, that was my happy place when doing instrumentals. I considered myself an instrumentalist who only sang because the human voice is the most important instrument and I had the only voice available. In fact, in 2011 I only wrote two lyrics, and one of them was simply borrowing blues phrases. When doing instrumentals, I could be experimental, try things out, see where tangents led.

2012 was a very busy year; the recording sessions started earlier than the usual hot summer stay-out0of-the-heat period. In fact, I was going through the hundred-plus folders and thousands of files, doing an initial inventory of my material, finding abandoned songs. Listening to your failures can tell you more about your thought process than the successes; this is where ambition exceeded skill. In fact, two albums related to old recording emerged first.

'Sonic Debris' was initially eighteen tracks that had been abandoned or forgotten during recording sessions, going all the way back to 2006. By nature it was a mixed bag, but there was a good deal of material that fell into the prog/psych/fusion category, as well as some strange experimental stuff even beyond that. My habit was to record extra songs and pick only the best ones, sometimes coming back the next year to finish something, sometimes not putting the effort into a failed piece.

'Retreads' were a group of songs that I redid, in part or usually from scratch, atoning for past sonic sins. The initial idea was to just replace a bad part, nearly always the drumming from my earliest attempts, but it quickly evolved into changing the entire approach, beat, and tone of a piece. This project worked very well, starting a tread in retreads that continued until 2016. Some of the leftover songs were retreaded and found a place on the other two albums from 2012, 'Zaftig' and 'A Mess of Blues'.

I was still trying to stretch boundaries more than define them back then, so even 'A Mess of Blues' had a piece like 'Raging Sevens', a blues in 7/4 time that strays into some very heavy territory. It took a few tries before I could approach the blues straight on, not hiding behind a hybrid version. Much of the reason was lack in trust in my voice; was it strong enough an instrument to really testify? I did eventually get there, but it was initially a struggle.

'Zaftig' was pure prog, even if I was throwing in Latin or jazz influences. That was the beauty of progressive music; it was by definition an open invitation to add new ingredients to the mix, not a list of ingredients that had to be included. The song 'Zaftig' above was an experiment in creating a duet between heavy atonal guitar and drums, inspired by the King Crimson song 'Groon'. Each instrument gets a chance to wail before the entire thing joins forces to make a big finale. The song was a statement about the entire album, pushing all boundaries in the hope of creating magical moments.

'Tres Rios', above, was structured to be sections that interlock together, creating a series of  crescendos. My drumming is noticeably better here. Ironically, by spending all the time on fixing outtakes and doing retreads, my percussion skills soared in 2012, the year I gained competency as a drummer. The arrangement is also more sophisticated, letting instruments and sections play out, not being in a hurry to force the piece. I'm really starting to find my footing, gaining confidence as my skill set expands. That's what progressive music is supposed to be about.

'Snoopy Takes a Trip' shows not only increased drum skills, but a confidence in my piano playing. Before 2012, I rarely spot lighted my keyboard skills. I am primarily a guitarist and very aware of the fact. But again, through working on so many older songs, I could create newer pieces that ventured into untried territory. One person mentioned that this song sounds like a psychedelic Dave Brubeck. No higher compliment could be applied.

'Naked' is indeed a very simple and relaxed piece, no studio trickery to hide behind, and nervy of me to try and pull off something with so much piano. In fact, the piece was written on guitar and intended to be yet another showpiece for that instrument, but I laid a piano track down and liked it so much that I restructured everything. Now the arrangement is all about interplay between three instruments, taking the listener to a very quiet space, ending the 'Zaftig' album peacefully. This was a big step forward.

After all the productivity of the 2012 sessions, rescuing older work while focusing on new areas of exploration, 2013 was pure high stress. In fact, the projects that year were done mainly as an outlet to the impossible deadlines that I was given at work. I did manage 30 new songs, another new blues album and yet again a prog album called 'Tracks'. On the blues album, every song was a vocal, the first time that I had ever managed that feat. As a result, it didn't veer into prog territory, although it did have touches of jazz and even bluegrass.

'Nesta Siesta' continues the trends from the previous year; the song takes its time making a statement. Each instrument adds to the whole; it is less about the solo and more about the mood of the piece. Even the music video is relaxed and pastoral, willing to wait for the payoff. There is no rush to show off, no need to prove myself a great musician, only a desire to make good sounds that build up and then cool off at the end.

'For Doc' shows that I can going acoustic and still be progressive. It is a catchy piece, all the footage is from the North Carolina mountains, including street scenes of Asheville. The song was a flat-out tribute to the great Doc Watson, a man that I had the great pleasure to eat dinner with once; he schooled me on the history of race in roots music, but in the nicest way completely, reversing all my ill-informed notions. He was a hell of a nice guy and a tremendous performer.

The song itself has received about as much positive feedback as anything I've ever done, largely because it seems to be old-time traditional music. It is not, dependent completely on a drone 'G' string, the Indian percussion (no bass needed) adding to the exotic feel. It feels comfortable, but is experimental at the same time, and I worked on this piece for a long time. Increased skills in engineering meant that the acoustic guitar had a powerful feel. Recording with a microphone in a spare bedroom, getting a decent ambient sound, is no easy feat.

'The Rabbit Hole' was originally on 'Tracks' but moved to another album, 'Remains' when I reduced the number of songs per album to 11 from the previous 13. It is a deceptively complex song, adding layers upon layers of overdubs over the course of the playing time. I don't often indulge in overdubs, preferring a naked sound with one take performances. This song was progressive in concept as much as in execution, as are many songs. Find an idea, then find a way to make it happen.

2014 was a completely different year that still defies explanation. I ended the previous year exhausted and angry; my job had become political to the point where I sometimes doubted the ethics involved. In retrospect, I must have taken all my frustrations out by recording a record sixty songs that year, destroying my drum kit in the process. By the end, the poor electronic thing was held together with duct tape, and I never could get it fixed.

The very process of recording was challenged from the very beginning, when I decided to go back and try things that I hadn't done in years, such as using old unused drum loops that I had uncovered. There were outtakes from the previous year that were extensively reworked like 'Rastas in Space' below. That song turned out particularly well, an exploration into areas that hadn't been visited, combining space rock and reggae. Even the video, using footage from a couple of Italian movies released a decade apart, turned out extremely well.

'Rasta in Space' was from 'X the Unknown', my purely progressive album that year. There were four other albums released, and they all touched on prog, although they were other genres. There was no blues album after three straight years; it was simply getting too easy and I needed a bigger challenge. The progressive album included something as aggressive as 'Twistoid' below, flirting with heavy metal, yet still in a strange time signature, using burbling keyboards as a texture.

Even the video was aggressive, using the most action oriented elements of a number of foreign movies layered on top of each other. This is another of those weird songs not necessarily in a one key, more about instruments playing against each other in different keys. 'JB Crown Royal' below uses funk elements with some over-the-top piano turn-arounds to create a new hybrid. The video itself is a deep dive into multiple images layered hypnotically over each other.

There were a lot of retreads, songs dating back to 2006, redone in a completely different fashion now that I could steer the music where I wanted it to go. 'Bango Tango', when first done on 'Soundscrapes', was actually one of the most ambitious tracks, but it was stiff, forced to match a beat that was too fast. Done in 2014, it comes off as creeping into focus, starting slowly, building with great textures and tones. This version makes the first try obsolete.

Even when doing my first explicitly straight-ahead rock album, prog snuck in on the only so-called blues. "Mobius Blues' is a twelve bar, but it is based completely on tritones, giving it a uniformed dissonance. It eventually becomes a screaming showcase for some out-there guitar soloing. The foundation was a concept, and now I could execute such notions.

Another album, 'Whole Lotta Buddha' was dedicated to songs with lyrics, both originals and covers. One ballad that I wrote, 'Face of Another', seems to be a jazz song, but it has a strange set of lyrics, and the melody goes in odd places. The video matches the words, not literally but in tone. By now, I could go into progressive mode in a meta way, incorporating conception, execution, and presentation as one complete package.

Even the outtakes album, really all the songs that couldn't be sequenced into the other four, had a great deal of prog, including something of such high quality as 'Percy'. I'm managing to make the organ sound like a synth, and the bass is aggressive enough to take the place of any guitar. With this crazy visual piece, I will leave you at a moment where my creativity was so white hot that I had to take a break, fearing that my hobby was becoming too much of an obsession. The next steps, to be covered in the last installment, may surprise you.

Prog I Am Am I Part 2

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.

Prog I am, Am I Part 1

The reason that I became obsessed with progressive rock, including defending it and defining it, was because, in the course of recording thirty albums, I realized that, while not entirely in any one genre, I fell more into prog and fusion than anything else. My aesthetic of doing something different on every song yet trying to tie the whole album together under one concept or theme. My attempt to make every album and every recording session grow upon the previous ones, getting better and sometimes bigger. My constant attempts to make my sonic palate expand.

Developing an aesthetic isn't something you do consciously. You start making a bunch of music, mostly flailing about in the dark, trying something different on each track. It's natural to gravitate towards the songs that work, to shy away from the failures. Also, give yourself a handicap at the beginning; you don't really know what you're doing. A great concept can be sunk by a faulty presentation. That's why I went back and did so many retreads later, when my skill sets in planning and arranging were at a higher level.

In the beginning, back between 2006 and 2010, it was enough to play around with sound. Creating effective arrangements, with introductions, middle eights and conclusions, was often accidental. I was hearing for the first time what I was capable of doing, slowing moving towards both the naturally easy, such as blues and rock, and well as the challenging, such as jazz and prog. I never fall into just one category; instead, I learned to focus on a genre while trying to explore both the fundamental aspects of it while pushing the boundaries.

The above video was one of my first pieces; I'm not playing anything, just assembling musical segments in layers. I'm not a classical musician and can barely read music, but the software enabled me to get very fancy within the confines of a genre that is not overly familiar. This was typical of my early soundtrack work, trying to develop something that might be a personal statement while having a piece that I could use at work behind a video. While I did eventually use between 12 and 15 pieces in that way, if you figure 337 total songs, it turns out of be a very low percentage that were ever utilized.

On 'Miles Tones', I was specifically going for a vibe; John McLaughlin playing with Miles Davis around 1969. There are two layers of guitar that I am supplying, but the horn as well as the rhythm section are loops. It works well for what it is, a simple exploration of certain tonalities on the guitar, a darker texture, with interesting counterpoints in the drumming. The video was also done early, probably around 2012, and is elementary playing around with moving textures.

Not all my wildest experimentation were failures; as I added more instruments to my arsenal, I could get a better handle on pushing to the end of a sound yet not losing the thread. It is entirely possible to create a piece of music, including composing it and playing most of the instruments, and really not know what key it is in. It happens nearly every time that I have a recording session. Again, it can be more about the sonic textures playing against each other than about a melody, necessarily.

'Planetrise' is a perfect example; I'm probably playing two keys against each other, and the synth pads in the background help make the piece seem grounded, but the guitar and bass are not in harmonic sync. That is the element that makes the song sound celestial. Doing this video, there was a large collection of various video loops of an interstellar nature. This was the perfect place to use some of those, and it works, very experimental and very prog.

Textures can be used in an overloaded fashion as well, such as piling them on in excess or removing some element that are normally present. Using three bass guitars over a very strange and shifting drum piece, full of effects, makes 'Big Jig', above, a very interesting construction. Each bass line has to have a function, and in fact there is a low, middle and high bass part, since to unclutter sound, you need to pick frequency levels for each instrument. Since this instrumental was also rather far out, I created a video that used some of the strangest clips that I had gathered.

It's not all about being harsh and atonal; being progressive can also mean being very tonal, but in a more pastoral or balladic fashion. 'Susan's Other Song' is my second attempt at this, from 2012. The first version, for 2008, was okay, but it was one of fifteen songs on a album, and I hadn't learned yet to reduce the amount of material in a presentation. Being the next to last piece, the listener was exhausted by the time it came up. Plus it wasn't a great performance, but it had potential. Hence, I later took another swipe at it.

The germ of the idea was going through my outtakes folder and finding an alternative version that did have a piano on it but was undeveloped. Om the released version, I went for a slow guitar-only ballad. Frankly, the album had too much guitar heroics on it, and the slower song simply became lost. I felt the melody and chord pattern were worth trying again, so I worked out a much better keyboard part and based the arrangement around it. There is still plenty of guitar solos here, but it is a more balanced piece. Even the bass gets a chance to soar relentlessly; it may be one of my best performances on the bottom end.

The video was done as a series of very slow dissolves. It may be the first time that vacation video from Antigua made it into one of my music videos, something that would happen frequently after. Footage was shot as an experiment, the idea of using the textures of sea, sand and foam somewhere, and 'Susan's Other Song seemed the perfect match. Add some dance sequences, stuff that had harsh stage lighting causing too deep shadows, and the video turned out particularly well.

'Gazebo Logic' was an important song, done in 2011 for the 'Jazzadelic' album. There was a nice guitar chord sequence that I made a demo of, then added a bass. I had only been playing drums since 2008, and many of my early efforts became the majority of the songs that were later retreaded due to my early limitations. I knew that this song would be a challenge to play, so I kept hammering away at it with less and less success. It looked like another case of a song that was more sophisticated than my ability to actualize.

It was the middle of summer, at least 90 outside, both in heat and humidity as happens in the South, so I went out and mowed the grass. That took nearly two hours, and I came back in, only in shorts, covered in sweat. Heading to the shower, I passed the drums and decided, despite my exhaustion, to give it one more try. I was tired and pissed off, and I flailed on the drums with complete abandon. That was the moment that I first got the drumming absolutely right in one take, no overdubs, no splitting the snare/kick and cymbals/toms into two passes. For whatever reason, largely due to my frame of mind, I beat the song into submission.

To the outside listener it may not be much, but to me it was a pivotal moment. Playing an instrument, including the human voice, can be more about attitude than skill, even in progressive music. I added  layers of soaring lead and later, during the 'Big Addendum' in 2016, remixed an underscore of just my scratch track guitar, as a reminder of the moment. The video used outtakes from work, footage that wasn't used, what is called 'b-roll' in the business. The combination of marshy bay areas and Manhattan make for an interesting visual treat.

You can't wallow in progressive rock without doing some Floydian Float. It may have taken many albums to realize that I was nearly always flirting with prog unless I was doing the blues (and there is overlap there as well), but 2011 I knew where things were heading. 'The Crux' was an attempt to balance electric piano with guitar and definitely shows heavy Pink Floyd influence. It is much harder to play the drums slowly than it is to play them fast.

Again, it is as much about the textures coming out of the instruments as it is about the notes. There is a great deal of bouncing around from type of playing - use of volume swells - to a different style - harder guitar soloing. Essentially, this is a song that wants to stew in its own juices for a good while, a meditation on a genre as much as a piece going somewhere specific. It overstays its welcome at the end, but for 2011, this was about as good as I could make it.

The video is another hodge podge of work outtakes and vacation footage from San Francisco, smeared over with random graphics. It may be the most typical of my videos, with every cliché that I have adopted over the years, while at the same time being completely non-linear. You have to develop a visual style in your music videos as much as you have to develop a musical style, and this shows me floundering a bit to make no point at all. Yet it still is an enjoyable ride, and worth looking back at from this vantage point in time.

Progressing Where, Exactly?

Durham, North Carolina had in the 1980s one of the biggest record and CD distributors in America, for some strange reason. It didn't last long; the executives all thought that they had to live the rock star life, and the company went up in flames as drug addiction, alcoholism, and divorce wrecked the lives of these clueless chumps. I had seem it before when I was a roadie in central Pennsylvania, when some young guy getting paid minimum wage to lug equipment confused himself with Keith Richards, blowing more than his earnings on blow in a doomed effort to be cool. I was a fool, but I wasn't that big a fool.

There was one interesting thing that I did learn from that Durham distribution company, however. One executive blithely claimed that he could predict my musical tastes by knowing the years that I was in high school. I told him 1971 to 1975, which made me a classic and progressive rock fan by his calculations. I was incensed, but he was absolutely correct, although my musical tastes go far beyond just those categories.

That puts me in the group of music fans who always have to defend their tastes because they like progressive rock. In fact, I don't like it, I positively love certain groups, yet I don't simply buy into the entire genre, as I don't buy into any genre. But the best prog groups and artists were certainly the most creative, ambitious musicians of their era, and they paid a heavy price for that talent.

It seems that the rocks critics, especially in America, found it offensive for an act to try and elevate the audience. It was perfectly fine for the Velvet Underground or Iggy and the Stooges to crawl in their own filth, making heroin chic a thing, or have one note wonders like the Ramones elevated to sainthood because of their mental incapacities. God forbid someone should try to write a song that has more than three chords. It will get you thrown out of the magazine if you actually quote a classical piece or play jazz.

England was different, and was largely responsible for actually encouraging progressive rock, at least in the beginning. The problem was that the British press is always on the lookout for the Next Big Thing. Most trends and trendy groups have a life span of six months, and quality is incidental. Anyone remember the Bay City Rollers? After building up certain bands at the start of their career, the press turned on them for a couple of decades. Take for example Pink Floyd, King Crimson, Emerson Lake & Palmer...

The grand question is; When did psychedelic rock turn into progressive rock? That's a tricky question, but I can tell you that the first progressive act were the Beatles, who in fact invented much of the aesthetic of progressive simply by trying so hard to improve with each single. The fact that later in life none of the individual members did anything particularly progressive (McCartney excepted, who at least continued with vague concept albums through the mid 1970s, but he was the hates one anyway). The Rolling Stones were the epitome of the non-progressive group, but they got their first and did it well.

Fusion is another loaded term that comes into this argument. It is assumed by popular decree to mean a fusion of jazz and rock, but it was first used to mean a fusion of folk and rock, or Indian music and rock, both happening around 1965 and 1966. In fact, any time you add non-blues or country to rock it is a fusion, just not in the accepted sense. Even the terms 'Blues Rock' and 'Country Rock', defining when the influence becomes overwhelmingly obvious, muddies the water. But there you go.

Progressive was a term first slung around by the British musical press to describe everyone from John Mayall to Ten Years After. Only in 1969, when groups like the Nice and King Crimson were really doing something radically different, did an actual genre start to cohere. Even then, it was ill-defined, the folk/jazz/blues of Jethro Tull were thrown into the same pot as the sonic experimentation of Pink Floyd or the orchestral pop of the Moody Blues. It seemed to be more about an attitude of expansion - expansion of musical horizons - than about similarities between acts. That was progressive rock's great strength, the diversity of approaches.

Some record companies, like Virgin and Charisma, supported it at the beginning, but the all-important US market demanded more. It demanded that Jethro Tull put a flute solo on every single as early as 1970, corporate branding beyond what the group members were conceiving. Logos that were consistent from album to album, using the same artist to design the cover and sometimes the stage settings; these are just some of the elements that make up progressive rock. It could be more about packaging and presentation than music sometimes.

Perhaps the biggest common denominator for progressive acts was a striving for the best possible sound, both in the studio and on stage. Not every English band had a George Martin as a producer, and some groups in the 1960s, including big names like the Kinks, the Who, Cream, and the Jimi Hendrix Experience struggled to get a decent studio sound. The Beatles' 'Abbey Road' was perhaps the first example of absolutely sterling audio quality, a crispness and clarity that was stunning and revolutionary for 1969. It was the gold standard for production value in a rock album until 'Dark Side of the Moon' in 1973, although 'Who's Next' in 1971 was also sonically awesome.

The real breaking point between psychedelia and progressive was both live sound and presentation. A psych band needed to get it right only once, in the studio. Very few could reproduce their songs with the same sonic impact. A case of point would be Steve Howe, a very skillful guitarist with a tremendous resume of session work. In the psych band Tomorrow, there were complicated arrangements, but the live evidence shows P.A. systems unable to handle the vocals or the volume, and the nuances crumble away. When he joined Yes in 1970, great effort was made for him to be able to switch between a dizzying array of instruments to reproduce accurately the sounds and textures of the studio experience.

The emphasis on classical music quoting in progressive is overstated, as well. Anyone familiar with Dave Brubeck, the best selling jazz pianist in the 1950s and 1960s, will notice that he did a lot of the tricks and mannerisms of progressive first, including both quoting brief classical snippets in his solos, concept albums based on musical themes, and basing entire songs on (somewhat stolen) classic compositions. No doubt he was very influential to, say Keith Emerson. Jazz was a texture to be used, and jazz-style soloing was a big part of many bands.

The big thing was the vocals, or lack thereof. Some bands, like the excellent Focus out of Holland, barely sang on their music, yet created some of my favorite prog during their relatively brief run in the 1970s. Unfortunately, truly popular music will always depend on the human voice, so the groups that sang, at least some of the time, were the ones who did very well. Pink Floyd had Dave Gilmour, Jethro Tull had Ian Anderson, and Yes had harmonies that sounded like Crosby Stills & Nash.

The live performances were both the making and the breaking of all the progressive acts save King Crimson. The staging became more professional; Pink Floyd was known as a 'must-see' live act in the USA well before they ever bothered the album charts. But those stage lighting cues and filmed backgrounds eroded away at the improvisational nature of the music, as it did with Yes, Jethro Tull, and Emerson Lake & Palmer. Spontaneity became a thing of the past, perfection the new goal, and sterility was inevitable.

In America, progressive sold like hot cakes throughout the 1970s, but there were very few homegrown acts, unlike Europe, where they sprung up in most countries like hallucinogenic mushrooms after a deluge. Frank Zappa was a grandfather of the genre, but he was singing 'Broken Hearts are for Assholes' by the end of the decade. Except for perhaps Kansas, the rest of the groups were too derivative of the British model, such as Starcastle. Canada had Rush, which was significant in the development of progressive metal; they kept at it in a critical vacuum for decades before getting any recognition.

Europe had prog groups everywhere. Gong, full of transplanted Brits and a strange Australian, Daevid Allen, dominated France, with the even stranger Magma joining in. Italy had a significant number of groups adding operatic elements, such as PFM and Le Orme. Greece had the excellent Aphrodite's Child, from Holland emerged Focus. Germany had so many groups form in the shadow of Pink Floyd that a separate genre, Kraut Rock, came into being. But by 1978, it was essentially over, and the big acts were either trying to hide their prog tendencies, like Yes and Genesis, or splintering, like Emerson Lake & Palmer.

But those kids who went to high school from a certain year to a certain year kept enjoying that type of music, even if it didn't bother the charts much anymore after 1985. The big stadium acts had to adopt the technologies first perfected by the prog bands to keep the larger audiences engaged. Corporate branding for any band became standard. After twenty to thirty years of being terminally uncool, with the advent of a vinyl resurgence came a prog resurgence, including new acts like Porcupine Tree and Opeth.

Progressive rock is sure to go the way of jazz, gaining a dwindling but devoted fan base past its expiration date. Music is all about technology now, and those prog artists were the first to exploit the technological aspects of electronic music. Prog paved the way for modern music, even as it was being despised and scorned. It is cold comfort, but it is the last laugh.

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.