Flower Power in Full Bloom - Progressive Rock - Part 3 Artwork

American Song

American Song is a podcast that traces the origins and development of American - and ultimately world-wide - forms of modern musical entertainment. Over time, we will trace every major genre from its origins through the current day.American Song looks at the development of our music through the lens of social, political, and economic changes that were occurring in each case, and we'll feature the most important musicians in each genre.Every episode is chock-full of the music we love and where possible, we include archival interviews so you can hear about, in the actual words and voices of these great musicians and singers, the motives and passions that drove their creativity.

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Flower Power in Full Bloom - Progressive Rock - Part 3

October 16, 2024 • Joe Hines • Season 4 • Episode 6

It seems like every ten years or so, society experiences a great reset. The end of the ‘60s was like that. The idealism and teen-culture of the ‘60’s was ten years older and moving into adult life. Just like everything else in life that was questioned and re-invented, some musicians began pushing the boundaries of what rock music could become.

Across the Atlantic, and as Ian Anderson, of Jethro Tull put it, English rockers “were trying to be originators and not simply relying on American music." Some of the most ground-breaking ‘60s albums led directly to the rise of prog, most prominently, The Beatles Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band . This album set a whole new expectation for what bands could do, and for what rock could become.

In this third and final part of our Progressive Rock episode, we're rocking out with some of the greats - including Jethro Tull, and Emerson, Lake and Palmer! Life is a long song, friends. Come sing it with us!

Themes In this Episode:

Classical touches in progressive rock
Early Jethro Tull
Martin Barre joins the band
Tull's themes - a more relatable sort of prog
Ian Anderson - An Extraordinary Minstrel
Why the flute?
What made Tull so unique
Early Emerson, Lake and Palmer
ELP put their unique stamp on classical music
A dystopian future: Tarkus
Food For Thought or Thoughtful Food? Brain Salad Surgery

Tracks

Genesis - The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway
Genesis - Blood on the Rooftops
Jethro Tull - Bouree
The John Evan Smash - Blues for the 18th
Jethro Tull - Locomotive Breath
Jethro Tull - Wind Up
Jethro Tull - Cup of Wonder
Jethro Tull - Songs from the Wood
Jethro Tull - Thick as a Brick Part 1
Jethro Tull - My Sunday Feeling
Jethro Tull - Excerpt; Thick as a Brick Part 2
The Nice - The Thoughts of Emerlist Davjack
The Crazy World of Arthur Brown - Fire
ELP - The Nutcracker
ELP - Still You Turn Me On
ELP - From the Beginning
ELP - The Barbarian
ELP - Tarkus
ELP - Still... You Turn Me On
ELP - Karn Evil #9 (first impression)
Genesis - Duke's Travels/ Duke's End

It seems like every ten years or so, society experiences a great reset. The end of the ‘60s was like that. The idealism and teen-culture of the ‘60’s was ten years older and moving into adult life. Some of these young adults tried bringing flower power with them, with varying success. It was a decade marked by unprecedented social and cultural upheaval, and popular music emerged as a powerful vehicle for expressing and amplifying the zeitgeist.

The intertwining of these two forces—music and social experimentation—was a symbiotic relationship that shaped the decade's identity. Art both mirrored and changed society.

Underture

Music played a pivotal role in the opposition to the Vietnam war, propelled by artists like Bob Dylan, while Aretha Franklin and others blew the winds of change into the sails of the Civil Rights movement. Psychedelic rock expanded people’s consciousness with music from bands like the Beatles and the Grateful Dead. Youth culture was alive with alternate lifestyles and spiritual exploration, mirroring the countercultural ideals of the time.

I like to think of the ‘60s and ‘70s as a musical Cambrian Explosion. For the last several episodes, we’ve seen how garage rock turned into various forms of punk. Today, we look at how another branch in music’s evolution – instead of stripping down and primaling out like punk did – got bigger, more complex, moving further away from the movement started by innovators like Buddy Holly, Little Richard, Richie Valens and Elvis Presley several decades earlier.

Just like everything else in life that was questioned and re-invented, some musicians began pushing the boundaries of what rock music could become. In previous American Song podcasts, we’ve talked about and listened to the arrival of fusion, which blended jazz and rock together – spearheaded by Miles Davis, but also articulated by others like the keyboardist, Chick Corea, John McLaughlin, Herbie Hancock and others. Check out my two-part episode from August, 2022, Electric Walls of Sound: Jazz Fusion for a deep dive in this exciting music. Links are in today’s show notes.

Others took inspiration from classical music. The Beatles receive a lot of credit for the pioneering work in this direction, with their albums like Revolver and then Sargeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club band, and Magical Mystery Tour which continued where Pepper left off, and songs like Within You Without Your and I Am the Walrus, and their semi-symphonic suite from the second side (back in the vinyl days) of Abbey Road. The Moody Blues, those veteran cosmic rockers, also were heavily into a symphonic sound with albums like Days of Future Passed, and To Our Children’s Children’s Children. Even as heavy a band as the Who, those mod rockers, contributed in big ways to this movement starting with their Rock Opera, Tommy and going even further with Quadrophenia. These bands, and others with the various flower-power, hippie, and counter-cultural movements, and their Romantic, anti-establishment, utopian visions together generated what later came to be called Progressive Rock.

Looking back on this time, Jethro Tull’s leader, song writer, guitarist and flautist, Ian Anderson, described the period like this, “We were trying to be originators and not simply relying on American music. Growing up as a musician, it was quite obvious that what had gone before was no longer new.·There was an irreverence about us. which came out on the second album [1969·s Stand Up]. the first proper album. which had influences of rock, folk, Eastern music, jazz, and blues. I was just indulging my fantasies and that really marked us out.”

Progressive Rock – or prog for short - grew out of parallel paths in England and America. Obviously, the foundation for prog was rock and we’ve seen many examples of how American music turned the rest of the world “on”, going all the way back to early jazz and blues. We also had a massive music market. By Jan 1, 1970, there were between two and three thousand FM radio stations around the nation. FM DJs had an unparalleled degree of freedom in what they played. The counterculture movement of the 1960s and 1970s, emphasized individuality and experimentation, and the DJs of the period were aligned with that free-spirited nature. DJs were often seen as rebels, challenging the mainstream pop music that dominated AM radio.

To get a feel for what radio was like in those days, let’s listen for a moment to KMET, an LA radio station that was hugely popular in the ‘70s and ‘80s when I was growing up. The DJ is Jim Ladd, and this was his show: Headsets.

FM radio was new. It was the wild west of radio where creative DJs were given free reign, as long as they had the listeners. In those long gone days before the corporations ruined a great thing, you could tune into a single radio show and hear a fascinating array of sounds – from the Stones, to the Beach Boys, Blue Cheer, Sinatra, Dylan, lighter jazz, hot soul, funk, Motown, John Mayall’s Blues Breakers, Zeppelin all in the same show, back to back all day long. The environment was very accepting. There was room for everything!

A Day in the Life

Some of the most ground-breaking ‘60s albums led directly to the rise of prog. As I’ve already mentioned, Sgt. Pepper was a major turning point in music. The standout on this album is “A Day in the Life”. In 1967, the New York Times rock critic, Richard Goldstein, wrote a review of the album, and devoted a lot of it to this single cut.

He said, “A Day in the Life” is such a radical departure from the spirit of the album that it almost deserves its peninsular position (following the reprise of the “Sergeant Pepper” theme, it comes almost as an afterthought). It has nothing to do with posturing or put-on. It is a deadly earnest excursion in emotive music with a chilling lyric. Its orchestration is dissonant but sparse, and its mood is not whimsical nostalgia but irony.

With it, the Beatles have produced a glimpse of modern city life that is terrifying. It stands as one of the most important Lennon-McCartney compositions, and it is a historic Pop event.

“A Day in the Life” starts in a description of suicide. With the same conciseness displayed in “Eleanor Rigby,” the protagonist begins: “I read the news today, oh boy.” This mild interjection is the first hint of his disillusionment; compared with what is to follow, it is supremely ironic.

A Day in the Life” could never make the Top 40, although it may influence a great many songs which do. Its lyric is sure to bring a sudden surge of Pop tragedy. The aimless, T. S. Eliot-like crowd, forever confronting pain and turning away, may well become a common symbol. And its narrator, subdued by the totality of his despair, may reappear in countless compositions as the silent, withdrawn hero.

In another section,

Musically, there are already indications that the intense atonality of “A Day in the Life” is a key to the sound of 1967. Electronic-rock, with its aim of staggering an audience, has arrived in half-a-dozen important new releases. None of these songs has the controlled intensity of “A Day in the Life,” but the willingness of many restrained musicians to “let go” means that serious aleatory-pop may be on the way.

Here’s Ian McDonald, the saxophone and flute playing wizard from King Crimson, to share his perspective on the Beatles and Sargeant Peppers.

God Only Knows

One year before Pepper, in 1966, the Beach Boys had released Pet Sound and with it, the first truly ‘modern’ album. In Pet Sounds, Beach Boys lead songwriter and musical genius, Brian Wilson created a group of painstakingly conceived bedroom reveries and heaven's gate chamber serenades. He made the recording studio more than just the preserver of sounds. Under his leadership and unique vision, the studio was now a musical instrument unto itself. Using old and new technologies alike, Brian combined exotic instruments, and vocal harmonies with rock and roll for colossal effect. The song, God Only Knows, is one of the amazing tracks from this album. He followed Pet Sounds with sessions for an album called Smile, which, due to Brian’s nervous breakdown during that period only saw daylight forty years later. Some of the work from those sessions did get released – for instance, Heroes and Villains, and Good Vibrations, described at the time as a ‘pocket symphony’.

Invocation & Ritual Dance Of The Young Pumpkin

Frank Zappa and the Mothers of Invention released Absolutely Free. This album foreshadowed the five-finger discounting that prog would be accused of later, as Zappa, a classical composer in his own right, referenced Stravinsky and Gustav Holst on this track, Invocation & Ritual Dance Of The Young Pumpkin.

Peaches En Regalia

Frank followed this album with Hot Rats, a solo album, and a prog rock milestone. The songs were more accessible and the production was landmark. Hot Rats was actually one of the first records produced on a 16-track machine. On the album, you get Zappa’s impressive guitar playing as well as two electric violinists, Don 'Sugarcane' Harris and Jean-Luc Ponty, along with the scabrous Willie The Pimp featuring Beefheart on vocals. Harris’s credentials at the time included playing with John Mayall & the Bluesbreakers and the legendary bluesman, Johnny Otis. Jean-Luc Ponty had already begun making a name for himself, playing with the French composer, Michel LeGrand. Later he’d go on to play with John McLaughlin’s fusion band, Mahavishnu Orchestra as well as having a prominent solo career of his own.

It's impossible to set the stage for prog without mentioning the monumental work Miles Davis was doing at the time – he singlehandedly brought jazz out of the 1940’s and 1950’s and into the electronic age with first his album, in a Silent Way and then, his follow up Bitches Brew in 1970.

You can get much deeper into fusion artists like Ponty, McLaughlin, Chick Corea, the Mahavishnu Orchestra, and the fusion-period Miles when you listen to the fusion episodes I mentioned earlier, so be sure and check that out!

If you were to say that Prog came out of the fusion movement, you would not be wrong.

On the other side of the Atlantic, in “Old Blighty”, a number of musicians living and playing around Canterbury, in the Southeast of England, created their own jazz-inflected hybrids including Soft Machine, Matching Mole, and Hatfield & the North. In attitude, Hatfield & the North reminds me of They Might Be Giants. They were cheerfully unheroic, and paired adventurous playing with shrugging, self-deprecating lyrics about nothing much. We’re listening to that song, “Gigantic Land Crabs in Earth Takeover Bid" now.

A Certain Kind

Soft Machine was active in the 1960s and 1970s. Their sound was a mash-up jazz, blues, and psychedelic rock. Like many of the later prog bands, they played unconventional time signatures, complex chord progressions, and extended solos. They also drew heavily from the psychedelic rock movement, like Pink Floyd, another prog band, they added texture to their compositions with sound effects, electronic instruments, and of course, a heavy dose of drugs, maaaan. And like a lot of the late 60’s and 70’s bands, these guys could play. Like the Dead, improv was a major ingredient of their live shows and they used it with breath-taking ability in their live sets. Also like some of the very best bands of the era – I’m thinking of Pink Floyd, and the Beatles for instance, experimentation was also key to their song writing approach. Different genres, unique instrumentation, and cutting-edge recording techniques were plastic in their hands. Out of it, they created fascinating soundscapes. We’re listening to their song UEL II from their first album, Soft Machine, released in 1968.

What Is Prog

By 1970, rocks’ first fans who had started listening sometime around 1955 were in their late 20’s or even early 30’s. They’d been influenced by the upheaval and social revolution of the 1960’s, and were ready for ideas that were bigger than just girls, cars and parents. The generation believed that rock could express more, and the musicians echoed their concerns.

As John Lennon once said, “We can say what they think, because we ARE them.”

A common cultural and political bond had been established. The experimentation, musical complexity and fusion of genres matched the ideologies of the counterculture. It wasn’t just music. It was a badge people wore that identified them as members of something like a new nation within nations that hard its own values, dreams, strategies, and even a new musical language.

The Firebird Suite

Among the hippies and the counterculture, there was a group of educated college students that thought the new language should elevate rock to a new artistic level. Looking around for inspiration, they hit on the romanticism found in late 19th century art. Musically speaking, they many of these English rockers were also turned on by composers like Sibelius – Jon Anderson’s favorite composer, Brahms, and Stravinsky in his earlier work. Yes used to open their shows with part of his Firebird Suite. We’re listening to that music now.

In the fine arts, painters like Delacroix, Friedrich, and Turner had all painted highly dramatic landscapes, another touchstone of the romantic movement. And Novelists like Mary Shelley, Goethe, and Victor Hugo populated their books with highly emotional, oddly eccentric characters in stories cast in super-charged situations set in places that have had countless retellings. You’ve probably heard of some of these: Do Frankenstein or Les Miserables ring any bells? The themes that flow through all this art are celebration of the individual, imagination as a tool to understand self and the world, emotion as a method to shape the way we understand the world, idealism, and exoticism – a fascination with far away and vastly different people and places. We’re going to explore some of those ideas today.

Romanticism and progressive rock each made use of mythology, fantasy and science fiction. You can see the outlines of the English landscape artist J.M.W. Turner’s work in the passion that West Coast hippies had for the environment. Their communal living, and getting back to nature were part of that same near-worship of the natural world. Some of the prog bands, like Jethro Tull, created a simpler form of prog – certainly more down to earth than Emerson Lake and Palmer’s symphonic contrivances were, and in some ways earthier than Genesis was, too.

Kent State

1968 was a pretty lousy year for America and a lot of the world. American universities started experiencing sit-ins and anti-war protests over Vietnam. Soon, campuses in France, Italy, Germany and Greece were having them too. In the same year, the country was rocked by political assassinations

Bobby Kennedy on MLK’s Assassination

Bobby Kennedy and Martin Luther King were both shot. The immediate response was riots across the nation from Washington DC to Los Angeles. The Civil Rights struggle was turning ever more militant as groups like the Black Panthers pushed for armed force versus King’s peaceful protest approach. Chicago had additional riots when they hosted the DNC convention.

Suite from Atom Heart Mother

In these dark times, rock audiences wanted their music to match the mood. One way to achieve that was create to borrow from other serious music; namely classical and jazz. Musicians on both sides of the Atlantic, like Clapton and Hendrix, took note of the extended soloing that came from jazz. Other artists, like Keith Emerson from the Nice drew inspiration and even direct quotations from classical music from 18th and 19thcentury composers. Bands like King Crimson, Genesis, and Yes used recorded strings sounds played on mellotron while other bands, like the Moody Blues, on their album Days of Future Passed, actually played and recorded with full symphonies – something that the Beatles, once again, had first pioneered, starting with Yesterday, and clear on up through things like I Am the Walrus and All You Need Is Love, and of course, A Day in the Life. Pink Floyd also collaborate with the Scottish avante-garde composer, Ron Geesin and recorded with a full symphony when they produced the Atom Heart Mother album. That’s what you hear playing now. Floyd recorded the Suite with the Abbey Road Session Pops Orchestra.

In fact, Pink Floyd, looked to 20th century artists like Schopenhauer and Cage to add ambient sounds to a lot of their songs. At the same time, these bands also gave their listeners enough musical familiarity, by using instruments people could relate to – like acoustic guitars, and more familiar styles like folk and blues - and avoided totally alienating some members of their audiences in the way some of the jazz guys, like Miles Davis did when he moved deeper and deeper into fusion. This experimental approach and the use of ambient and electronic sounds was part of Floyd’s DNA from the very beginning. One great example is this sequence from their song, On the Run, from Dark Side of the Moon. By the way, you can learn more about Pink Floyd’s more avante-garde side by listening to my episode published in December, 2021 about Musique Concrete. A link is found in the show notes today.

The Revenge of the Giant Hogweed

In some ways, the Prog ecosystem might seem like familiar home to fans of Star Trek. This was a brave new genre, going where no man (or woman, or tribble or Klingon) had gone before. This was a world of imaginative adventurers, exploring dystopian worlds of environmental apocalypse, or man – machine battles with giant beasts that were a cross of armadillos and army tanks. The prog canon is filled with odd eccentricities – songs like this one from Genesis, called Revenge of the Giant Hogweed, about a giant plant that was brought home from a trip to the Siberian Steppe by a an English, Victorian explorer, or a homeless, snotty nosed vagrant named Aqualung, or a 21stcentury Schizoid man.

2112

Progressive Rock songs tend to be on the longish side, written in exacting detail, and only rarely improvised. These bands worked overtime on their arrangements. Here’s a tip for my younger listeners: Put on your airpods and listen to an album like Rush’s 2112 album. Find a place you can completely lose yourself for its entirety. And then just let it roll over you. Undulating musical waves – like waves crashing on a beach - are formed by gentle crescendos, subduing diminuendos, textures, harmonies and counterpoints all distilled from a eclectically blended mix of electric, electronic and acoustic instruments, mixed on as many different tracks as the technology could muster forth.

In a lot of ways, this is music for musicians, or at least for listeners who are not afraid to go on an unexpected journey. Its music you need to give your time to before it feels familiar. It improves with every listen. There are probably not a lot of people who immediately fell in love with something like Genesis’ Supper’s Ready or Yes’s Close to the Edge on first listening. A very close musician friend of mind used to refer to Close to the Edge as “headache music”. But for me, it’s exactly this element of prog – the fact that it IS so densely packed with ideas that are all competing for your attention at the same time that drew me back again and again. In a lifetime of listening to many different genres and artists, some of this stuff is my most favorite music ever.

Progressive music came along just as the age of technology was still in its relative infancy. Without the astounding, imaginative use of new instruments and studio wizardry that was only just coming into view, it could not have been. So much of what we routinely take for granted today was built on prog’s impressive shoulders.

Good Vibrations

It started with the lofty ambitions of some of the ‘60s real musical visionaries, like Brian Wilson. In the several years leading up to his nervous breakdown, Brian’s mid-60s studio experimentations created a mosaic-like, modular song-writing and studio recording process he described as ‘modular’. All of us mortals just thought of it as ‘wonderful’. Brian said he was writing a “teenage symphony to God”. From 1967, when he abandoned the project to 2007, when it finally released the completed album as “Brian Wilson Presents: Smile”, the musical world spoke about it in hushed tones. Literally hundreds of recorded song fragments sat in a vault somewhere. Rumors abounded about how different popular music may have been had Brian finished the album. Brian in America, and the Beatles, in Great Britain transformed the studio from a recording space to a place to create entirely different forms of music. In studios, composers could spin ideas that arrived as countermelodies or variations on previously written songs into totally new compositions. When the Beatles gathered at Abbey Roads for the last time in 1969, they brought their own fragments and splinters of half-written songs, and with the paired genius of Paul McCartney and George Martin, created the Abbey Road ‘suite’ – something that could only be done in a studio. But this started as early as Revolver in 1966 when, freed from the necessity of having to create music they could play live for an audience, they wrote Tomorrow Never Knows, and the other great songs from that album.

Strawberry Fields Forever

Think of this: when the lads recorded their first album in ’62, they did it in one day. It took them six months to produce Revolver. At the beginning of their Sgt. Pepper’s period, John Lennon brought in his song Strawberry Fields Forever. The recording we all know by memory today is actually from two different recordings, in two different keys, one slowed down slightly in the final mix to match the key of the other. The Beach Boys were doing similar things. When the Beach Boys recorded their album, "All Summer Long", the album before Pet Sounds (arguably one of the greatest rock albums in history), it took them two days. During the SMiLE sessions, Brian often dedicated dozens of recording sessions to one song.

Technology, and what ambitious prog rockers did with it, only accelerated as rock moved into the ‘70s. As a result, the music became more sophisticated. Recording technology went from use of 2-track machines, to 8- and 16-track, and then to 24- and 48-track capabilities. Musicians increasingly used the recording studio as a kind of composer's sketchpad. '

By the early 1970s, short sections of music were frequently built up in layers using these multi-track techniques, and editing them together. This is how a lot of the music we’ll talk about in this podcast was created. Yes' 'Close to the Edge' was recorded in short sections and assembled into the final version without the band ever having performed the final version. In fact, they had to ‘learn it’ before they could go out and tour it!

Switched On Bach

New sounds needed new instruments. When Robert Moog introduced his Moog synthesizer, in 1964, it was the first new musical instrument to come along for a hundred years – not since the saxophone almost one hundred years before. They were huge things, filling up entire university laboratories – way too big to be casually carried around like they are these days – and way out of range price-wise for a start-up rock band. Anyway, by the late ' 1960s, synthesizers were making their way out of universities and into rock bands. And again, as in so many other ways, the Beatles were the first to make popular use of them namely in George Harrison’s song, Here Comes the Sun.

Baba O’Riley

A few years later, first Pink Floyd, and then the Who used it in memorable ways on Dark Side of the Moon and Who’s Next respectively. In classical music, a musician named Walter (who later became Weny) Carlos recorded an album called Switched on Bach, trading out Johann’s church organ and harpsichord for this wondrous new machine.

Later, Moog introduced his Mini-Moog, and players like Rick Wakeman, Keith Emerson and Tony Banks quickly snatched it up. It wasn’t long before nearly everybody from Aerosmith to ZZ Top used it. Synthesizers could not only create previously unknown musical sounds, they were also master imitators of traditional instruments, and even put other musicians out of work. Bands that previously toured with horn sections or small string sections could much more profitably emulate those sounds. Plus, synthesizers never got sick, didn’t demand union wages, and never upstaged the singers they were supposed to be just backing.

Non-Brewed Condiment/ Allan Holdsworth - Atavactron

Keyboards weren’t the only thing that got the ‘synthesized’ treatment, either. Guitar gurus, like Allen Holdsworth, played something called a synclavier, which could record and playback samples of real-world sounds so guitarists could reproduce the sounds of other acoustic instruments into their own playing, sequencing – with the ability to create complicated patterns and rhythms – and MIDI capability, which let these new instruments digitally link and synchronize with other electronic instruments. Horns went electronic too. The Yamaha Wind Synthesizer is played like a sax or clarinet but it’s a synth. EVI’s are valved instruments like electronic trumpets. Starting in the ‘70s and ‘80s, it became easier and easier to create any sound a rich and fertile imagination could dream of. Progressive rock, and fusion jazz were the first playgrounds these musicians took their new toys to!

Now that I’ve set the stage for this new music, it’s time to bring on the bands!

The Giles Brothers

Boyfriends &. Girlfriends

There have been at least three different phases in the prog lifecycle. This first episode on progressive rock mainly deals with the first era which ran from ’68 to about ’75. Many critics point to an album by the band, King Crimson, called In the Court of the Crimson King as the first actual progressive rock album.

King Crimson started life in 1968 as a band called Giles, Giles, and Fripp. They recorded a comedy album called The Cheerful Insanity of Giles, Giles, and Fripp. After that, Fripp asked his friend, Greg Lake, to join the band. On July 5, 1969, they had their first gig – opening up for the Rolling Stones at a free concert in Hyde Park. Soon after, they started to record their first album, in the Court of the Crimson King. The Vietnam War was a major theme on it.

21st Century Schizoid Man

It starts off with 21st Century Schizoid Man, an indictment against war-mongering politicians. The song is a prediction about how the negative impact of the war will carry through into the 21st century. Pretty far-reaching, I’d say! The best lyrics of the song go, "politicians'' funeral pyre, innocents raped by napalm fire." Appropriately, the song sets up a jarring tension which is relaxed somewhat in the next song, I Talk to the Wind – in which the main character of the song explains that talking to God is like talking to the wind, meaning he doesn’t hear an answer. I suppose in a world marked by war and human suffering many of us can feel that way sometimes.

Epitaph

Epitaph is the next track in the sequence, and like the rest of the album is equally dystopian. The core message here is that the world has basically gone totally and utterly mad. Looking around today, can any of us say it hasn’t? The character in the song faces an existential struggle, afraid that his epitaph will be nothing more than “confusion”. Written at a time when lots of people were seeking enlightenment through LSD or gurus, the band was saying that maybe insanity was the only sane choice. Given everything that’s happened since 1969, outside of faith, is there a better one? Greg Lake’s vocals on this track are remarkable, maybe his best ever, which is after all, not a bad way to start a career.

The rest of the album deals with war and death, and the final cut, the title track of the album, goes in a different, but equally troubling direction. King Crimson presents us with a picture of a society where people have chosen escapism and lunacy instead of accepting the harshness of the evil reality that surrounds them. Choose insanity and ignore the bloodshed, carnage, and oppression that the crimson king, Satan, is responsible for.

“The Court of the Crimson King” includes “The Return of the Fire Witch” and “The Dance of the Puppets.” A witch casts spells, mesmerizing and transforming those under her spells; fire is desire, craving, attachment, greed, hate, and delusion. Since the Fire Witch is in the court of the crimson king, her spells keep the fire of our desires aflame. Think of a master magician who cleverly distracts your eye from seeing what he’s really doing to make things appear or disappear. If this topic is intriguing, you might want to read Al Gore’s book, published in 2007, called The Assault on Reason. In it, he wrote about the role of the media in modern America. He said there that the media's role is spreading false information to promote partisan rhetoric and marginalize independent thought, reason and logic. Ladies and Gentlemen, I give you: Foxnews. Boo!

Even as some of us wrestle with reality, as the album’s lyrics include “the purple piper plays his tune/The choir softly sing/Three lullabies in an ancient tongue…” These three lullabies represent the Evangelical Christian Church which preaches endlessly about a holy war. These days though, I don’t see a lot of holiness in it. Defendant Number One has them acting as human shields to protect a felon.

Musically, the song moves into a section of sedation, lulling us to sleep. Towards the end though, there’s a return of the same confusion and dissonance that the album opened with, bringing the whole album full circle, and reminding us of the horrors that are hidden. The crimson king uses silence to drown the screams.

This is some heavy shit. Besides its strong message, this album became the foundation that many of the later prog bands and their albums built upon. Impeccable musicianship, thoughtful and poetic lyrics, and an overarching theme – a concept album. More on this in a minute, but first…

ELP – Pictures at an Exhibition (Return of the Manticore version)

… not everyone was – or is – impressed with King Crimson.For sure, they had their critics. One of their harshest was the Rolling Stone magazine rock critic, Lester Bangs. If you remember Phillip Seymour Hoffman’s character in Almost Famous, that’s Bangs. For him, prog was over-blown and too far away from its roots. Bangs saw himself as a rock and roll warrior, the defender of rock in its purest essence. Aand when another band, Emerson Lake and Palmer, in the mid 70s, released their version of Mussorsky’s Pictures at An Exhibition, he wrote,

“If poor old Mussorgsky and Ravel can hear what Emerson, Lake & Palmer have done to their music, they are probably getting dry heaves in the Void; speaking strictly as a fan of M & R and heretofore certified disdainer of EL&P; however, I can say that I listened to it twice tonight, beating my fists on the floor and laughing, and I got my kicks.” Bangs wanted to believe that the band members thought of themselves as vandals, gleefully desecrating the classics. Instead, ELP’s drummer, Carl Palmer, told him, "We hope, if anything, we're encouraging the kids to listen to music that has more quality"-and "quality" was precisely the thing that Bangs hated the most about their music. Let’s let ol’ Lester tell us how where he finally settled on the whole ELP ‘thing’: https://youtu.be/-c8hkyL-9x8?si=alNh3Jzw0Dv3kzT4

Lucy In the Sky with Diamonds

I’ve mentioned the term ‘concept album’. While the crooner, Frank Sinatra, gets the credit for the world’s first concept album called ‘in the wee small hours of the morning’ it was only loosely conceptual – an album of love songs. The first rock and roll concept album was the Beatles “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band”.

Once the former mop-toppers had quit the road, they were freed to write music in new ways, and to play with new musical forms. Not all the Beatles saw this creative period the same way. Late in his post-Beatles days, John Lennon said that Sgt. Pepper's wasn't a true concept album. Although there was some pretty elaborate packaging – complete with a poster and cut-out mustaches and lapel pins, and there was an overarching theme of a fictional band, he felt that the individual songs could have easily fit on any other Beatles album. Lennon here.

And this begs the question, what really is a concept album? Defining traits can include different nested elements that are used throughout a long composition. Concept albums were seen as an opportunity for bands to push the boundaries of their playing, and writing, and a chance to use of all the new studio technology and electronic instruments now available. With all that, they created soundscapes, overarching narratives and fantasy worlds.

Pink Floyd – The Trial

Very often, the concept albums told elaborate stories. For instance, Pink Floyd’s album, The Wall, is about a rock musician whose father had been a RAF pilot that lost his life in the war. He goes through a number of disastrous situations, like the dissolution of his marriage. Towards the end, he loses his mind as his inner voices and self-loathing condemn him for the way he’s lived his life. A court hearing, complete with lawyers, plaintffs, and a judge. All his inner demons, the horrors of his past life, accuse and condemn him in this court of his own imagination. The conclusion is that he goes completely insane, signified by the complete destruction of his assembled mental walls. (Tear Down the Wall)

Rush 2112

Following the release of their third album, Caress of Steel, the Canadian prog band, Rush, was at a crossroads. That album had not done well, and their label, Mercury Records, was not happy. This next album – whatever it was going to be – had to pay off big for the label, or the band was done. Alex Lifeson was thinking about going back and working as a plumber with his Dad. I mean, that’s pretty rough. Mercury Records wanted Rush to do something like their first album. The band chose to stick to their guns. And it paid off big. 2112 ended up being a classic; a major influence on hard rock, progressive rock and heavy metal. Featuring the spellbinding sci-fi storytelling of the masterpiece title track.

Told across a seven-part suite comprised of song fragments and reprised musical themes, the storyline is a simple one. In the year 2112, the world is under the totalitarian rule of the Solar Federation. All art and culture is controlled by the priests from "The Temples of Syrinx." A young man discovers an ancient guitar, learns to play it and suggests to the priests that its music would greatly benefit humanity. Citing the guitar and the music it yielded as a reason the previous civilization failed, the priests destroy the guitar. Distraught, the young man kills himself amid the chaos , and as the story ends, an ominous booming voice can be overhead: "Attention all planets of the Solar Federation: We have assumed control."

What attracted a lot of attention, was a statement inside the album's gatefold: "With acknowledgement to the genius of Ayn Rand." The late Neil Peart, that genius of the drum kit, had a literary mind and was the band’s lyricist. With a mind like his, it’s no surprise he was heavily influenced by Rand, especially her books Anthem and The Fountainhead. Alex recently explained his late friend’s devotion to Rand like this, “What he always got from her writing is that it's about the power of the individual, to do great things, to rely on yourself, nobody's there to do anything for you. You have to do it on your own, you have to craft what you want to do, and do it the best that you can. That's really what it's about: You don't owe anybody anything for your hard work. That's what permeates all this writing, that sensibility. Those two books were probably more important to him in terms of how he found inspiration for the lyrics, but ultimately it was that very individual spirit."

the Revealing Science of God

Ingenious stories were not required for an extended work to qualify as a concept album. Take what we’re listening to now. This is the band, Yes, and the first track, the Revealing Science of God, from their 1973 album, Tales From Topographic Oceans.

Instead of a story, Yes gives us a double album (that’s four sides of a round vinyl disk with a tiny hole drilled in the middle, made from petroleum oil, that you put on a little platter that spins clockwise at 33 1/3 revolutions per minute (RPM).)

Each side of those four relics from an ancient time in a land far, far away had a single track on it. When you combine all four sides, you’ve got something like a Prog Rock symphony. And that’s exactly how the band saw it. The band’s lead singer, Jon Anderson wrote all the lyrics for Topographic Oceans, inspired by the teachings of an Indian (that’s dot, not feather) mystic named G.I. Gurdjieff and a footnote he found in a book about a yogi named Paramahansa Yogananda that mentioned the four bodies of Hindu texts called shastras.

Here's a few of the major concepts presented on the album:

Self-discovery and enlightenment: Dive into your own consciousness, with or without chemical assistance, and acquire a deeper understanding of yourself and the world all around you

The nature of reality: Things are not always what they seem to be!

The interconnectedness of all things: Everything in the universe is connected. This was previously covered material that George Harrison had already mined in his song, Within You Without You

(Excerpt) Within You Without You

Try to realize it's all within yourself

No one else can make you change

And to see you're really only very small

And life flows on within you and without you

These ideas, and more, were poured into the four compositions and each of these also had its own theme that gave the others some scaffolding. In comparison with what rock and roll had started off to be in the ‘50s, we definitely weren’t in Kansas anymore, folks! There’s not a single blue suede shoe in sight!

(Short excerpt from Carl Perkins Blue Suede Shoes)

True Messenger

Music like this is only possible if you’ve got brilliant musicians. In an interview he gave about the recording of the album, Jon Anderson said,

“It was tough going, but there was a sense that there lay an unprecedented opportunity before us, provided we could keep our nerve. As hard as it was, and it was hard, nobody wanted to bottle out of what we’d committed ourselves to do. We just knew we had a big landscape we could explore.”

Jon Anderson was Yes’ lead singer since the foundation of the band, and recorded with them through the. 2000’s, although he is not on their late 70’s, early 80’s releases Tormato or Drama. To this day, Jon Anderson still has a very unique, ethereal, almost feminine sounding voice. Actually, he’s still in really great musical form – even as he approaches early adulthood at nearly 80! You should check out his latest release, “True” which he recorded with his group, “The Band Geeks”! We’re listening to a bit off of it now, called True Messenger.

As you can see from the “Topographic Oceans” concepts, Anderson was really into spiritual and philosophical themes. By 1969, Anderson was already a veteran of the English rock world. He’d already been in two bands before Yes - The Partisans and also The Gun and this was around the time that he met Yes’s bass player, Chris Squire.

Flowerman

Like Anderson, Chris already some experience as a bass player for the psychedelic rock band, The Syn (S-Y-N). This is their song, Flowerman, from 1967. It turned out that these two had very similar musical tastes. Believe it or not, they were both really into ‘60s English Pop! Jon and Chris met in a small Soho club called La Chasse and as they talked, they found they liked a lot of the same bands including the Beatles the Byrds, Simon & Garfunkel, The Association (who had a really lovely ballad called "Never My Love," and a poppier song called "Windy"!), and they liked the Motown groups like the Supremes. You can totally hear this influence on Yes’ first two albums. They covered Ritchie Havens, the Beatles, Buffalo Springfield, but they also covered a version of Leonard Bernstein's "Something's Coming" from West Side Story.

Chris goes down in the annuals of music history as one of the greatest bass guitarists in the entire 70 years of rock history. He was very melodic, like Paul McCartney, and often his bass lines included intricate harmonies. His tone was also crisp and clear – almost bell-like.

Giants Under the Sun (TFTG)

Steve Howe became the band's guitarist after Yes’ first guitarist Peter Banks was dismissed from the band after Time and a Word was released. Steve’s virtuosic playing fused classical, jazz, ragtime, rockabilly, country, and blues into a style all his own. His contributions to the vast musical world that Yes created can’t be over-emphasized.

For a good part of the '70s, critics and audiences alike considered him to be rock's best guitarist, and he frequently won guitar polls. He was voted "Best Overall Guitarist" for at least five years in a row in Guitar Player magazine!

To deliver the goods, Howe applied his left-field phrasing, finger-twisting, fretboard gymnastics, and precisely crafted fingerings. He leaves other rock guitarists in the dust.

This is how one fan described seeing Steve Howe in concert with Yes.

“We were fairly close to the front, and actually seeing what was going on, as well as listening to it gave me an extra layer and I went back and listened later and then understood a bit more because I was actually watching Steve Howe and what he was doing. And I was watching the interplay going on, which gave me a bit more depth than I'd had from years of listening to those albums without actually ever having seen Yes before.

Another fan said,

“Most of the time, I'd be watching the guitar, not because I could play it, but because I knew enough about it to recognize it when it was being done well and I was fascinated by the people doing it and couldn't take my eyes off them!”

You can really feel the depth of the “Guitar-Hero Worship” going on in these quotes, can’t you?

Life On Mars

Rick Wakeman joined Yes in 1972, before the recording of Fragile. And he brought his Mini-Moogs, Mellotrons, electric and acoustic pianos, and Hammond B3 with him. Wakeman had been trained as a classical musician, at the Royal College of Music in London. He studied piano, clarinet, and composition but never graduated. Instead, he started playing in recording sessions. His early credits include playing keys in a progressive folk rock band called The Strawb. He also recorded with Time Machine, which was a British rock band that released a few singles in the late 1960s, but the historic thing he did was play with David Bowie on Bowie’s "The Man Who Sold the World" and "Hunky Dory." That’s Rick you’re hearing here on Bowei’s song, Life on Mars, from Hunky Dory.

Wakeman’s contributions to both Fragile and Close to the Edge brought Yes to a whole new level in their evolution as a band. About recording Fragile, Rick said, ““I knew that the music was very special and very clever. But what we didn’t know was whether the musical public were ready for something like that. And thankfully they were, which was tremendous.”

A classically trained pianist, Rick was also capable of absolutely rocking a Hammond B3. Check out his solo from Roundabout, on the same album [fade into Roundabout keyboard solo]

Like Howe, he had mastery over a huge range of styles and, also like Howe, fused them to create his own musical fingerprint. His solo from South Side of the Sky is about as far from what he played on Roundabout as you can imagine. Here it is. [fade into piano from Southside of the Sky]

Close to the Edge

His playing was equally wondrous on the next album, “Close to the Edge” and he spreads the complement equally among the rest of the band. In another interview, Wakeman shared,

“It’s almost 50 years old, and I don’t know technically how the hell we made that album. We did things that really we shouldn’t be able to have done, technically. I think it was the last album made … where technology was way behind what musicians wanted to do. Certainly with us. So to me, it’s a very very special album. And I think it was during the period of time when the band was at one of its peaks; everyone was playing really well.”

Jon Anderson had this to say about recording the album

https://youtu.be/6nkBnzuAzIc?si=LYoC1KIKtG6iXbCx&t=64

Here’s more from Rick on making Close to the Edge.

https://youtu.be/6nkBnzuAzIc?si=vvDX4JkfyG66kwNp&t=196

But by the time we get to recording Tales From Topographic Oceans, Rick had already checked out of Yes and his parts are not as developed or featured as the rest of the guys knew he was capable of. Wakeman just wasn’t enjoying where the band was going during the making of Tales, and he’d decided to check out without actually quitting yet. For him, the new material was too close to jazz fusion, and as he said at the time, he didn’t feel he had much to offer in this genre. Wakeman did return to the band – several times – during their long career.

Ritual: Nous Sommes du Soleil (14:30ish)

Yes’s longest-serving rhythm section came together once Alan White joined the band. Alan came into the band during the recording of ‘Topographic Oceans’, replacing Bill Bruford who had grown disenchanted during the recording of Close to the Edge. Like Wakeman, White also had big “session player” credibility. He worked with major artists like John Lennon – Alan played on John’s first solo album – Plastic Ono Band (the one with Mother and God on it). The really basic drumming on that record is proof that he played to the music, and is a good counter to the argument that prog musicians were a bunch of self-indulging show boaters. He also worked with George Harrison playing on the All Things Must Pass album. So did Phil Collins, in his pre-Genesis days, except that Phil’s work was eventually not included on the album.

Although White and Wakeman did play together as session players on Bowie’s Hunky Dory album, the invitation to join Yes came from Chris Squire who’d identified the fit and made the opening.

On Tales From Topographic Oceans, Alan’s gifts are magnificently illuminated on the extended percussion tour-de-force that makes up part of Ritual: Nous Sommes du Soleil, or ‘we are of the sun’.

The Ritual mentioned in the title relates to the Hindu tantras. On this track, everybody except Steve Howe played the composition on a percussion instrument. Alan played a standard drum kit, Anderson a cocktail kit, Squire a set of tympanis. Jon Anderson has described Ritual’s bass and drum solos as a sound painting depicting “the fight and struggle that life presents between sources of evil and pure love.

Here's another great thing about Yes. Most of the big prog bands had a dominant writer but when it came to them, you had a situation with five talented writers, and each one had a totally different approach to making music. Putting that talent to effective use was not always easy or straightforward. Here's Bill Bruford, Yes’ drummer during the Close to the Edge period, discussing his take on writing of Close to the Edge. Bruford

Um, guys, I hate to say it, but I think Bruford’s comments here are pretty ‘snotty’ – even ‘assholish’. He’s basically saying that Anderson was a terrible musician, and that Yes were a great band because they could take what Anderson brought in and then ‘make something worthwhile out of it’. And I think it exposes one of prog’s harshest critiques – that the players were pretty elitist – it’s the kind of thing that made guys like John Lydon in his Sex Pistols days write “I Hate” above the words Pink Floyd on his t-shirt.

Outside of prog, nowhere else in the rock world did you get these pretensions about being ‘classically trained’. Lennon and McCartney may have been the greatest song writers of the 20th century, or at least they ranked right up there with them. But none of the four Beatles had any formal training. None could even read music. In fact, the Beatles were proud of what they were doing, and that they could do it even with what other people said were limitations. Their songs are still celebrated all over the world, and they’ve been reinterpreted, re-recorded, and even re-packaged thousands of times. And the Beatles themselves had been inspired by rock’s earliest pioneers, like Buddy Holly, who didn’t really have any real training either, and whose career was so short!

For all the frustration that at least some of the band experienced, the results were definitely there. Close to the Edge was the third-best-selling album in America in 1972.

Golden Slumbers Suite here

Unlike the classical composers that they admired, for instance Gustav Mahler, the prog bands did not always approach their long classical-form compositions from a big-picture perspective. Sometimes it was closer to what the Beatles did several times in the latter part of their career. Most of you guys will probably be familiar with their album, Abbey Road, and the “suite” from the ‘second side’ which starts with Golden Slumbers. They basically had a bag full of unfinished songs that they brought together McCartney, and their producer George Martin carefully tied all these odds and ends together and created the ultimate swan song for the best band in rock history. Now, you might say that the Beatles could not have achieved what they did without George Martin, but I’d say that the same is true the other way around, too.

Other progressive bands used their albums to tell complete stories. One of these was Genesis, who in the same year that Yes released Close to the Edge, released Foxtrot. These stories give another dimension to the word ‘progressive’, in this case it’s not the avante garde nature of the music as much as the sense that you’re embarking on an epic journey into a fictional universe. As one fan said in an interview,

“Another good thing I think about great progressive rock is it's like immersing yourself in a great book. You can really get lost in it. It's the thing I don't understand, why the people don't get that as to, you know, as a form of great escapism, because compared to a four-minute song singing about a failed relationship, there's just no comparison.”

Prog Lyrics

Because prog was born out of the counter-culture movement, a lot of the song lyrics deal with social, cultural, and political issues.

My God / Aqualung

They can be pretty blistering about the government, social institutions and the like. Ian Anderson, of Jethro Tull, wrote some of the most obvious examples in this regard. For instance, their 1971 album, Aqualung, asks some pretty tough questions about the sincerity of faith in a Church that seems so worldly. Likewise, Tull’s album, A Passion Play explores life after death and the spiritual journey of a recently deceased man, named Ronnie Pilgrim, and themes morality and religion; good and evil.

The Musical Box

Genesis, in their third album, Nursery Cryme, poked fun at some of the latent vestiges of Victorian morality and it’s evil twin – sexual perversity - with their song, 'The Musical Box'. The song is richly dark and mischievous; a surreal tale about the British aristocracy and an old man’s lust for a young girl. In 1972, they released their album, Foxtrot, which had a 23-minute epic called 'Supper's Ready' a song which was, at least partially, about the apocalyptic battle from the Bible, in the book of Revelations.

It's time now to turning off the bedroom lights, and draw the blinds tightly shut. (SFX closing blinds) Let’s switch on the black light (SFX lamp switch) and let all that neon ink on the posters ooze down the walls. Hey man, dig my lava lamp and all that bubbling, melting hot pink good inside it. Just one more touch now… (sfx match lighting) (sfx sniffing) I just love the smell of burning incense, don’t you? OK. Now you’re ready to listen to the album.

Supper’s Ready

We’re listening to Genesis’ composition, Supper’s Ready, from their album, Foxtrot. Like Close to the Edge, which we’ve spent some time talking about, this album was released in 1972, and for both bands, Supper’s Ready it was their fourth album. Foxtrot is a seven-part, through-written tour de force. It displays the group’s full musical and technical range as the band reached early maturity in their development. This is extraordinarily sophisticated music for any group, but when you realize the guys were all between 21 and 22 years-old, it’s really remarkable. By the time Genesis got to writing Supper’s Ready, they’d already tackled some fairly long, and pretty avante-garde tracks, like the Musical Box, and the Fountain of Salmacis. Here’s Tony Banks, keyboard player, composer, and co-founder of the band, to talk about how the band wrote this remarkable piece of music. Tony Here.https://youtu.be/eb7gc0sqofw?si=L1nwwY2Lfc5jgM9V&t=608

In another interview, Tony said:

“When we started it we thought we were writing a kind of follow-up to The Musical Box, and it was going along quite nicely. Then we had this pretty-pretty song, Willow Farm, on its own, and thought, what if we suddenly went from there into this ugly, descending-chords sequence? No one would be expecting it. And once we got into that, we thought, well, we’re here now, let’s carry on, with freedom, and see where it leads us. When we put the whole thing together and heard it back for the first time, we went: ‘Oh, this is actually pretty good.’”

But not everyone in the band was equally sold on the new work. Steve Hacket, Genesis’s former guitarist who left the band after their 1977 album, Wind and Wuthering, says,

“I was not convinced it was a good idea at all: I thought, no one’s gonna buy this, because it’s too long. The [lyrical] references are too far-flung. It’s totally ambiguous. I thought the first time Tony Stratton-Smith- head of Charisma records - heard it he was gonna say: ‘Sorry, boys, game’s up, contract’s cancelled, you’ll be hearing from our lawyers.’

Instead it was Stratton-Smith who really cheered the band on, getting them to take their music as far as it could go.

It's important to point out though that writing Supper’s Ready was not all butterflies and roses. There was plenty of tension and more than one argument about how parts of it should go. Steve Hackett shared that,

“We were all involved as lyricists on Foxtrot per se, but Pete insisted on writing all of the lyrics to Supper’s Ready himself.”

Like a lot of prog songs, there’s plenty of room for personal interpretation about the meaning of those lyrics. It’s rumored that the germ of the song was an incident one night at Peter’s home and whether his wife, Jill, had actually become possessed. In an interview, Hackett said,

“I believe there’d been some drug taking going on. I believe she was having a bad trip at one point, and that Pete and a friend managed to talk her round and get her out of the horrors or whatever it was. So that’s a part of what the song was about, but in a way there’s a kind of redemption implication that goes with that.”

Gabriel later claimed other parts of the lyrics were inspired by a late-night sighting of seven shrouded spirits walking single file through his garden in the dead of night.

Supper’s Ready became Genesis’ all-time showstopper at their live shows. Always an impressive showman, Peter would go through several costume changes throughout the piece, and in the end he’d ascend ‘into the sky’ in a silver suit.

The predecessor to Foxtrot is actually the album that brought the classic five-member Genesis lineup together for the first time. Now with Phil Collins on drums and backing vocals, and Steve Hackett on lead guitar, the three founding members, Peter Gabriel on lead vocals, flute, and bass drum, Michael Rutherford, on bass and 12-string rhythm guitar, Tony Bank on keyboards and 12-string was ready to take the band to new heights. Here’s Michael Rutherford to talk about the very earliest days in Genesis long history.

(On guitar - :30s)

The third album was called Nursery Cryme and it had two standout songs, the Fountain of Salmacis, and Watcher of the Skies. Nursery Cryme was also the first record with the band’s classic 5-member lineup on it, including

As a guitarist, Hackett gave the band a new level of precision and melody that Anthony Phillips never had. For example, he was doing two-hand tapping at a time when future guitar god, Eddie Van Halen, was still in grade school, before he’d ever learned his first chords!

You can hear this in full evidence on Watcher of the Skies where he plays a searing fuzz guitar solo that’s as melodic as it is blistering; check it out. WOTS solo here

Firth of Fifth

Like Steve Howe, Hackett has a broad stylistic range, equally at home on electric and acoustic guitars. The early Genesis albums, clear up through Wind and Wuthering, feature his astounding solos. Listen to what he does on Firth of Fifth, from Genesis fifth album, Selling England by the Pound. FOF solo here.

Also like Howe, Hackett’s a really fine composer. In one interview, he said that his two biggest influences have been J.S. Bach and Jeff Beck, rest in peace. About Beck, Hackett recently said,

“He informs my every note on electric guitar. Before players like him, guitars used to just go ‘twang.’ Then they learned to sustain and scream and impersonate a woman’s voice and imitate brass instruments. I was fooled when I first heard the Stones doing ‘Satisfaction,’ as I thought it was a brass section or a trumpet. I had no idea at the time that it was a guitar! I realized at that moment, that was where the guitar was heading, that it was going to be impersonating all these things. Guitar was the synthesizer before the synthesizer.”

Los Endos drumming here

Fans who got into Genesis late in their career may not know what a brilliant drummer Phil Collins was. To really get an education in prog rock drumming, just check out this track, Los Endos, from A Trick of the Tail, the first album the band released after Peter Gabriel’s departure. This was also the first album where Collins stepped up to the plate. He’d frequently sung harmonies behind Peter, and had actually enjoyed one lead vocal on a track from Selling England By the Pound that he co-wrote with Steve Hackett, called More Fool Me.

After Gabriel left the band, there was a period of time when the group auditioned different lead vocalists but no one they heard had that essential ‘it’ that Gabriel had brought. Then, Phil decided he’d try the vocal on the song you’re listening to now, from the album Trick of the Tail, the song is called Dance on a Volcano.

Collins surprised himself and his bandmates with what he was capable of! Good thing, too. Until then, having failed at finding the right singer, the band was seriously considering becoming an instrumental outfit. I imagine it would have sounded something like a more rock-oriented Weather Report or a mellower Mahavishnu Orchestra. On ‘Trick’ and also on the follow up, ‘Wind and Wuthering’, Genesis fans actually said that he sounded more like Peter Gabriel than Gabriel did himself! His voice had a lot of naivete, you can hear that he’s unsure of himself. On late period Genesis albums – which I would count as anything starting with Duke and after - he had huge confidence. For a while there in the ‘80s, he was literally everywhere, playing with everyone, and scoring every time. Memorably, he was the one artist involved in 1985’s Live Aid who actually played on both sides of the Atlantic, having hopped onboard a Concorde and flying to Philadelphia!

When Phil took on the lead singer role, it meant there had to be a second drummer. And who did he turn to but Bill Bruford, lately from King Crimson and formerly from Yes as you know! On subsequent tours and through the rest of Genesis’ career up through 2007, Chester Thompson from Weather Report was their drummer. Chester Thompson remembers how his long-time touring career with Genesis first began.

I had the opportunity to see Genesis a number of times during those years. One of the absolute greatest moments from those tours was always the drum duets Phil and Chester performed. Phil was a left-handed drummer; Chester is right-handed. They would play these incredibly sophisticated, rhythmically challenging drum duets and because of the left hand/ right hand thing, it was like watching a mirror reflection. Here’s Phil and Chester from 1984, when Genesis did the Mama tou

Lamb Lies Down opening

As we’ve talked about, classical music runs deep in progressive rock. It’s got Beethoven’s drama, DeBussy’s atmospheric effects, Wagner’s emotional intensity and Stravinsky’s leaning into the future. Outside of Genesis, Tony Banks has also released a lot of classically oriented instrumental music. His three Orchestral Suites are a good example.And from his Genesis library, I love this opening for the Lamb Lies Down on Broadway. Another track you need to hear for yourself is Firth of Fifth and this majestic piano intro he wrote for it; opening to Firth of Fifth

Steve Hackett has also produced a deep well of classically oriented guitar music. This is his from his song, Blood on the Rooftops, from Wind and Wuthering. There’s no doubt that this is an artist of great ability. Steve’s mastery of the guitar brought color, shade and texture to Genesis’ albums.

JETHRO TULL

Bouree

You’re now listening to the utterly unique flute stylings of the one and only Ian Anderson, founder, lead singer, and primary song writer for Jethro Tull. Across a history of 54 years, this band, named for the 18th century inventor of the seed drill, has had a parade of 30 different musicians and 19 different lineups. Here’s Ian, remembering how the band got it’s name. Band name here https://youtu.be/zl-wrZm2TIU?si=CGwg9H2RjJn8d6B4

Blues for the 18th

Most young rockers start out playing with their friends in childhood bands. They’re usually pretty lousy when they begin, and get less so as they move along. So it was with young Ian Anderson formerly of Dumferline, later of Edinburgh Scotland, educated in Blackpool. Anderson met his school mate, John Evans and the two of supported and encouraged each as their bands changed names and personnel, starting out in 1963 as The Blades, later as the John Evan Smash, and finally as Jethro Tull. We’re actually listening to a recording of the John Evan Smash, and their song Blues for the 18th when young Ian was a very innocent 20 years old. With Evans on keys, Ian held down lead vocals, played lead on a white Stratocaster guitar, as well as harmonica and sax. The flute still lay in his future. In this track, you can hear a lot of the blues foundation that Tull had in their first album, This Was.

Across the span of Tulls’ first three albums, This Was, Stand Up and Benefit, you hear a good, but not very unique blues band slowly discovering their own identity as they gradually incorporate more jazz and more classical music into their sound. This is the sound of a band that is rapidly evolving, transitioning from one that had been captivated by American blues legends the likes of Muddy Waters, Son House, and Albert King just like the rest of English rockers had and becoming something something much more authentically English.

Locomotive Breath

One of the most remarkable changes in Tull’s sound happened when lead guitarist, Martin Barre, joined the band for the Aqualung album, in 1970. It’s hard to imagine what Tull’s early hits like "Cross-Eyed Mary," or the album’s title track would have been without Barre’s monstrous riffs. Here’s Martin, talking about recording the song Locomotive Breath. Talks about Locomotive Breath 1971 at 46:35

Barre joined Tull during a major shift in direction. The leap the band made between 1970’s

Benefit to the 1971’s Aqualung is mind-blowing. In the space of one album, Tull went from producing pretty unassuming electric blues and electric folk-rock, and sounding a bit like John Mayhall and the Blues Breakers, to something a lot more progressive and conceptual. It was stuffed full of sophisticated compositions and complex, intellectual, lyrical constructs. This still wasn’t full-on prog rock – Tull wouldn’t get there until their next album, Thick as a Brick, and when they did, man, they really upped the ante!

Locomotive Breath is a real stand out from the first side. Ian’s explained the song’s meaning like this,

“"It was my first song that was perhaps on a topic that would be a little more appropriate to today's world. It was about the runaway train of population growth and capitalism; it was based on those sorts of unstoppable ideas. We're on this crazy train, we can't get off it. Where is it going?”

About the overall Aqualung album, Ian has said,

“Aqualung wasn’t a concept album,although a lot of people thought so. The idea came about from a photograph my wife at the time took of a tramp in London. I had feelings of guilt about the homeless, as well as fear and insecurity with people like that who seem a little scary. And I suppose all of that was combined with a slightly romanticized picture of the person who is homeless but yet a free spirit, who either won’t or can’t join in society’s proscribed formats. So, from that photograph and those sentiments, I began writing the words to ‘Aqualung.’ I can remember sitting in a hotel room in L.A., working out the chord structure for the verses. It’s quite a tortured tangle of chords, but it was meant to really drag you here and there, and then set you down into the more gentle acoustic section of the song.”

The album’s A ‘side’ (at least it was a vinyl side in the old days), is a collection of songs about social derelicts. The Aqualung character, for instance, is a runny-nosed homeless character who sits in the park, leering at young girls all day. There’s also a hooker named Cross Eyed Mary, and a number of other odd characters in the songs.

Side two is a collection of songs about how the Church has failed in its responsibility to help these wretches. The album closes with a lyric wagging an angry finger at the church, saying

Wind-Up

“I don’t believe you, you’ve got the whole damn thing all wrong. He’s not the kind you have to wind up on Sundays.” I think Anderson’s intention was to say that, whatever the state of the world, its man’s misunderstanding of God, and our inability to connect, that has resulted in the sorry state this world is in. So, whatever it is, the album definitely makes a statement.

Again, here’s Martin Barre talking about Aqualung: https://youtu.be/XH3utW-ILlQ?si=hYtgUcRVHQ9S9mJ5

Tull’s most progressive efforts followed Aqualung. In 1972, the band released Thick As A Brick and following that, they offered A Passion Play. Both albums contained a single, extended composition that stretched across both sides for over 40-minutes and revealed new levels of song-writing complexity. Shifting meters, irregular rhythms, and constant key changes captured and held the attention of their growing audience. More so than Passion Play, I believe Thick As A Brick is a more interesting record with its shifting motifs, sophisticated chord progressions, and harmonic, melodic and rhythmic patterns.

Cup of Wonder

From my perspective, Anderson’s themes were more relatable. In Yes’s song-writing, Jon Anderson could be pretty hippy-dippy. I mean, what do you make of a line like „Mountains come out of the sky and they stand there“. He was – more often than not - conjuring Eastern mysticism, but Tull was earthier, and in songs like this one, Cup of Wonder from Songs From the Wood, he’s cast himself as the rock and roll Ray Mearss or Bear Grylls. So, going back to what I said earlier about the counter-culture lifestyle, Tull’s original audience was very „crunchy granola“.

Because we’re in a time where a lot of us still look to the mountains or the ocean as a way to get centered - I know I do, that’s for sure - I think some of Tull’s music still sounds fresh compared with other 70’s prog bands like the Moody Blues. At least, I don’t know of too many folks who are still chanting their om’s or burning incense candles anymore! Most of us are too busy burning the candle at both ends….

Songs From the Wood

To me, Tull’s best work was done when they were in their more acoustic mode. Their albums Minstrel in the Gallery (1975) and Songs From the Wood (1977) had a really beautiful, acoustic guitar, flute and vocal harmony sound that evoked medieval and renaissance styles. While bands like Yes and ELP were off trying to compete with huge symphonic works that bordered on late romanticism, these earlier genres seemed better suited for rock bands and rock audiences. I guess you could say that – while the influences were more distant in time, the sound was more relatable to modern ears.

Only Angels

We even get references to Medieval ad Renaiisance culture and life in Tull’s lyrics. 1973’s a Passion Play has lyrics about dancing around Maypoles. And then this song, “Only Angels“ from War Child has lines about fools, and court jesters and then, one year later, in 1975, Ian is mining that same history in “Minstrel in the Gallery“ when he sings from the viewpoint of a court jester who is looking down on his audience. As late as 1978, he’s still placing his songs in the context of“Jolly old [pre-industrial] England“.

TULL LIVE

A lot of the Prog bands had pretty elaborate stage shows. I talked earlier about the characters and outfits that Peter Gabriel portrayed – there was the NewYork Puerto Rican gangbanger, Rael, for instance. In the same era, but outside prog, Bowie had been through several character changes – from the alien Ziggy Stardust, to the coked-out Thin White Duke. KISS perfected a weird blend of Japanese anime and the demonic in their black and white, blood spitting and hell-fire antics and so on. Fronting Jethro Tull though, Ian Anderson took on the persona of the slightly-mad minstrel flautist hopping up and down on one leg, hyper-ventilating into his flute. He’d dress in the period clothes of a minstrel, or a jester, right on up to the tights and the codpiece. This modern-day jongleur created a totally unique live experience.

About those times, Ian has said, “It’s something to do with being, a gypsy, a troubadour, a traveling musician, that peculiar romanticism about traveling around and hawking your wares, which is what we do to a bunch of different people in different places.”

And Anderson was a sharp social critic – in a way that was very similar to the roles of actual court jesters. After all, in the days of the Devine Right of Kings, if you wanted to criticize your king and live to tell the tale, you’d better coat it in plenty of laughter!

This was really apparent on the Thick as a Brick tour. While Anderson was as serious as a heart attack about his band’s musical perfection, he also knew his audience was there for a good time and he filled the spaces in-between songs with wry jokes about himself, his band, society, the venue, or sometimes the technical problems they might have on a given night. Anderson used his snide sarcasm to entertain his audience and it worked.

Flute Playing

Ian Anderson’s flute playing is another aspect that made Tull’s sound so unique. While there were prog bands that also used the flute – Genesis, in particular, but also Gentle Giant, King Crimson, and Camel – come to mind, what Ian Anderson did with it was totally different. In Tull’s’ live act, with flute in hand, he used the instrument to really play up his Medieval English strolling minstrel character.

Let’s have Ian explain the context in which he picked up the flute.

My Sunday Feeling

In the beginning, his flute playing was very blues inspired, playing lines that you’d otherwise have expected to soar out of the amp of some guitar god. This song, “My Sunday Feeling”, from Tull’s This Was album, is a good example.

But around the time of Aqualung, Ian Anderson made a very deliberate decision to move away from the blues. Asked about it, he said,

“I quickly became dissatisfied with what we were doing. I found it hard to go onstage and convincingly be a polite shade of black. What really got me was that I was singing something that was essentially stolen. And it wasn't just stealing music, it was stealing somebody's emotions and point of view, almost pretending to have an awareness of what it means to be black.”

In place of the blues, he decided to mine his own culture’s deep heritage.

Let’s let Ian Anderson tell us, himself, how he started playing flute.

There are other aspects of Ian’s song-writing, and the band’s collective playing that create their unique Renaiisance sound. Along the way, he added new instruments to his repertoire, including acoustic guitar, balalaika, bouzouki, and mandolin. Asked about his musical influences during an interview with Creem magazine, Anderson said,

“Since I became a professional musician, I listen to less and less music, and I very rarely listen to rock. I’m not interested in listening to other people who do the kind of thing I do. I’m interested in listening to music which sounds to me completely different.

I believe first and foremost in a folk memory. I'm of particularly mixed origin; my mother is English, my father is Scottish. So you have the peculiar sort of mixture of origins in me. But I do believe in a folk memory or something which is at once Anglo-Saxon and Celtic mixed together from way back a long, long time ago and I believe that we retain something of, certainly not the academic wherewithal to put that type of music together, but something of the emotional response to that music.”

Vocal 11

Other members in Tull’s classic lineup also doubled on Renaiisance instruments, brought to a very unique use on this section from Thick as a Brick Part II.

David Palmer, Tull’s keyboard player breaks out a portative organ, which is a lap-held, wooden organ with a one, or sometimes two octave range and nine pipes. One hand squeezes an accordian-like bellows, and the other plays the keys. It sounds like this: https://youtu.be/NzCET6Ae64Y?si=aYko_mRYR3yyprc5

Jethro Tull’s drummer, Barriemore Barlow even played period instruments like the naker and a tabor; these two drums made their way into Europe from the middle east during in the middle ages.

Tull’s song Velvet Green from Songs From the Wood puts it all together for us.

(Velvet Green)

Listeners of popular, folk, or rock music are more often drawn to a song’s melody, lyrics or performance than they are to a song’s form. The major reason for this is that these types of music are usually made from small-scale forms that are easily digested. Our long-term exposure to them has embedded the structures into our memories and our expectations, sort of like the way you can slowly care soft wood with a pen knife. Everyone knows that when they hear a verse and a chorus that another verse and chorus is going to follow. We only really notice the actual structure or form of a song when it surprises us because it moves away from what we thought was coming. We’re noticing that the traditional rules have been broke. Tull’s Thick as a Brick alters and denies expectations so many times that once you get past the first ten minutes, it’s like being on an epic journey! To appreciate music like this, you have to be receptive to change, and keep in mind that the composition lives in two worlds; the classical one with its structure, and rules, and the popular song world.

It also takes longer to get to know this music. There’s a lot more required of us as listeners.

_________________________________

In the ‘70s and ‘80s, when FM-radio still reigned supreme, in the days before they coined the term Classic Rock, Emerson, Lake & Palmer were progressive rock's first supergroup. This three man rock and roll symphony succeeded in turning prog from a regional thing happening in England into something much bigger, passionately loved by tens of millions of fans. ELP’s songs, like "Lucky Man," Still…You Turn Me On," and "Karn Evil 9” and their massively selling albums like Tarkus and Brain Salad Surgery proved that somewhat nerdy, classical rockers could compete dollar for dollar with the blues, hard rock, and early metal bands of their day. Emerson Lake and Palmer sold over 40 million albums.

The Nice – The Thoughts of Emerlist Davjack

They formed out of the merger of two earlier bands; keyboardist Keith Emerson’s group, The Nice, and lead singer, Greg Lake’s group King Crimson. These two bands had played the same concerts several times, and Greg had gotten to know Keith over a few jam sessions. The good chemistry, and powerful synergy were immediately present.

Fire

It took a year after their early jams, but eventually Lake quit King Crimson to officially team up with Emerson. They auditioned a few drummers – Carl Palmer was only 19 at the time, but he could play circles around almost everyone else in music. He’d already been in a few high profile bands, including the Crazy World of Arthur Brown – I’m playing you their song “Fire” right now.

The Nutrocker

It seems like every ten years or so, society experiences a great reset. The end of the ‘60s was like that. The idealism and teen-culture of the ‘60’s was ten years older and moving into adult life. Some of these young adults tried bringing flower power with them, with varying success. It was a decade marked by unprecedented social and cultural upheaval, and popular music emerged as a powerful vehicle for expressing and amplifying the zeitgeist.

The intertwining of these two forces—music and social experimentation—was a symbiotic relationship that shaped the decade's identity. Art both mirrored and changed society.

Underture

Tomorrow Never Knows

A Day in the Life

With it, the Beatles have produced a glimpse of modern city life that is terrifying. It stands as one of the most important Lennon-McCartney compositions, and it is a historic Pop event.

In another section,

Here’s Ian McDonald, the saxophone and flute playing wizard from King Crimson, to share his perspective on the Beatles and Sargeant Peppers.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BJXMYiSuuX0

God Only Knows

Invocation & Ritual Dance Of The Young Pumpkin

Peaches En Regalia

If you were to say that Prog came out of the fusion movement, you would not be wrong.

A Certain Kind

What Is Prog

As John Lennon once said, “We can say what they think, because we ARE them.”

The Firebird Suite

Kent State

Bobby Kennedy on MLK’s Assassination

Suite from Atom Heart Mother

The Revenge of the Giant Hogweed

2112

Good Vibrations

Strawberry Fields Forever

Switched On Bach

Baba O’Riley

Non-Brewed Condiment/ Allan Holdsworth - Atavactron

Now that I’ve set the stage for this new music, it’s time to bring on the bands!

The Giles Brothers

Boyfriends &. Girlfriends

21st Century Schizoid Man

Epitaph

ELP – Pictures at an Exhibition (Return of the Manticore version)

Lucy In the Sky with Diamonds

Pink Floyd – The Trial

Rush 2112

the Revealing Science of God

Here's a few of the major concepts presented on the album:

Self-discovery and enlightenment: Dive into your own consciousness, with or without chemical assistance, and acquire a deeper understanding of yourself and the world all around you

The nature of reality: Things are not always what they seem to be!

The interconnectedness of all things: Everything in the universe is connected. This was previously covered material that George Harrison had already mined in his song, Within You Without You

(Excerpt) Within You Without You

Try to realize it's all within yourself

No one else can make you change

And to see you're really only very small

And life flows on within you and without you

True Messenger

Music like this is only possible if you’ve got brilliant musicians. In an interview he gave about the recording of the album, Jon Anderson said,

Flowerman

Giants Under the Sun (TFTG)

To deliver the goods, Howe applied his left-field phrasing, finger-twisting, fretboard gymnastics, and precisely crafted fingerings. He leaves other rock guitarists in the dust.

This is how one fan described seeing Steve Howe in concert with Yes.

Another fan said,

You can really feel the depth of the “Guitar-Hero Worship” going on in these quotes, can’t you?

Life On Mars

A classically trained pianist, Rick was also capable of absolutely rocking a Hammond B3. Check out his solo from Roundabout, on the same album [fade into Roundabout keyboard solo]

Close to the Edge

His playing was equally wondrous on the next album, “Close to the Edge” and he spreads the complement equally among the rest of the band. In another interview, Wakeman shared,

Jon Anderson had this to say about recording the album

Here’s more from Rick on making Close to the Edge.

Ritual: Nous Sommes du Soleil (14:30ish)

Although White and Wakeman did play together as session players on Bowie’s Hunky Dory album, the invitation to join Yes came from Chris Squire who’d identified the fit and made the opening.

For all the frustration that at least some of the band experienced, the results were definitely there. Close to the Edge was the third-best-selling album in America in 1972.

Golden Slumbers Suite here

Prog Lyrics

Because prog was born out of the counter-culture movement, a lot of the song lyrics deal with social, cultural, and political issues.

My God / Aqualung

The Musical Box

Supper’s Ready

In another interview, Tony said:

But not everyone in the band was equally sold on the new work. Steve Hacket, Genesis’s former guitarist who left the band after their 1977 album, Wind and Wuthering, says,

Instead it was Stratton-Smith who really cheered the band on, getting them to take their music as far as it could go.

“We were all involved as lyricists on Foxtrot per se, but Pete insisted on writing all of the lyrics to Supper’s Ready himself.”

Gabriel later claimed other parts of the lyrics were inspired by a late-night sighting of seven shrouded spirits walking single file through his garden in the dead of night.

You can hear this in full evidence on Watcher of the Skies where he plays a searing fuzz guitar solo that’s as melodic as it is blistering; check it out.

Firth of Fifth

Also like Howe, Hackett’s a really fine composer. In one interview, he said that his two biggest influences have been J.S. Bach and Jeff Beck, rest in peace. About Beck, Hackett recently said,

Los Endos drumming here

Lamb Lies Down

JETHRO TULL

Bouree

Blues for the 18th

Locomotive Breath

Barre joined Tull during a major shift in direction. The leap the band made between 1970’s

Locomotive Breath is a real stand out from the first side. Ian’s explained the song’s meaning like this,

About the overall Aqualung album, Ian has said,

Side two is a collection of songs about how the Church has failed in its responsibility to help these wretches. The album closes with a lyric wagging an angry finger at the church, saying

Wind-Up

Again, here’s Martin Barre talking about Aqualung:

Cup of Wonder

Songs From the Wood

Only Angels

TULL LIVE

Flute Playing

Let’s have Ian explain the context in which he picked up the flute.

My Sunday Feeling

But around the time of Aqualung, Ian Anderson made a very deliberate decision to move away from the blues. Asked about it, he said,

In place of the blues, he decided to mine his own culture’s deep heritage.

Let’s let Ian Anderson tell us, himself, how he started playing flute.

Vocal 11

Other members in Tull’s classic lineup also doubled on Renaiisance instruments, brought to a very unique use on this section from Thick as a Brick Part II.

David Palmer, Tull’s keyboard player breaks out a portative organ, which is a lap-held, wooden organ with a one, or sometimes two octave range and nine pipes.

Jethro Tull’s drummer, Barriemore Barlow even played period instruments like the naker and a tabor; these two drums made their way into Europe from the middle east during in the middle ages.

Tull’s song Velvet Green from Songs From the Wood puts it all together for us.

(Velvet Green)

It also takes longer to get to know this music. There’s a lot more required of us as listeners.

_________________________________

The Nice – The Thoughts of Emerlist Davjack

Fire

The Nutrocker

Their first major gig was at the Isle of Wight Festival where they tore the roof of the place, and their first album, stuffed with their strongest early originals and two massively impressive classical adaptations that showcased Emerson’s rippling piano and synthesizer technique, anchored around Lake's bass work, and Carl Palmer, propelling the band forward like a rocket’s booster engine.

Ironically, Palmer had not been the band’s first choice. That complement was paid to none other than Mitch Mitchell, from the Jimi Hendrix Experience. Mitchell ‘passed’, but told Jimi about it, and Hendrix, bored or burned out with the Experience, communicated his interest. Before anything could happen though, Jimi died of an accidental overdose. He’d taken too many of a friend’s legal sleeping pills. Otherwise, who knows… ELP might have been called HELP!

Still You Turn Me On

ELP’s song writing was heavily influenced by classical music, and jazz and – at least in their early years – hard rock. Many of their pieces were based on earlier classical works and Keith Emerson could pretty regularly be heard quoting famous works in his playing. The band understood they needed to also bring things down to a relatable level, and luckily the could rely on Greg Lake for his steady ability to write a great ballad. Greg Lake also knew his way around a studio; he produced the band’s first five albums.

As a live act, they were explosive. Think about how mind-bending it would have been to see Carl Palmer play his revolving drum kit, while, across the stage, Keith Emerson, and his grand piano were both spinning upside down - all while pulling off some of the greatest musicianship!

In fact, just about everything ELP did in their live act was in some way an effort to be bigger, bolder, faster, more dramatic, louder, more….. well, there was almost no end to it! Let’s let the guys tell you in their own words. Really, it’s the best way to get the picture.

In the Beginning

While Greg Lake was not a circus-unto himself like Emerson or Lake, he could do it all: He played electric, acoustic, and bass guitar. That’s Greg on this song, In the Beginning, for instance. And we’ve already heard some of his tasteful electric soloing on Still You Turn Me On. Did I mention he was a very competent producer, too? Actually, he produced the band’s first six albums.

Along with Cream, ELP was one of the first real supergroups. Their first album, called, predictably enough, Emerson, Lake and Palmer and it had a number of their biggest hits on it, including Lucky Man, which Greg Lake had written as a young teenager.

The Barbarian

In addition to strong originals, ELP had a real way with re-working famous classical pieces and making them all their own. Check out this bit from their version of Bartok’s The Barbarian.

Tarkus

For a new band, recording the second album can be a tough challenge. You want to keep up the momentum you started with the first album, but your first one had a bunch of songs you’d had years to write. Now, you’re between tours, on a timeline, receiving pressure from all quarters, and you have to deliver. With Tarkus, released in 1971, ELP lived up to their supergroup status. Keith created a much more complex keyboard sound, and the band delivered another ‘epic’ in the prog canon, Tarkus. The album also set the direction for their sound as they moved forward. Tarkus was loud, bombastic, and pretty depressing. And people bought it like crazy! What saved it was the sheer power of the trio’s playing. The album went to number one in England and hit the Top Ten album in America.

Their follow up to Tarkus was a live recording of their version of Pictures of an Exhibition, the classical piece from the late 19th century Russian composer, Mussorsky.

The band’s best-selling album is Brain Salad Surgery. This is the album that their 30-minute tour-de-force "Karn Evil 9" was on. The band had never played better.

Brain Salad Surgery

They continued to grow as a band, and in 1973, they released their most popular album, Brain Salad Surgery. This was their best selling album. Keeping form with their earlier albums, side one had two classical compositions that the band reworked in some pretty imaginative ways. One was William Blake's "Jerusalem" and the other was Alberto Ginstera's "Toccata". Ginstera himself fully endorsed their arrangement! The other notable song was "Still... You Turn Me On”. Flip that licorice pizza over and side two was another ELP epic called "Karn Evil 9"; 30 minutes of mayhem divided into thirds, and telling a story about the battle between men and technology – you might call it Son of Tarkus.

All that work behind a hot mixing desk got the band ready for the road and a long tour, out of which they recorded enough live material to follow “Surgery” with a three-disc album called “Welcome Back My Friends to the Show That Never Ends”. I guess three-disk live albums were sort of the thing back then, as Yes had released their Yessongs live album a year before, which also had three disks.

By the time 1977 rolled around, punk had come roaring into England, and, with the new breed wearing t-shirts with the words “I Hate” hand-scrawled over the words Pink Floyd, it was pretty evident that progressive rock was on its way out. In a world where punk could burn the essence of song into your cerebellum in under two minutes, who need a half-hour cruise into a rock and roll psychotic break to achieve the same thing? Never mind the bollocks, give us the Sex Pistols!

To close out their recording contract, ELP put out a double album, called Works I, which three sides devoted to each band member, and a fourth side of group compositions. Emerson’s and Lake’s sides were pretty strong; Palmer’s received mixed reactions. Works II followed, and it was sort of a collection of things that hadn’t been considered good enough for Works I, but things were nearing a breaking point internally. They followed that with an album that most ELP fans wish they hadn’t, called Love Beach. The guys pretty much phoned it in on this album. It didn’t sell well, and that was pretty much the end for a long time. Emerson and Lake did reunite in the. 80’s, and brought in a new drummer, named Powell – so they were still ELP – and there were some live dates, including their last ever show in 2010.

Behind the Lines

In today’s episode, we tried to take you behind the lines into the world of progressive rock. We went time tripping back to the late 60’s and early ‘70s to look at this unlikely turn in music’s road. We saw how the adventurousness of the ‘60s counter-culture, used new technology, and inspiration borrowed from different sources - the 19th century romanticists as well as other brilliant musicians in jazz fusion – to create progressive rock. We saw how prog reflected both the African roots that come from rock as well as native English culture to create a brilliant new musical direction. And we also met a few brilliant musicians as we dug deep into some of the greatest progressive bands of the era, including King Crimson, Yes, Genesis, Jethro Tull and Emerson, Lake and Palmer.

Next time, we’ll hop back across the pond and see how what the Europeans were doing continued to inspire new musical directions back in America. Music is, definitely, an on-going conversation between the musicians and their fans, as well as between musicians living in different places. I hope you’ll be back to listen when that next episode is ready!

As always, this podcast is a labor of love from me to you. I thank you for continuing to support American Song. You can help this show grow, too! Tell a few friends about it – send out a few links on your social media pages!

Like always, if you’ve been inspired to dig deeper into some of the bands I’ve shared with you today, you can learn more about all this great music. My sources are always provided on the American Song facebook page; just type in American Song Podcast in the search window.

For American Song, thanks for listening everybody! This is Joe Hines. I’ll catch up with you soon!