My engagement with this blog has certainly fallen off, and I apologize to those of you (if you exist) who are disappointed by my lack of ongoing enthusiasm for it. There are multiple factors involved: 1) I stopped finding interesting things on YouTube (partly because I wasn’t looking); 2) too many of the best videos (especially any involving Robert Fripp) were pulled; and 3) the summer ended and life got in the way.
The Hall of Prog is not dead, just hibernating. Yes, winter is upon us. And with our first real winter snow storm having hit us here in Minneapolis yesterday (a few unseasonable fluke snows in October, which quickly melted, notwithstanding), I am thinking back, as I always do, to December 1992. I was a freshman in college, and thanks to Usenet newsgroups like alt.music.progressive (this was in pre-Web days), I was learning about more obscure prog bands than I had ever been able to discover with the limited resources available to me at the pathetically understocked (and now long-since closed) Musicland in the dying mall in my hometown.
Interestingly, the band I was just getting into in December 1992, and the band I always think about when the first real winter snows hit, was a band I did not learn about from the nascent Interwebz. It was a band I found scouring the pages of my well-worn copy of the Rolling Stone Record Guide. The guide gave Gentle Giant’s The Power and the Glory a bullet — their worst rating, not worthy of even a single star. (Even Tales from Topographic Oceans mustered that much.) I was convinced that any prog band willing to offend the fickle Rolling Stone reviewers to such an extent must be worth hearing, and I was right. Luckily, a slightly less-pathetic record store existed in a neighboring, slightly less-pathetic city, and they had a few Gentle Giant CDs in stock. I cleaned them out over my Christmas break from college, and spent most of the rest of the winter immersing myself in the bizarre (even for prog) intricacies of their work.
The most intriguing element of Gentle Giant’s music, for me, is its brevity. While every bit as complex as any prog you’ll find, Gentle Giant’s music crams as much intricate arrangement and virtuosic instrumentalism into 4 minutes as most prog bands managed to fit into their requisite side-long epics. In fact, aside from live performances, Gentle Giant’s longest track barely cracks the 9-minute mark, and that’s on their first album! Over the years they recorded a few other tracks in the 7- to 8-minute range, but the vast majority of their songs are under 6 minutes.
Anyway… perhaps Gentle Giant’s brevity is a lesson I should take to heart in writing these blog posts.
This is a pretty cool video, even if the band is lip-syncing to the studio version of the song. I honestly didn’t realize they weren’t playing live until Derek started singing in the rock part halfway through the song. Maybe I was too distracted by John Weathers’ Oakland A’s uniform.
Robert Fripp did some interesting things during his late ’70s King Crimson hiatus. He produced a lot of albums, notably the second Peter Gabriel solo album and Sacred Songs by Daryl Hall. He also performed as a guest musician on a number of albums including what might be his most well-known (if unidentified as such) guitar part ever, on the David Bowie track “Heroes.”
And, he released his own outstanding solo album, Exposure. But I think, on reflection, the thing he did that was the most surprising and of the most enduring interest was to form a punk band, The League of Gentlemen. It was a shortlived arrangement, with the return of King Crimson looming, but nevertheless, the band’s small body of work answers the (unasked) question: Can Robert Fripp do punk? And would it be any good? I think the answer to both questions is “yes.”
Let’s be clear: I really hate “videos” posted on YouTube that are just music with a still image. YouTube is not a peer-to-peer music sharing service. I don’t really care about the copyright issues — I mean, I do… sort of. But copyright law is so fundamentally broken that it’s hard to defend anymore. What really bothers me about it is the misuse of technology. YouTube is not designed for this purpose, and it’s ill-suited. My general feeling about it is, if what you’re uploading isn’t a video, it doesn’t belong on YouTube, period. Find someplace else for it.
That said, I’m featuring this video anyway, for several reasons: 1) I wanted to post another Gentle Giant track, and in keeping with my Apollo 11 theme, this is their only song with “moon” (or, really, anything even close) in its title; 2) it’s a cool song, and this is the only version of it that I could find on YouTube; and 3) if there’s any album cover I would want to cruelly subject you to staring at for nearly five minutes, it’s this one.
“Utopia Theme” by Utopia
From the 1974 album Utopia
Todd Rundgren is probably better known for his role as a record producer, or for his early ’70s soft rock hits like “Hello It’s Me”, but in the mid-’70s he also dabbled for a while with full-blown prog rock.
As its full name (Todd Rundgren’s Utopia) suggests, the band was really a Rundgren vehicle, with an ever-changing lineup, and increasingly mainstream sound, with continuity provided mainly by the presence of Rundgren himself. The band was never as progtastic as on its first album, from 1974, which was partially recorded live. It features the epic 30-plus-minute side-long track “The Ikon,” as well as the equally excellent (and also very long) “Utopia Theme.”
Even though prog rock was fairly popular in the U.S. in the ’70s, few American bands achieved this level of epic complexity. And even though Utopia itself quickly abandoned this style, this first album remains as a classic of the genre.
King Crimson’s a bit hard to come by on YouTube, presumably because Robert Fripp is extremely protective of his intellectual property. But for some reason, appearances on Old Grey Whistle Test seem to trump all. That makes me happy, because this is a pretty fantastic video of the great ’80s lineup of King Crimson playing what is probably my favorite song from that era.
Since it is now officially summer (as of yesterday, I realize), I wanted to celebrate with a “summer” track. Unfortunately the only prog tracks I have with “summer” in the title are “Blood Red Summer” by Coheed and Cambria (which I have already featured) and Rush’s cover of the Who’s cover of “Summertime Blues.”
But I did find this music video recorded by Andy Summers and Robert Fripp for the title track from their 1982 collaboration. 1982 was an interesting year. MTV was just getting big (you know, back when they actually showed music videos), The Police were huge, and Robert Fripp was busy. Strangely, those forces came together to produce this odd artifact, seemingly heavily influenced by the title sequences of Roger Moore-era James Bond films as much as by the dancing that typically accompanies gamelan music (which itself influenced the music on the album).
This track has added significance for me, as it was a stylistic inspiration for “At the End of the Day (Is the Night),” the third track on my recent solo EP, Burnt Snow.
If you’re interested in more cheesy Robert Fripp promos from the pre- and early-MTV era, be sure to also check out this video for the title track from his 1979 solo album Exposure.
Van der Graaf Generator is considered one of the most “important” prog bands, although I’ve never gotten into them very much namely because I find Peter Hammill’s voice, like that of Dagmar Krause, too strident to enjoy much. That said, their music kicks some serious ass, especially the slowly building “Darkness (11/11),” presumably (though I’ve never bothered to research it) a reference to the World War I armistice on November 11, 1918. This song has a special significance to me personally, as it was a big influence on one of my own original compositions, “The Salton Sea, Pts. III & IV” from my 2008 RPM Challenge submission, Unnatural Disasters.
It’s also interesting to see on this video that David Jackson plays two saxophones at once, a trick I’ve previously only witnessed by myself (on a 1990 Bassius-O-Phelius recording called “Room 34″) and the inimitable Rahsaan Roland Kirk who, to be fair, actually played three saxophones at once.
The sound here is not great, but it’s rare to find live footage of the fearless mid-’70s King Crimson lineup in action, so it’s worth enduring any shortcomings in the recording. First we hear “Easy Money,” the closest thing to a “hit single” from Larks’ Tongues in Aspic. Then in the second clip the band segues into one of their signature improvs.
As long as I’m on a Gentle Giant streak, I might as well throw this one in as well. If you grew up in the ’80s like I did, you probably never heard of Gentle Giant. Which on the surface would seem a bit strange: Yes, Genesis, Rush and Pink Floyd were all hugely popular in the ’80s, probably even more so than in the ’70s. Even the likes of King Crimson, ELP and some of the other well-known but slightly less commercially successful ’70s prog bands were still at least present in the ’80s. You would occasionally encounter them on MTV or the radio, or see their albums in record stores. And of course there was Asia, the early ’80s supergroup comprised of former members of Yes, King Crimson and ELP. But it was almost as if Gentle Giant had been erased from existence.
Partly that’s because Derek Shulman quit making music after the band broke up in 1980 and became much more financially successful as a record company bigwig (so much so that he has refused to even consider reforming the band). But mostly it’s because the tumult of the late ’70s emergence of punk was just too much for the band. Consider this music video, made as they… erm… attempted to streamline their sound to fit the zeitgeist.
I started this blog with a clip from Gentle Giant, but I didn’t really talk much about the band in that post. The progressive rock landscape is a bit like a Venn diagram, whether you consider it either by stylistic subgenre or by band personnel: there are lots of partially overlapping stylistic characteristics between bands that define the genre, and there was also a free exchange of members between some of the bands, either in terms of guest appearances (like Jon Anderson of Yes singing on the third King Crimson album, Lizard) or changing lineups (like Bill Bruford of Yes leaving to join King Crimson permanently, two albums later).
And then there’s Gentle Giant. Though they were contemporaries with the other big early ’70s progressive bands, enjoyed roughly the same amount of popularity, and played in a style that could only be defined as “progressive,” they were also different in a few notable ways (and not just in that, to my knowledge, they never recorded a track longer than about 7 minutes). First, they were an island unto themselves with their lineup, including the fact that in the original configuration there were three Shulman brothers (though Phil left after a few albums). Second, no one else really quite sounded like Gentle Giant. Though their music was probably the most intricate and elaborately orchestrated, including some medieval instruments, they also managed to create a more solid and rocking sound, owing to the steady drumming of John Weathers and the powerful bass of Ray Shulman.
This video from 1974 features a track from their 1970 debut album, and it also shows off one of the band’s most distinctive quirks: trading instruments. The previous song ends with Ray Shulman on bass, though he quickly hands that instrument off to his brother, lead singer Derek (who also plays saxophone, though not on this track). Ray moves over to the other side of the stage and begins playing violin. And quite well at that. Later, he switches again from violin to trumpet, an instrument where he is also solid if not quite as virtuosic. (Phil was the original trumpet player on this track.) And later, he’s back to the violin. Meanwhile, keyboardist Kerry Minnear moves from his typical progger’s array of synths and electric pianos and plays an extended vibraphone solo. Granted, that’s not as much of a stretch, but it’s still a pretty unusual instrument in a rock lineup, even for prog. And then he picks up a cello.
