This song, not “Hocus Pocus,” was my first introduction to Focus, back in about 1993. The friend who introduced me to it put it on a cassette of Gentle Giant’s album Interview and let me proceed on the mistaken impression that it was Gentle Giant. For a time I professed my love of the Gentle Giant “epic,” and proclaimed that only Gentle Giant could possibly have made it!
As for the title… well, it’s never been clear to me whether there’s an “o” in it or not.
Now, I know these guys like to jam. But I also know this song like the back of my hand. And I’m pretty sure this is actually a fairly sloppy, mistake-ridden performance. And it still rocks.
I came to this video indirectly, from a Slate article about a new, three-minute Nike ad for World Cup Soccer, which prominently features an extended remix of the original studio version of “Hocus Pocus.” As crazy as the studio version is, imagine seeing the band play it live, twice as fast, with even more insane yodeling, flute playing, whistling action from Jack Nicholson-in-The Shining-meets-a-garden-gnome-with-a-neck-beard organist/multi-instrumentalist Thijs van Leer.
I’ve already featured a video of “Yours Is No Disgrace” before, but this is a different one. And not just any different one, but a great one, from the era where psychedelic freakouts were broadcast regularly on television. It also features Bill Bruford in his “TUBS” shirt, which was a great source of amusement for a friend and me back in high school.
As I tweeted yesterday, I actually heard this song in its entirety at a frozen custard shop here in Minneapolis. It was playing on XM satellite radio, so that makes it a little less surprising, but still… not your usual aural accompaniment to a banana split.
I’ve never been a huge ELP fan. They’ve always tended a little too much towards the easily mockable, cartoonish bombast for which prog rock has earned the somewhat-deserved bad reputation it has never been able to shake. Unfortunately for my own personal reputation, I like just enough of their music that I just can’t bring myself to reject them completely.
I have, however, completely rejected Works, Vol. 1 to the extent that I have never owned it. ELP as a band are scarcely a band, but rather three colossally over-inflated egos that only manage to share a stage by virtue of lacking a fourth member. (And by “member” I mean… well… you get it.)
Anyway… I have drawn a line in the sand regarding this album from late in the band’s original era, a time when the only thing that could bring them together to record even one side of a double LP as a group (as opposed to their three individual sides that comprise the rest of the album) was the extra revenue all three names appearing on the gatefold sleeve would bring in. (Well, that and the fact that apparently none of them could be bothered to record an entire solo album, either.) Yet despite myself, I kind of like their rollicking shuffle version of Aaron Copland’s “Fanfare for the Common Man.”
Why do I like it, exactly? Perhaps only by association. It is probably the first prog rock recording I was ever directly exposed to as a child, via its frequent use to accompany the lesser televised sports in the late ’70s and early ’80s, the kinds of sports Howard Cosell would introduce to the American audience every Saturday afternoon on ABC.
I think it’s safe to say that I haven’t heard this song in at least 25 years. That is, until yesterday. I was watching the opening ceremonies for Target Field, the new Minnesota Twins stadium, which hosted its first regular season game yesterday. At one point several Twins legends were trotted out into the left field bleachers to help raise flags honoring each of the team’s most successful seasons (division, league and world championships spanning 1965 to 2009). And what better music to accompany this festive moment than ELP’s “Fanfare for the Common Man”?
It had been so long since I’d last heard it, I wasn’t even entirely sure it was ELP (and, given the liberties the band took with it, I also wasn’t entirely sure it was “Fanfare for the Common Man”). But once it got to the synthesizer mayhem that occurs later in the recording, I knew there was only one man who could be responsible for such sounds, and I also knew royalty checks would soon be cut and delivered to the residences of Messrs. Emerson, Lake and Palmer.
So… um… yeah. Anyone who thinks prog rockers are either nerds in lab coats or delusional anachronists in sequined capes needs to watch this video from 1971 of Keith Emerson going balls-out crazy-ass rock-n-roller on his beat-up Hammond organ with a set of throwing knives and… uh… himself.
I saw ELP live in 1993, and in addition to the knife routine (possibly on the same beat-up but incredibly resilient Hammond), he brought in a little then-contemporary technology, in the form of a large metal phallic MIDI controller, which he played by… well… you can guess. And at the… erm… climax… flames shot out of the end of it.
The iTunes Genius experiment has been leading me rather far afield into not-really-prog-rock territory and I’m feeling the need to rein it back in. Then again, it did at least take me from “Crystal Ball” to this, so there’s some hope for it yet.
This video is supposedly from 1971, and it might well be. But if it is, it’s one of Rick Wakeman’s earliest appearances with the group. The Yes Album was recorded with Tony Kaye on keyboards in late 1970 and released in February of 1971; Fragile, the follow-up and debut of Rick Wakeman, was released in the UK in November of 1971. This concert presumably fell somewhere in the middle.
I love seeing Yes in this era back when they were still young and energetic and their spirits not fully tainted by the turmoil of the years to follow. Then again, already by this point only three years into their career they were already down to 3/5 of their original lineup.
This is the song iTunes Genius picked first to follow yesterday’s selection of “I Don’t Remember.” Today I am debuting a new and occasional feature: “then and now.” Here are two clips showing two very different bands named “Genesis,” even though they share 60% of the same personnel. Both bands know how to put on quite a show, albeit with very different budgets and very different approaches. First up we see the Peter Gabriel-led Genesis performing the song shortly after the release of the album it appeared on. Second, latter-day Phil Collins-led Genesis, on their grand 2007 worldwide reunion (and likely farewell) tour.
“I Know What I Like” is an interesting song. It was the “single” from Selling England by the Pound, but I can’t imagine hearing it on top 40 radio. Then again, at least it was a tightly-structured song that works as a single. Around the same time, Yes was reduced to hacking their 18-minute epics into incoherent 3-minute chunks for such purposes.
“Behind the Lines” by Genesis
From the 1980 album Duke
For today’s post, and as an experiment I will be conducting indefinitely — or at least for the next several days — I will be allowing iTunes Genius to decide my musical selections for me. I had pretty much ignored the Genius feature since trying it out briefly on the day it was released, but for some reason I decided to turn it back on today. Yes, it sends Apple every shred of personal information at iTunes’ disposal, but hey, who needs privacy when you can have progress?
Anyway… Genius is kind of neat. Still probably not much more than a novelty, but I do like how it will build a playlist out of tunes in your own library around a song you choose. And that’s how I’m going to use it here: each day I will select the song I’ve last featured on this blog, generate a Genius playlist around it, and use the first song it returns as the next feature.
So I selected “Tempus Fugit,” my previously featured video, in my library, and clicked the Genius button. “Behind the Lines” was the first item returned. I fear that the particulars of the day I’ve chosen to start this experiment may doom me to languish forever in the prog-starved year of 1980, but we’ll have to see how it goes. At any rate, I’m happy with this first selection. I’ve said it before, and with some trepidation I will posit it once more: Duke is my favorite Genesis album.
I’m not saying Duke is their best album. That honor probably must go to The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway, or at least to some album where Phil Collins spent the vast majority of the recording sessions behind his drum kit and away from the microphone. But I will attest, any day, to the merits of Duke as a cohesive, intelligent, accessible 55 minutes of prog rock, and a concept album (more or less) at that!
The album starts off strong with the excellent “Behind the Lines,” originally part of what was to become a side-long epic, but was instead split up across the entirety of the album. I think that was an excellent move by the band, because even if the “B-side” tracks were never intended to be part of the suite, by structuring the album as they did, it feels like the whole thing tells a story. This track also became a staple as the opener for the band’s live shows for years (nay, decades) to follow. OK, I don’t know if they always opened with it, but I know they did for a while, and they did again on their most recent (and probably final) tour, in 2007.
Drama is one of the most unusual entries in the extensive Yes catalog. Yes was the brainchild of two individuals who met in 1968: Jon Anderson and Chris Squire. And though the band has had almost as many personnel changes as Spinal Tap, these two have remained at the core of the group for four decades, with two exceptions. The first occurred in 1980. After some failed sessions in 1979 following 1978′s Tormato, Jon Anderson left the band, as did Rick Wakeman (again… but hardly for the last time). The second is right now: after Jon suffered acute respiratory failure last year, he stepped aside from the impending Yes world tour and was replaced by Benoit David, formerly of a Montreal-based Yes cover band. Not to be confused with jazz pianist David Benoit. Chris Squire found him on the Internet. I wish I was making this up.
Anyway… back to 1980. The remaining trio of Yes found themselves in the studio without a keyboardist or a singer. As it happened, the Buggles (who were soon to etch their permanent footnote in pop history as the first group ever to appear on MTV, back when it used to live up to its name), a keyboard-and-vocals duo, were recording in the same studio. The two bands met and became one.
Despite the oddity of the meeting, and the album’s curse never to be acknowledged by a once again Jon Anderson-led Yes, the results of this strange experiment were actually fairly interesting — certainly a lot better than Tormato, and probably better than any Yes album that would follow, with the possible exception of 1999′s The Ladder.
I could pretend I wanted to post this video so I could regale you with all of the finer minutiae of late-’70s Yes, but let’s be frank: it’s all about Alan White’s sweatbands. I guess in 1980, everyone wanted to be John McEnroe.
Peter Gabriel seemed to be channeling spirits from another time and place for much of his time with Genesis, and this Centurion-like character is no exception. Selling England by the Pound is quite possibly the best of the Gabriel-era albums: quintessential early Genesis in terms of style and lyrical content, with, in my opinion, the best production values of any album the band has released, ever.
Later, the band launches into a rocking section that features Mike Rutherford playing a (presumably) custom-made Rickenbacker double-neck bass/6-string guitar, and Steve Hackett demonstrates the two-hand tapping technique that — unbeknownst to most Eddie Van Halen fans — he originated.
