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.
Nursery Cryme was a breakthrough for Genesis. The addition of Steve Hackett and Phil Collins to the band’s lineup was not unlike the changes Yes experienced around the same time, with the addition of Steve Howe and, one album later, Rick Wakeman: the new members brought fresh ideas and upped the ante for instrumental skill; the new quintets were set to plunge into music of a conceptual and compositional complexity beyond what they had previously attempted.
Back when I listened to this album a lot — in 1992 or so — “The Fountain of Salmacis” was my favorite track. I hadn’t really listened to it in a long time, but today I decided to pop the DVD from the new CD/DVD set of Foxtrot into the XBOX 360 to watch while I’m working. This video was one of the bonus materials, and I was delighted to find that it’s also available on YouTube. I love seeing these guys when they were so young and exuberant and… well… hairy, especially Peter Gabriel and Phil Collins.
“Watcher of the Skies” by Genesis
From the 1972 album Foxtrot
I grew up as a big fan of ’80s Genesis: I was 9 when MTV had “That’s All” in heavy rotation, and it quickly became one of my favorite songs. I was in 6th grade when Invisible Touch came out, and I used to sit in the basement for hours on end with the 45 of “Land of Confusion” on repeat (yes, you could put a turntable on repeat) while I sorted my vast collection of baseball cards.
I don’t know exactly when it was that I learned that in the ’70s, Peter Gabriel (another one of my favorites — I loved “Sledgehammer,” mainly for the cool stop-motion music video) was the band’s original lead singer, but I remember it was before I knew anything about progressive rock, and I knew it sounded like a pretty awesome arrangement.
When I was a senior in high school, I finally got to hear what that arrangement sounded like: it was “senior skip day” (is that a common thing?) and a couple friends and I decided to take a mini road trip to Mankato. Yes, that Mankato: the “big city” Pa Ingalls frequently had to go to on Little House on the Prairie — a two-day-each-way trip for him by horse wagon, even though Walnut Grove is only 85 miles away. As it happens, that’s about the distance we had to travel, but in the opposite direction, and it was a round trip we were able to make within the normal span of a school day. I’m still not sure why we went there, but I suspect it had something to do with my desire to scout the place since I was going to be attending college in a nearby town (that itself was so lame that it doesn’t bear mentioning by name) that fall.
Our eventful trip included eating lunch at the mall food court and me buying a copy of the Genesis album Foxtrot on cassette at Disc Jockey, the record store at River Hills Mall. (That store is long-since defunct. I blame it on the fact that they played “What’s Goin’ On” by 4 Non Blondes incessantly while I was in college.) The trip also included a memorable moment when the friend I was riding with (for some reason we took two cars), decided to climb up on his seat and moon our other friend, following us in his own car, out his window. While driving. The car was on cruise control, and I was manning the wheel from the passenger seat. An asinine idea. Luckily no one was either injured or arrested, and I assure you that contrary to all logical explanations, no alcohol or controlled substances were involved.
On the drive back home, I got my first taste of that sweet nectar of the musical gods: Gabriel-era Genesis. The first song I heard was “Watcher of the Skies.” I loved it immediately, and it’s still one of my favorite Genesis songs. The wicked Mellotron obligato at the beginning is the stuff of prog rock legend. So much so that one of my musical cohorts and I once recorded a cover of it with some found speech of Pat Robertson blathering on in his inimitable way, and we named it “Watcher of the 700 Club.”
Confession: I am dealing with the most inexplicably finicky* WiFi connection I have ever encountered tonight at an inn in Bayfield, Wisconsin. Somehow I managed to get connected to YouTube long enough to find this video, but not long enough for the site to actually load any images or, even more problematically, the video itself.
That said, it’s a clip from Old Grey Whistle Test, so I’m going to trust that it’s at least moderately interesting, whatever the quality of the recording itself.
This morning in the shower, for some reason that I should perhaps not explore, lest it reveal too much about my psyche, I found myself with “What Are You Doin’ to Me?” by Greenslade (sample lyric: “I’m a one-woman man but you’re faithful to three”) stuck in my head. It occurred to me that Greenslade was a band I have so far neglected on this blog. They’re an unusual band, even for prog — led by keyboardist Dave Greenslade; a four-piece, dual-keyboard, no-guitar lineup, heavy on the Hammond and the Mellotron. And their drummer was Andy McCullough, perhaps best known as the drummer for the third King Crimson album, Lizard.
Greenslade produced four albums, of varying quality, from mostly-reasonably-good to almost-entirely-awful. In short, they’re full-on prog, in that peculiar way that maybe sounded relevant in the early ’70s but has most decisively not aged well. I own their first two albums, the self-titled Greenslade from 1972, and the 1973 follow-up, Bedside Manners Are Extra. I like about 70% of the first album, and maybe 45% of the second. And from what I’ve heard of their last two albums, I’d be hard-pressed to justify paying even $6 for a used CD or the MP3s on Amazon.
That said, a band with this much Mellotron and other vintage keyboards is worth hearing, at least once. So go ahead, and watch the video. I wish I could!
* Regarding the finicky WiFi connection: I’ve determined that the problem is not the WiFi network itself, which is actually broadcasting quite a strong signal, nor its Internet connectivity, which also seems to be fine. The problem is its DNS server, which seems either severely corrupted or only intermittently available, or some combination of the above. So the only way I’m even able to post this is by having edited my hosts file to recognize and properly translate prog.room34.com since the WiFi network appears incapable of doing so itself. So don’t say I don’t work hard for you.
After a roughly 2-year break where each member of the band undertook the indulgent step of releasing a solo album (examples to follow in future posts), Yes reunited in 1977, bringing Rick Wakeman back into the fold, to produce what was probably their last great album, Going for the One. To help them signal a rebirth of the band, they decided to drop the surreal paintings of Roger Dean for the cover art, instead going with a characteristically ugly photo collage (butt included) by Hipgnosis. (I’m not a big fan of Hipgnosis, if you couldn’t tell.)
The cover is the worst part of the album, though. Musically it’s pretty solid. Not as great as… well… any of the albums that came before it, but better than any that would follow.
Here we see the band (minus Jon Anderson) recording the instrumental tracks for the Chris Squire-penned tune “Parallels.” Hearing this arrangement in a slightly more raw form than the somewhat over-slick production of the final album, without the vocals in the forefront, you really can hear what a great, jamming rhythm section Squire and Alan White could be when they got a groove going. Steve Howe’s rhythm guitar is tight, if a bit low in the mix, and Rick Wakeman… well now, what can one say about Rick Wakeman? Many of his organ parts on this album were played on a huge pipe organ at a church in the town where the band recorded the album in Switzerland. (I seem to recall the band was in a self-imposed exile in Switzerland to avoid heavy taxation on their income back home in the U.K.) The pipe organ is, quite frankly, utterly ridiculous, and I think the album would have been stronger if those parts had been played on a good ol’ greazy Hammond, but that’s just my taste.
“On the Silent WIngs of Freedom” by Yes
From the 1978 album Tormato
Oh, where to begin? To which page in my mental encyclopedia of Yes knowledge should I turn with this one?
Well, let’s just focus on what I, with said encyclopedic knowledge, find most bizarre about it. The credits that appear at the beginning and end of this video are, for anyone who grew up in the early ’80s on a steady diet of the nascent media form known as MTV, unmistakable. Their presence here can mean only one thing: at one time, somehow, this video was aired, presumably in its nearly-nine-minute entirety, on MTV. Yes, that MTV.
At first I couldn’t see how this was possible. My own personal introduction to Yes was on MTV, in 1983, with their biggest chart hit: “Owner of a Lonely Heart.” I would be surprised, to say the least, to know any Yes songs from before 90125 had ever appeared on MTV though, because the band hand broken up before MTV went on the air, and this track in particular predates a particularly nasty turn in the band’s history, leading to their only album ever to not include Jon Anderson as the lead vocalist. Then again, the two musicians who came in to replace Anderson and Rick Wakeman on the erstwhile Yes swan song, 1980’s Drama, also happened to record on their own as a duo named The Buggles, also known as the band whose “Video Killed the Radio Star” officially launched the MTV era. So, who knows?
I’ve seen some of this footage before; much of it was used in the career retrospective documentary Yesyears that was released in the early ’90s. But I had never seen it all in this form.
The version of the song we’re hearing here is most definitely not the album version. Even though Tormato is by far my least-favorite album from the pre-Rabin incarnation of Yes, I’ve still listened to it enough times to know every nuance of this track by heart. I can’t tell, though, whether the film really isn’t of the band performing the exact version we’re hearing, or the editor was just an idiot: you can clearly see in the last segment that the audio is a quarter note off from the video — watch Alan White’s left hand. But whether the rest is just sloppily edited or is in fact mismatched takes is beyond my ability to discern. There are some parts where Jon Anderson’s singing doesn’t seem quite on with the visuals though.
At any rate — the MTV connection aside, the parts of this I enjoy most are those where the band breaks down and indulges in a little Spinal Tap-esque studio banter. In Chris Squire, especially, one can see plenty of inspiration for certain classic Nigel Tufnel lines.
