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.
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.
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.
“Feels Good to Me” and “Back to the Beginning” by Bruford
From the 1977 album Feels Good to Me
Bill Bruford has perhaps the most impressive pedigree of any prog musician: original drummer of Yes, he quit the band on a high note after the release of Close to the Edge in 1972 to join a newly reformed King Crimson, a band he would continue to perform with through the late ’90s. After King Crimson went on indefinite hiatus in 1974, and Peter Gabriel went solo in 1975, Bruford became the touring drummer for Genesis, allowing Phil Collins to step out from behind the kit as the band’s new lead singer. After a couple of Genesis tours, Bruford started his own prog/jazz fusion band, appropriately named Bruford. Dave Stewart (of Egg, Hatfield and the North and National Health fame) was the keyboardist, and for most of the band’s brief life, the now-legendary jazz-rock bassist Jeff Berlin held down the low end. For a time Allan Holdsworth was the guitarist, and the first couple of Bruford albums also featured Annette Peacock on vocals, giving the music even more of a Canterbury influence than Stewart already brought to the proceedings.
In this video, ex-National Health (and future Whitesnake, if you can believe it) bassist Neil Murray appears in place of Jeff Berlin. I’m not sure how the timing of this Old Grey Whistle Test appearance corresponds to the recording of that album — whether Murray was the original bassist in the band and was replaced by Berlin for the album, or if this followed the album and Berlin was, for whatever reason, unable to appear on the show. Neil Murray does a fine job here nonetheless, but the main appeal for me is simply the chance to see Bill Bruford and Dave Stewart in action together.
I’m not sold on Annette Peacock’s vocals here, but at least the mix is a little more balanced than on the album, where her vocals are so inexplicably loud that you can scarcely hear the rest of the band — and, seriously, who’s listening to Bruford for the vocals anyway? It’s worse than the mix on Trout Mask Replica.
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.
The two bands most conspicuously absent from the exhibit so far are undoubtedly Genesis and King Crimson. I was really hoping to find a rare gem from Genesis, like something from the elusive Lamb Lies Down on Broadway tour, their last with Peter Gabriel. I found a few, but none were of the quality I was hoping for. Instead, I’ll offer up this surprising find from the brief period in 1973 when King Crimson operated as a quintet, before the… er, unique… Jamie Muir fled to a monastery, and Robert Fripp fled to a barber.
This looks to be from the Beat Club in Bremen, Germany. You’ll see plenty of clips from the late ’60s and early ’70s at Bremen’s Beat Club on VH1 Classic or YouTube, and they are all more-or-less the same: gaudy overuse of low-budget psychedelic video effects; inexplicable superimposition of the band’s name halfway through the performance, followed by a personnel list with unnecessary instrument name abbreviations. (Really? You couldn’t fit “ums” next to the “dr” right there?)
“Beyond and Before” by Yes
From the 1969 album Yes
I’ve linked to this one before on my main blog, but it stands out so distinctly in my mind that I knew it was going to have to be one of the first videos I included here. It’s the original lineup of Yes, circa 1970, performing the lead-off track from their first album on French TV. The band sounds pretty damn good, even though the quality of the video is a bit sketchy. It’s fun to hear them when they were young and energetic and this style of music was fresh and new. This lineup of the band tended to improvise more than later versions, and they loved to throw in snippets of familiar tunes: note a bit of “Frère Jacques” near the end in a nod to the French audience.
But of course, there’s one, and only one, real reason I love this video: Bill Bruford’s “NO” t-shirt.
