Mountains Come Out of the Sky Read online

  (Nick Hale/Getty Images)

  Copyright © 2010 by Will Romano

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form, without written permission, except by a newspaper or magazine reviewer who wishes to quote brief passages in connection with a review.

  Published in 2010 by Backbeat Books

  An Imprint of Hal Leonard Corporation

  7777 West Bluemound Road

  Milwaukee, WI 53213

  Trade Book Division Editorial Offices 33 Plymouth St., Montclair, NJ 07042

  Printed in the Unites States of America

  Book design by Damien Castaneda

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Romano, Will, 1970-

  Mountains come out of the sky : an illustrated history of prog rock / Will Romano.

  p. cm.

  Includes bibliographical references and index.

  9781617133756

  1. Progressive rock music--History and criticism. I. Title.

  ML3534.R675 2010

  781.66--dc22

  2010032445

  www.backbeatbooks.com

  Table of Contents

  In The Beginning

  Pink Floyd

  Crimson

  Emerson, Lake & Palmer

  Yes

  Genesis

  Jethro Tull

  Colosseum And Greenslade

  The Canterbury Scene

  Camel

  Gentle Giant

  Prog Folk

  Progressivo Italiano

  German Prog And The Krautrocker

  Song For America

  Tubular Bells

  Rusk

  U.k.

  The Return Of The King (Crimson)

  Throwing It All Away

  Marillion

  Dream Theater

  Progressivity Continues Into The Twenty-First Century

  For Sharon, Molly, and Maggie

  Author’s Note

  The majority of interviews featured in Mountains Come Out of the Sky were specifically conducted for inclusion in this book. In addition, I drew upon interviews I completed as a freelance music journalist on assignment for such publications as Goldmine, the New York Post, Modern Drummer, and EQ.

  Author-provided artwork was gathered from various sources, including record label press materials, contemporary publications, personal music memorabilia, and original album packaging.

  Foreword

  FEW OF US INVOLVED IN THE golden years of progressive rock expected the subject to be written about and discussed with quite such enthusiasm decades after the last pair of flared loon pants had been hung out to dry. Had we been able to foresee the more constrained music-scape of forty years hence, however, we nascent progsters might have better appreciated the wild amounts of freedom we were being given. A patient, long-suffering, and generous record industry was supplying us with unlimited studio time and then letting us get on with it. We just thought this was what rock music was.

  Arguably, until the Beatles’ 1967 Sgt Pepper’s album, pop music was created broadly according to a fixed set of musical principles about what should happen when guided by strict notions of acceptability and the public taste. The sound track to the late- ’60s counterculture had no interest in any fixed set of principles, and even less in public taste. For a brief, heady and aberrant decade, the crew ran the ship, and the captain was stowed below. In the best sense of the phrase, progressive rock didn’t know what it was doing. The ship may have gone round in circles for a bit, but then it set sail for the heart of the sunrise.

  The main contributors were making it up as they went along. When I was in Yes, we felt we could do anything we wanted, so long as it didn’t sound like anybody else. When Atlantic Records sent their top A&R man, Tom Dowd, to London to supervise the making of The Yes Album, he listened quietly at the back of the studio for a while and returned to the U.S., fully aware that what was going on at Advision Studio 1 was not subject to the usual laws of pop or rock music as he understood them.

  As a subject for doctoral theses and learned discussion, progressive rock has everything you need. A reasonably clearly defined beginning and end, with a peak golden period followed by a slower decline and fall, a sociopolitical context against which the music could be heard (the counterculture), and at least three major technological innovations in place to facilitate change (the long-playing vinyl record, stereo twenty-four-track recording, and FM radio). From Pink Floyd’s wildly imaginative 1967 The Piper at the Gates of Dawn to ELP’s horrific 1978 Love Beach, progressive rock flew, like Icarus, too near to the sun, crashed, and burned. After a period of disgrace, a 1980s neo-progressive movement took hold in the charred subsoil, to be followed by the current resurgence and reevaluation—of which Will Romano’s excellent book is a part. This was the life cycle of the progressive butterfly, the perfect little art scenario—something like the Pre-Raphaelites or the Bloomsbury Group in the visual arts.

  Romano has wisely enlisted many of the principal players to tell us firsthand how the story unfolded from their respective points of view. He has interviewed me on several occasions, and it’s a pleasure to be considering his work instead, for a change. He makes an affable and enthusiastic tour guide, pointing out everything you need to know about the main features of the rocky outcrop affectionately known as “prog.” His book, of which he can be justifiably proud, is a friendly, colorful, and thorough account of one of the last century’s most enduring of musical movements by a commentator who’s clearly an enthusiast. Progressive rock, then, is still with us, if limping a bit. To misquote Frank Zappa, “Prog isn’t dead, it just smells funny.”

  Bill Bruford

  Surrey, U.K. 2010

  Bill Bruford, the godfather of progressive rock drumming, was at the top of his profession for four decades playing with Yes, King Crimson, Genesis, Earthworks, and many more. His taste for the unpredictable in live performance led him to collaborations with dozens of the world’s top jazz and rock musicians in pursuit of the innovative, the unusual, and the unlikely.

  (K & K Ulf Kruger OHG/Getty Images)

  WHAT IS PROG?

  ONLY GLUTTONS FOR PUNISHMENT DARE TRY THEIR hands at the definition of “progressive rock,” as it is almost too extensive, too elusive, too amorphous and contradictory to put down on paper. Prog rock is a bit like pornography—the lines and definition can be blurred, but you know it when you see it.

  Historically, progressive rock had been forged from the musical fires lit by American blues and R&B pioneers as well the major proponents of the 1960s psychedelic movement. In part, progressive rock was a natural outgrowth of flower power and hippie/utopian sensibilities. The psychedelic bands did as much experimenting with musical form, sometimes dispensing with pop music structures and expectations (dabbling in elements of world music and free jazz), as they did with illegal and illicit substances.

  With a classicist’s sense of precision and ambition, “the progressives” gave shape to amorphous forms of drug addled and hallucinogen inspired rock music and, taking a cue from bands such as Pink Floyd and the Beatles, approached rock music as an art form while developing along a completely different evolutionary musical branch (and occupying a different head space).

  Genesis at Shepperton Studios, October 1973. (Pictured are vocalist/percussionist/kick drummer Peter Gabriel, left, and kit drummer/backing vocalist Phil Collins.) (Ian Dickson/Getty Images)

  The problem is, every artist could be called progressive. The term itself becomes meaningless: Artists from Elvis to the Who to Jimi Hendrix to the Clash could be seen as being progressive in their own ways. Is a band progressive merely for evolving? Every band evolves. U2 evolved. R.E.
M. evolved.

  Next you say, “Okay, the music itself must be progressive, in that it moves from one mood or shape to many different ones within the span of a single song.” Fine. But this statement runs into the same problem. Black Sabbath changed its music within the framework of one song (they used compositional dynamics) in the late 1960s and early 1970s. So did Led Zeppelin. And the Who. They took the listeners on a journey. Are they progressive rock?

  The textbook definition of progressive rock prescribes an artistic approach to music (which later became a genre of music) that developed, initially in Britain, in the late 1960s and continued into the 1970s, which sought to fuse rock with different musical styles, usually of distinctly European origin—from classical to folk. Prog rock was, generally speaking, written, performed and listened to by white, middle-class kids.

  Applying the definition gets to be a bit sticky, however. Fitting music into a category leads to a hierarchy that, ironically, the progressives were against from the start. The fact is, there may be a standard description of prog rock as the major progenitors had perpetrated, but the banner of progressive rock houses encompasses many diverse artists, many of which have little in common with one another. How does King Crimson sound like Emerson Lake and Palmer? Is Jethro Tull remotely connected to Genesis? In theory, no barriers exist in progressive rock: At its best, progressive rock is postmodernism run amok.

  Some would argue that all the above-mentioned bands deal, or have dealt in some form, with keyboard technology, and touched upon European art music at some point in what is considered their most “progressive” periods.

  Somewhere along the line, prog rock took on certain identifying factors that are ripe for spoofing: banks of synthesizers, concept albums, extravagant LP cover illustrations (or LP packaging), and absurd stage costumes and fashion statements (i.e., wizard hats and sequined capes)—all of which have been both parodied and explored by artists with earnestness and fervor.

  “There has always been progressive music at every level,” says Yes vocalist Jon Anderson. “You had progressive jazz, and some of the great classical composers of the twentieth century were considered progressive minimalists, and others, like Karlheinz Stockhausen, who were jumping into electronic areas as well.”

  “The concept of progressive music is pretty wholesome, you know?” says Greg Lake, bassist and vocalist for Emerson Lake and Palmer. “But really, it became very twisted. It became the easy target for the press.... But the essence, really, of progressive music is pretty much the essence of all of rock ’n’ roll, which was to move forward and to discover new things. To try to express yourself in, I suppose the word is, an original way is not really different, in a way, than what any of the rock ’n’ roll artists did during the 1950s and 1960s. Everyone tried to move his game on. What happened in the case of progressive rock that earmarked as it as a special genre was that it is a European movement, which made it kind of peculiar. The roots of progressive music were, essentially, European. At least that strain of it that we are talking about—Pink Floyd, ELP, King Crimson, that sort of thing, that took its influences a lot from European music. There was very little else to draw from the well of inspiration of rock music. By the time 1969 came, perhaps 1968, ’69, it was really time to look for some new avenues of inspiration rather than drawing from blues or American jazz or country and western music, the idea occurred to draw more from European classical structures, folk also.”

  “I like to think of it as an expansion of rock,” says Ian McDonald, cofounder of King Crimson. “As I had said many times, it’s breaking out of the two guitars, bass, and drums format for a rock band. I never liked the term progressive rock, anyway, and I’m just using it as a reference, because progressive rock turned on itself and became more regressive. It became a parody of itself. For me, it just meant broadening out the straight-ahead rock-band sound.”

  “Some thought we were soft rock,” says Yes guitarist Steve Howe. “Then [Yes] got called symphonic rock, and then it was orchestrated rock, and then it was cinemagraphic rock.”

  “Progressive to me was always a cross between American R&B and European classical music,” John Wetton (King Crimson, Family, Asia) told the author in 1995. “If you put those two together, you have the formula for great progressive rock. I defy you to name me a classic progressive rock album that doesn’t have those two qualities somewhere. It must have the rhythmic pulse of the blues, but it must have the melodic European stuff.”

  The success of bands such as the Beatles, the Moody Blues, Procol Harum, and others was part and parcel of a larger cultural flowering that would encompass the growing and dynamic progressive rock movement, uniting a generation of musicians and listeners alike in a conversation and a common search for answers.

  “There was a confluence of factors involved in the mid-1960s,” notes Gong bassist Mike Howlett. “The rise of technology, economic revival after World War II, a hugely disproportionate number of youth, the Vietnam War, and the civil rights movement were all happening at the same time. The creative avant-garde found itself in a large body, for once, rather than the fringe, and suddenly at the center of popular cultural movements that inspired and encouraged one another. The other factor is the psychedelic influence and the sudden availability of LSD, which certainly expands people’s creative imagination and opens people to the potential of all the power of coordinated art forms. When you combine music and fashion in a big cultural conglomeration ... and throw some acid into the picture, you’re going to get some extraordinary events and extraordinary experiences,” says Howlett. “That spurs people who make art to go further.”

  “What we’re talking about gets back to watersheds,” says John Lodge, bassist and vocalist for the Moody Blues. “You don’t realize its importance at the time. If there was anything that the ’60s and ’70s did, it was open the conversation. Young people throughout the world were saying that we’d just had two world wars in the last forty years, perhaps it is time we open up conversations about things that can be really important to us. I think that this is really what happened, Woodstock and the Isle of Wight Festival in the U.K. It wasn’t a goal: I think it was a conversation. This was really from 1967 through 1973. That, to me, was the major part of modern rock history. That is when, if there is any philosophy in rock ’n’ roll, that’s when it happened. That was the watershed.”

  The wave of British artists that would include Yes, Jethro Tull, King Crimson, Emerson Lake and Palmer, and others represented, on some level, a conservatism, as these artists accentuated one half of the postmodern/modern equation or definition of progressive rock by being apolitical and bringing structure to chaos.

  Australian scribe Craig McGregor, writing in 1970, once pointed out that in order for rock ’n’ roll to survive the 1960s and thrive in the 1970s, it must turn from “Dionysian frenzy” to “Apollonian order” to something resembling order and classicism.

  “Instant orgasm is great,” McGregor said, “but stales with repetition.”

  Despite cries of critics to the contrary, rock music needed prog to exist. “Progressive rock was an extension of psychedelia,” says Howe. “The psychedelic bands did whatever they wanted, didn’t they? But after that, there needed to be some sort of containment, some shape. I think progressive rock became that framework.”

  IN THE BEGINNING

  The Beatles, Early Floyd, the Moody Blues, Frank Zappa, and the Rise of the Moog

  “TO ME, THE FIRST PROGRESSIVE ROCK band was the Beatles,” says Ian McDonald. “The dawn of so-called progressive rock, or the acorn, to me was the song ‘Yesterday.’ Just before the interview I pulled out my vinyl album of Help!, to see what year that came out. It was 1965, and I was nineteen years old, and I loved all kinds of music and I already loved the Beatles, and I had interests in jazz and classical, but I basically loved rock music and the Beatles in particular at that time. When I heard ‘Yesterday,’ a little lightbulb went off that told me that something new was happening right now with t
his because of the use of a classical string quartet. It was not the first time strings had been used on a pop record—that goes way back to Gene Pitney and Buddy Holly... but there was something about the use of strings in that song that ... had classical music influence and style and to me that was the dawn of progressive rock. Of course, people went on to explore and introduce various influences and expand the scope of two guitars, bass, and drums to almost anything you can think of. That gave the rest of us permission or license to do it ourselves. The progressive era was happening just as the Beatles were breaking up, and that whole era of Revolver and Sgt. Pepper’s and Magical Mystery Tour basically gave new bands, at that time, license to do whatever they wanted.”

  “The Beatles opened up the doors for everybody,” says Jon Anderson.

  “Dare I say the Beatles slip into [progressive rock] a little bit with Sgt. Pepper’s,” says Ian Anderson, vocalist and multi-instrumentalist for Jethro Tull. “Though somehow I can’t bring myself to acknowledge that Paul McCartney, the master of the showbiz form, be let into that world inhabited by Pink Floyd and their successors to that progressive move in music.”

  “The Beatles led the way with Revolver,” says Justin Hayward, guitarist and vocalist for the Moody Blues. “The Beatles are kind of responsible for a lot of musicians thinking that they ... didn’t have to fit [their music] into a three-minute format.”

  The Beach Boys’ Brian Wilson had first heard the Beatles’ Rubber Soul in December 1965 and it was “definitely a challenge for me,” Wilson later commented. Wilson remarked at how each cut on Rubber Soul was stylistically “stimulating,” and he soon went to work on the Beach Boys’ recognized masterpiece, 1966’s Pet Sounds, a title that not only references the animal-like experimental noises heard on the record but the fact that Pet Sounds was Wilson’s “pet” project while the band was on tour without him.