Can’t argue with that overall appraisal of Love Beach. However, there was one cut I loved; Emerson’s arrangement of a classical guitar piece by Gaspar Sanz called Canario. (The source material for Emerson’s arrangement begins at :52. It’s gorgeous!)
I just listened to it again, after not hearing it for decades; it still thrills me! Check it out.
There was a lot more to prog rock than Emerson, Lake and Palmer. Aside from a passing reference to Rick Wakeman - whose solo projects outside of Yes were saturated with classic themes (Six Wives of Henry VII, King Arthur) - there’s no mention of any other artists here.
Sadly, prog has been killed from the inside, by bands “keeping up the prog tradition” while introducing precisely those qualities prog was once derided for eschewing.
So now we have a magazine in the UK called Prog, which, apart from a few pages devoted to the giants of yore like Yes and ELP, is mostly about slightly ambitious rock and metal.
Nuprog and prog metal are really much closer to rock and metal respectively than to what was once called prog. So seeing an article claiming to be about prog that IS actually about prog is heartening.
I discovered this world, like most, in high school, though for me that was the late 80’s. By then, “Prog Rock” was definitely a derogatory term in the “music critic” world, who remains, even today, stuck on late 70’s punk as the epitome for all that is good (and prog for the epitome of all that is bad.) The judgment is partially deserved- things got out of hand, the self-indulgence and flamboyance overshadowed the music’s quality. On the other hand, there was a lot of brilliance there, and a 20 minute long song isn’t automatically pretentious; Close to the Edge shouldn’t have been a second shorter than it was. If prog has a resurgence today, it is, sadly, like everything else in 2014, an ironic one. OMG Prog Rock is awesome, OMG, love the crazy costumes, 20 minute solos are the best!
The truth is prog rock is just pop music. It is superficially inspired by classical, and less superficially by jazz, but Yes, ELP, Genesis… they’re all basically pop music. If you lump Zappa into that group, he’s the exception, but that’s also why he doesn’t fit into that group- he’s a serious composer, the other guys are rock bands with some conservatory training- but at heart, they’re pop.* In fact, I’d say Genesis got better when Peter Gabriel left and they literally became 80’s rock-pop, which I know is a blasphemous opinion for prog-rockers. But their early album by-the-numbers time signature changes are just so boring and predictable, and both Peter Gabriel and the band produced much better stuff after the split.
But I digress. There are prog rock bands I will always love, but there is definitely a lot of mediocre stuff, too. Both Yes and ELP have put out a lot of crap in their discographies, though Yes, at its peak, remains everything the genre strives to be. Challenging, inspired, moving.
As for this article about the occult and all that shit, I guess if you’re into D&D you can view prog rock that way, but none of that medieval silliness really has to do with the music. Like, at all. The goofy song titles, the moronic lyrics… that wasn’t the point. Roger Dean was right in his appraisal- I guess it seems meaningful when you’re 12, but come on!
*King Crimson might qualify as an exception, sometimes.
Just because!
Big time. Genesis was playing the Centre sportif at l’Université de Montréal a full year before the band broke in the rest of North America. Lots of very good homegrown stuff too, such as Maneige and lesser-known bands like Sloche.
I do note there was some tendency, on both sides of the Pond, for Francophone prog to move in a fusion direction, e.g., Potemkine in France. There are maybe some points in common with the Canterbury scene (e.g., Soft Machine).
Yow!
I remember an interview where Emerson expressed his regrets about the album, though he was justifiably proud of Canario, likening it to Hoedown.
Most of the time. Things like “Elephant Talk” or “Dinosaur” are probably less than half the output. Mind you, it can be extremely hard at times to chivvy KC into the prog genre.
I personally really like the later, Adrian Belew KC (saw him perform once in the old 9:30 club in DC, he was wonderful), but it would be really hard to categorize it as prog-rock.
How about Genesis for instance? Many good bands of that era were ruined by arena rock, and those massive tours drained their creativity. Although not prog rock, Kansas had a great first album before becoming just another Don Kirshner arena act.
I think it started getting really interesting when Bruford joined up, even before Adrian Belew joined - say, about the time of Red. I think adding Belew was moving further in a direction Fripp had already started down. (Not to put Belew’s contributions down - quite the contrary. KC may be Fripp’s band, but it has always been more of a collaborative effort than most realise.)
Progressive Rock is a big tent, more unimaginably huge than even its fans can apprehend. I’ve been a fan since the 70s, but I can also trace an unbroken line of progressive rock bands from the formative years of the late 1960s (Soft Machine & King Crimson) all the way to the present.
Wait a minute! You thought it had died! The problem is partially the fans: The moment anyone does anything startling and progressive with the genre, people start trying to kick it out of the tent. The genre of prog rock contains classic and delightful hobbity bullshit like ELP, Yes and Starcastle. It also contains the more severe end of the scale like Henry Cow, Area, Magma, Albert Marcoeur and the challenging “Rock in Opposition” subgenre.
Progressive Rock is essentially like Metal. It comes and goes in popularity, but during the periods of rest, it twists into bizarre and unrecognizable new shapes. During the 80s, a time that most folks view as a prog-free zone, you got acts like This Heat and The Cardiacs. There are many more.
The whole Post-Rock and Math-Rock era of the 90s is one long homage to prog and krautrock which we have not yet recovered from.
There are people who will trace the rising interest in progressive rock to Radiohead and the Flaming Lips. But I blame metal. When Hair Metal fell off the pop charts in the 90s, Metal went back underground and fermented into a million bizarre subgenres many of which incorporated prog rock tropes far beyond slapping a Mellotron on the break. Prime-numbered time signatures and album-long suites have become common again. Hideously complex acts like Gentle Giant now sound positively quaint.
Prog rock is back, has been back and will be back again. It has its adherents that want the genre to be preserved and it has its adherents that want the genre to progress. This is where we are now.
If we’re talking just “good music” then, yeah, everything from Red through Thrak I find much more interesting that the old stuff, for sure! Belew is a pop musician at heart- which is not slander. Pop music is wonderful when done right, and Belew’s a master at pushing it to its limits. Combining him with Bruford and Levin, you really can’t go wrong as Fripp’s collaborators!
Also, there is the fact that they are taking music that might be more influenced by classical, but it’s clear they are seeking out a pop audience, if that makes sense. They are not making a non-commercial music, if they were making a more classically constructed, symphonic music… But yeah, the influence of jazz, especially the postwar bebop and the weirder, more estoric jazz stuff can be seen as an influence.
Dunno about “symphonic”, but…
(Not the original instrument, which was the harpsichord. This should sound good on the harpsichord, but the performances I’ve heard on YouTube didn’t really catch the prog style of the rhythm.)
Veering s little off-topic, perhaps, but I think that’s why the later King Crimson works. Fripp is a masterful player and thinker, but he’s just so stuffy (I once saw him perform with a group of his students back when he was really into the whole Gurdjieff/Fourth Way thing, and when someone had the audacity to take his picture he stopped in mid note and went off on a rant about how vampiric that was and how violated he felt), whereas Belew, for example, is just so loose, that the contrasts just work.
Totally agree. Fripp can be brilliant at times but the magic formula happened with that lineup (and then later with the expanded “double trio”. By contrast, the early 70’s stuff, which I still love quite a bit, has a more limited palate… and the new KC lineup I’m still unsure about. The album they released a few years ago (not officially “KC”) goes back to that stuffy seriousness that lacks a little too much soul.
I can’t fathom why you disagree with this, when it is both obvious to any lay person and objectively true. The pretentiometer can be used to measure this effect. Horrible horrible stuff.
I loved prog when I was 13. But dude - I’m not 13.
agree! Fish Out of Water is amazing! Steve really lets it all out on his solo stuff. I need to find a USB turntable to make my vinyl of Olias of Sunhillow a 21st C thing. and the Ennio Morricone… and my old Bill Cosby records, the kids would love those!
I hear Jon is touring on some new solo work and playing oldies?
and Yes, i love ELP, Crimson and Belew
Olias is an all time favorite; brilliant stuff.
Jon’s been doing the solo thing for a few years after Yes let him go and touring behind them pretty frequently. He recently ran a successful Kickstarter for an album with his new band with Jean-Luc Ponty, the Anderson Ponty Band, and they’re recording that now.
