For the love of PROG
The Show That Never Ends: The Rise And Fall Of Prog Rock David Weigel WW Norton €28
First, let us dispel some long marinated prejudices about ‘prog’, the ones often trotted out on the more mirthless clip shows and panel games. Only one progressive rock musician, Rick Wakeman, ever wore a cape and even then there was something archly knowing about this, like his penchant for Watneys, Rolls-Royces and staging Arthurian extravaganzas on ice.
Second, pretty much none of it was about trolls or goblins although, yes, Emerson, Lake and Palmer’s (ELP) second album was a concept suite concerning the war between a robot armadillo and a mythical lion-scorpion hybrid. It was also No 1 for 17 weeks. We shall return to this.
Last, let me declare an interest. I’ve loved progressive rock, or at least the good stuff, since I was 12. This is why I found this book as exasperating as certain tracks by Van Der Graaf Generator: sporadically fascinating but clotted and hard to get through.
‘This is an argument for progressive rock as a grand cultural detour,’ claims Weigel, a US critic, but what this means never becomes clear and he never expresses any great passion for it. In the very next paragraph he states: ‘prog’s reputation has never quite recovered from a series of crises in 1977 and 1978’. This downbeat tone is very much the default state of Weigel’s prose and it’s just plain wrong as an assessment.
A combination of factors – the growth of retro cool, the demise of the fundamentalist music press, the rise of the internet – has meant that the 21st century has been a boom time for prog old and new.
French act Magma, who never had a whiff
of a hit at the time, sold out their recent Manchester shows in a matter of days. Gentle Giant, a band whose crazily, brilliantly skilled mix of the thoughts of Camus, R D Laing and Rabelais with jazz-rock chamber madrigals (yes, that old chestnut) are more feted and hip now than at any time in their life. Muse and Radiohead are prog-rock bands manqués. Weigel finds some juicy bits of gossip in the back issues of the music press (this is the kind of book that used to be called a ‘scissors and paste’ work); Daevid Allen of Gong arguing with Germaine Greer in the bar of Melbourne’s Swanston Hotel; Robert Fripp turning down Greg Lake’s plea to reform King Crimson made in the back of a limo as Fanfare For The Common Man rode high in the charts; Loyd Grossman reviewing ELP’s first album for Rolling Stone magazine thus: ‘Such a good album it is best enjoyed as a whole’, as he would later perhaps say of the ninecourse tasting menu at Le Manoir aux Quat’Saisons. But there is no context, no wider cultural or social theorising. What the detractors forget about ‘prog’ was that as well as being overblown and high-falutin’, it was also mind-bogglingly popular. Jethro Tull’s sales in America dwarfed those of The Rolling Stones. Pink Floyd hogged the top of the album charts for years. ELP, Yes and Genesis filled the stadia of the world at the drop of a wizard’s hat. My favourite quote about King Crimson, one not included here, remarkably, came from drummer Bill Bruford: ‘What I loved about being in Crimson is that you could play in 15/8 time and still stay in decent hotels.’ More of this kind of playfulness and savvy would have made this a lot more fun, almost as much as prog itself was and is.