The glory (and downfall) of prog rock
Say you’re a rock ’n’ roll fan and you’ve been given a great gift — you can go back 40 years for just one night and hear a classic band at the height of its powers. The catch is that you have to choose between the Ramones and Yes.
If you’re hip and with-it, you’ll immediately leap in the mosh pit for the Ramones, the pioneers of punk. If you have nerd tendencies, you’ll opt for the otherworldly bliss of Yes, the princes of prog. For those in that latter category, David Weigel has written a book just for you, “The Show That Never Ends: The Rise and Fall of Prog Rock.”
The full name is progressive rock, a most unfortunate label. It implied, and many of its practitioners believed, that prog actually was better than other forms of rock, better than Little Richard or Chuck Berry or Elvis or the Beatles. It’s not, but when prog’s done right, it’s as good as anything ever to come out of your speakers or iPod. It’s tough to define, but think of prog as a style that started by brushing up against American rhythm and blues, then veered off sharply toward European classical and folk influences with sidetrips into jazz and psychedelia, the whole blend expanding from three-minute pop songs into sometimes 20-minute complex, electronic sagas. The late-stage Beatles helped start it, and then it went out of control.
As Weigel says, “Humans have spent tens of thousands of years learning to perk up when they hear surprising sounds. You needed to tell a sabertoothed tiger from a gust of wind. So the conflicting attitudes, discordant instrumentation, and jerky rhythms and tempos of prog keep us constantly on edge.”
Weigel presents a history of prog, starting with the genre’s forefather, Franz Liszt. This flamboyant pianist’s legendary showmanship in the 1800s surely inspired 20th-century keyboard wizards such as Keith Emerson and Rick Wakeman. Weigel relates tales of prog originators Soft Machine and the Nice, and he remembers nearly forgotten acts including Gentle Giant and Caravan. He gives plenty of room to the groups that would become giants, such as the Moody Blues, Emerson, Lake & Palmer, Genesis, King Crimson and Pink Floyd. Most of the top bands were British, though some American groups like Kansas made a mark.
Weigel, a national reporter at the Washington Post, doesn’t take his subject too seriously, but he does pay it proper respect — “when the progressives were on, they wrote gooseflesh-raising music. Their follies were grander than anyone else’s follies; their strange epics, stranger and more epic.” It’s likely that Weigel had to make big cuts in his original manuscript, presumably because the publisher didn’t want to put out a book the size of a Tolkien trilogy. Thus there are a few gaps in his narrative where the transitions are too abrupt. Maybe he’ll offer an “extended verson” online.
The first big hit for a prog band probably was “A Whiter Shade of Pale” by Procol Harum in 1967. You can judge its impact by Weigel’s story of Paul McCartney meeting his first wife at a Procol concert. Even though Sir Paul had written some pretty fair songs by then, “A Whiter Shade of Pale” became “their song.”
Back in the day, when most parents detested any kind of rock, a youth could play them some prog and prove to them that groups like Yes were top talents whose members could have been symphony musicians if that had been their calling.
Prog rock was huge in most of the 1970s, filling up stadiums and, at least to its critics, becoming ever more pompous and pretentious, a prototype for “Spinal Tap.” By 1977, punk had emerged and was considered “real” back-to-basics rock. “The downfall of progressive rock happened quickly, with an entire critical establishment seemingly rooting for its demise,” Weigel writes. “In just a year, bands like Yes and Jethro Tull — winners of reader polls for the whole of the 1970s — had become soft punch lines for music writers. Band after band moved away from the complicated songwriting that had defined them. More important, the labels were dumping progressive music as fast as they could.”
Music is all about emotion. Steve Howe of Yes is a better guitarist, technically, than Johnny Ramone, late of the Ramones. Yet Ramone’s head-banging power chords can be just as fulfilling as Howe’s dexterous ramblings. It all depends on your mood. The Ramones are no more, but some makeshift versions of Yes keep going on the road. And as Weigel writes, a prog group from Canada, Rush, is more popular than ever, still selling new music and still progressing.
Long ago, rock fell into the same trap as other musical genres, with its fans dividing it into ever more subgenres, arguing about which is better and expressing contempt for those who disagree. Those folks need to heed the words of jazz great Louis Armstrong, who once said there are only two kinds of music, “the good and the bad. I play the good kind.” So whether it’s classical, rap, bluegrass, soul or Alpine yodeling, prog or punk, if you like it, then it’s the good kind.