Advanced Progressive (For Beginners) [Guest DJ Malcolm Garrett]
17th November, 2008Podcast - listen now!
We hand over to Mr. Malcolm Garrett again this time for a pretty special selection of tunes. This is a real grower, and for those of you who don’t buy albums any more this will remind you of the joys of a well constructed tracklist, it’ll grow on you - I guarantee. A lot of consideration has gone into these tunes and as ever, his words are better than mine:
There was once a time (as the sixties turned into the seventies) when pretty much all music that wasn’t classified as pop, classical, jazz, or (the dreaded) easy listening, was known simply as ‘underground‘ or ‘progressive‘.
Everything contemporary, unusual and otherwise unclassifiable found its way into a rack in the record store that was labelled just ‘progressive‘. Naturally this was the principal place I would look for anything exciting or challenging. I would return to the same few stores in Manchester and thumb through the same collections of discs week by week, wondering whether or not to buy a particular disc, invariably one adorned with a curious image and with an esoteric sounding title, trying to decide if the music would be as enjoyably intriguing as the sleeve. There was no internet to aid research, so almost everything I sampled was based on personal recommendation, or a lead from an enthusiastic NME or Melody Maker review. More often than not I simply bought it on a whim, or after a cursory listen to a track or two in the listening booths still installed in the better stores.
Faced with a mixed lot of largely unknown and previously unheard discs, and with precious little guidance, it is remarkable that most albums I picked up were by and large fresh and eminently listenable. Some of what I found was truly progressive, in a way that I don’t think has been heard since. The world of music really was opening up. In that first explosion of audio experimentation, I discovered things that are genuinely timeless, and so, with the passing of time, here I am still listening.
A cautionary note, however. Please do not confuse ‘progressive‘ with ‘Prog’. At some sad time in the early- to mid-seventies, the likes of Emerson, Lake & Palmer, Rick Wakeman and Yes would appear to have embarked upon a willful and systematic ruination of the genre. With each new album they recorded longer and longer pieces, but for no discernible benefit, and with less and less musical discipline or charm. Often they had fairly meaningless ‘concepts’ underlying them, in an attempt to imbue them with some sort of higher musical significance.
Thus it was that the perfectly acceptable, and suitably descriptive, tag of ‘progressive‘ was mercilessly shortened to simply ‘Prog’ rock. This was a quite different term for what was quite different music altogether, albeit springing from similar origins. This rather pejorative term has lingered in the collective memory as one which not only sums up this other largely unpleasant musical backwater, but sadly has also besmirched the heritage and credibility of musically sophisticated recordings such as the ones to be heard in this collection.
What we have in this playlist, by way of clarification, is mostly work from those early days of ‘progressive‘, and is definitely not what I would call ‘Prog’. This, instead, is from the time when pop seemed to turn to rock almost overnight, and the LP found favour as a preferred medium to the 3 minute single, which by then was already somewhat redolent of the first psychedelic era. A later playlist will address more directly the transition from pop single to rock LP track, but these recordings are definitely album material only. They are somewhat longer than 3 minutes, no longer constrained by 7″ vinyl nor daytime radio restrictions, and whilst they feature extended instrumental passages, and are musically quite complex, they display a sparkling sense of musical invention. The basic instrumentation of electric guitar, bass, drums was augmented first with keyboards, then often with wind and strings, and most significantly, with their electronic counterpart: the magnificent mellotron.
This collection begins and ends with pieces by Van der Graaf Generator, who are archetypal ‘progressive‘, and a band truly without equal. The opener ‘Man Erg’, from their opus ‘Pawn Hearts’, has been played continuously by me since its release in 1971, and it still chills me with its haunting presence. The last piece is an impassioned live rendition of ‘Childlike Faith in Childhood’s End’, which was the closing track from the penultimate Van der Graaf album, ‘Still Life’, before they called it a day in 1976, and laid the way clear for Punk.
I could write much more about the other songs in this list, and detail my reasons for selecting them, but I’m hoping that you’ll discover and enjoy this music with that same spirit of enquiry that I did first time around.
Tracklisting
Man Erg - Van Der Graaf Generator
Stagnation - Genesis
In The Land Of Grey And Pink - Caravan
Cirkus - King Crimson
Hollow Stone (Escape OF The Space Pirates) - Khan
Tropical Fish: Selene - Gong
Symphony No. 2 (3rd Movement) - Egg
Nothing Is Easy - Jethro Tull
Alucard - Gentle Giant
Starship Trooper: Life Seeker/Disillusionment/Wurm - Yes
Instant Kitten - Matching Mole
Death Walks Behind You - Atomic Rooster
Childlike Faith At Childhood’s End - Van De Graaf Generator
While your track listing is impressive, you are wrong to disparage ELP and YES, two of my great prog rock favorites. They are critical to prog rock and moreover they are gateways to other genres such as classical and jazz. Your little lesson omits at least three seminal prog works that cannot be ignored in order to explain the genre to a larger audience.
1 Larks Tongues in Aspic (King Crimson)
2 Tarkus (Emerson, Lake and Palmer) and
3 Musical Box (Genesis)
There are more (I love Yes’s Relayer) but these three opened up other genres LTIA is an ode to classical music if there ever was one. The keyboard passages in Tarkus owe much to blues and of course jazz. The Musicial Box is pure theatrics made all the more attractive by Peter Gabriel’s talent. All in all it was the musicianship that marked prog rock, something that’s lacking in today’s music.
Lefty
Hi Lefty
Thanks for your reply. Nice to hear someone is listening already!
One small, but rather significant point, that you may have chosen to miss is that my collection is of what was initially called ‘progressive’ music, and in this way is not at all concerned with ‘Prog’, which is what much music from that period became. Hence some of the exclusions you complain of. This was quite deliberate on my part.
In my notes I endeavoured to clarify this distinction between ‘progressive’ and ‘Prog’. I think this is a very important distinction to make, as in my view ‘Prog’ came to represent a very specific and somewhat constrained genre, and for me the musicians I most appreciated went elsewhere as time went on.
For this reason it is certainly ‘Prog’ that I was disparaging towards. I have no problem repeating that ELP and Yes, following promising beginnings, would appear to my ears to have embarked upon a willful and systematic ruination of the very musical inventiveness that marked their earlier works.
It is into this latter category that I would place their later works, reserving the broader ranging term ‘progressive’ for a much greater variety of bands, and especially for works that are less pompous than say ‘Brain Salad Surgery’ by ELP, ‘Tales From Topographic Oceans’ by Yes, or ‘The Myths and Legends of King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table’ by Rick Wakeman. I stopped listening to any new albums by these bands quite early on, but I have of course included ‘Starship Trooper’ from ‘The Yes Album’ which in my opinion is a much, much better work by Yes.
It’s obvious that Keith Emerson (even in his prior incarnation as The Nice) and Rick Wakeman both displayed pretentions towards being appreciated as ‘Classical’ musicians, composers, and above all as soloists. The relatively unasssuming Robert Fripp, on the other hand, went on to make many inventive and varied albums, ‘Larks Tongues in Aspic’ included, both as King Crimson and with many other collaborators, playing his part in making music with others, rather than surrounding himself with supporting musicians as he laboured over yet another solo.
This is already a long playlist, and time constraints necessarily restricted me to but one track from some of my favourite artists, such as Genesis and King Crimson. There are indeed a great many exclusions that many listeners would lament, myself included, all made in the interests of variety, and as an attempt to introduce a certain level of surprise even for afficianados such as yourself.
Whilst ‘The Musical Box’ would absolutely make it onto anybody’s list of the best of Genesis tracks, I felt it was a bit of an obvious choice, and preferred to direct listeners towards their lesser known debut album, before they had hit their stride. In the case of King Crimson, I find the LP ‘Lizard’ a particularly adventurous exploration and layering of musical styles. It displays a remarkable fusion of rock, jazz and other musical forms, the like of which I had not heard before (nor since), and felt quite justified in choosing the opening track ‘Cirkus’ as being representative of that album, whilst hinting at some of the power of early tracks such as ’21st Century Schizoid Man’.
I agree with you about a perceived loss of musicianship in contemporary music, and this list was intended as a (personal) reference point and introduction to a wide variety of musicians and bands, who between them created a vast array of musical delights. Where you take it from here is up to you.
Thanks for listening,
Malcolm.
PS. I will try to add some notes to the above track listing, and offer some further recommendations, at a later date.
Malcolm Garrett