Prog Rock

Funny, I'm playing Facebook Scrabble and listening to the new Enslaved as I peer in on this thread...

A little bit annoyed at constant reiteration of the canard that anything using 3 chords is unsophisticated, whereas all "prog" as narrowly defined is the epitomy of questing musicianship

Hmm: with the exception of Carl Palmer, I thought everyone was actually quite reasonable about it. Rick Wakeman made the point well, I thought: it's a very British trait to be embarrassed about/dismissive of technical skill. I mean, using three chords is unsophisticated, really. Trouble is, sophistication does not equate to quality ... the way it seemed to me, watching that, the music just got worse and worse until by the mid-seventies a lot of it wasn't just irritating, smug and showy but irritating, smug, showy and completely and utterly shit. I mean, there was a good reason why Tales From Topographic Ocean became an (unwieldy) byword for all that was awful about music ...

But some of the earlier Yes stuff actually sounded quite interesting, which is something I never thought I'd say. And it reminded me of how much I love King Crimson (Bill Bruford's explanation of the difference between playing in Yes and KC was one of the highlights of the entire programme).

Dude from Egg is a little ... intense, isn't he? And Carl Palmer really is a complete and utter tool. Fucking stainless-steel drum kit. Bell-end.

my 'radiohead' comment was a reference to that crimson song introed by annie nightingale. uncanny.

"Bill Bruford's explanation of the difference between playing in Yes and KC was one of the highlights of the entire programme)."

i couldn't bear to watch the doc so i'd appreciate knowing what this was.

I haven't heard the very earliest Yes albums but Fragile and Close to the Edge are good fun, and very pretty.

Yeh, it was Close to the Edge that piqued my interest. Bruford reckoned he'd achieved everything he wanted to do with Yes with that album, and left straight after.

"Bill Bruford's explanation of the difference between playing in Yes and KC was one of the highlights of the entire programme)."

You'd need to watch it to appreciate the arched-eyebrowed subtletly of his delivery, but his point was that Yes was basically a hippy democracy where absolutely everything was discussed at great length (eg should the bass be F natural with the organ in G# on top, or vice versa) whereas in King Crimson there was none of that: "You were just meant to know". He also said that with KC one was expected to develop a style unique to that group: ie they didn't want Bruford in the band because of what he'd done with Yes, but because what he'd done with Yes suggested that he could do something new and specific for KC.

Interesting, cheers.

Bruford and Wyatt were great, esp the latter - just loved everything Wyatt said and it was worth watching for that alone (the laughed hurt as he talks about he 'failed' as a pop star showing some real hunger there, great little take on the punks who followed on). Shame I never really could get on w/Soft Machine. Crimson rule. I wanted someone to ask Bruford about Cobain. Eno should've been on it as a link between glam and prog. No van der Graaf Generator mention wtf?!

The other people on it were a pathetic bunch, fucking hypocrites, talking about how uncompromising they were and crying when they couldn't get enough groupies! Little Richard knock offs were 10x more 'sophisticated' than most of the music on it.

No mention of anything German either, and Pink Floyd seemed to be the prog elepehant in the room, for whatever reason.

Well, its Prog Britannia. I think the German bands were better because they liked Stockhausen and acknowledged that riffs were good and sonatas were a dead man's game.

They cast Floyd in a pre-prog psychedelic/surrealist mode, along the lines of Pepper.

It was fun but flawed. A discussion of prog's lyrical limitations without a mention of Hammill is pretty much sacrilege, for instance.

I'm, er, acquiring a copy of Close to the Edge as I type. It's taken less than 10 minutes. Wonder if a few other people have been moved to do the same kind of thing this morning?

x-post yes true, and I suppose the German bands could have filled a whole (much better) documentary anyway.

As for Floyd, I personally prefer that earlier mode, but surely their 70s prog stuff shouldn't have been ignored?

Okay I went out on the piss and missed this but no VdGG = obvious fucking same old NME-line repeating BULLSHIT also I'm assuming there was no discussion of the early 80s neo stuff, failure to do which is also BULLSHIT also anything put together from a "whoa wasn't Prog funny and hippy and rong" perspective = BULLSHIT also whoever pointed out that a whole bunch of post-Okey Dokey Computer indie is utterly beholden to Prog for better or worser = BULLSHIT also no Geir = BULLSHIT

And there are more Zeppelin songs about dungeons and dragons than there are Prog songs you cunts

sorry, too furious to point out that whoever pointed out that post Okey Dokey Computer is beholden to Prog was right and if this doc didn't address that then it was eating its own bollocks

there is no "gnome and wizard" shit in the genre to the best of my knowledge.
― Pashmina (Pashmina), Tuesday, 18 May 2004 13:54 (4 years ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

THIS GUY KNOWS WHAT HE's ABOUT

Honest to God, FUCK PUNK and its fuckshit idolators

It didn't really go beyond 1980, apart from some piss-taking footage of Yes playing "Owner of a lonely heart".

I Was a Teenage Armchair Jagger Fan :/

Grimly, what they didn't tell you in their simplistic "every prog band started honourable but got progressively (fnarr) more pretentious and bad" narrative is that Yes' best album came out AFTER "TFTO". Namely the completely overlooked and totally incredible Relayer. CTTE is fucking brilliant too tho, you should definitely lay hold. If only for "And You And I". ;-)

Noodle bringing some heavy jurisdiction.

Relayer didn't feature choice talking-heads Bruford or Wakeman, of course, so it was never going to get a mention.

I'm with your Relayer love LJ, but you cd advance the argument further by citing Going for the One which is canonically a Great Yes Album from 77, before we even have to hit people over the head with 90125's awesomeness in a oh shit mom they're making pop music style.

I love the way shit like this pretends the first 3 or 4 Roxy albums weren't Prog because it doesn't fit the lol behemoths story arc also.

Re the late 70s "OMG punk destroyed prog" bit I thought they could have talked more about the fact that a lot of the punks actually liked prog, e.g. John Lydon, but all we got was Phil Collins talking about Rat Scabies saying he was a big fan of his drumming.

I was a bit surprised about the lack of VdGG. Also no Gong or Here & Now. I guess Hawkwind you could claim are "space rock" and don't count for some reason.

They did mention Roxy Music at one point I think but I was in the kitchen so I can't add much more than that unfortunately (xpost)

Oh yeah, they mentioned Roxy as part of an entirely different thing, without realising that their concrete definitions of prog were BS. It was a very fluid 'movement'. Much like some of the stuff they were spouting.

I don't actually have those two Yes albums, something I gotta rectify. :-/ Also, seriously, no VdGG, no cred, and I've still only got two of their albums. (Still Life is so *perfect* that I can't really imagine anything else living up to it, but I really should investigate.)

I'd look this up online but I'd probably just get annoyed by it. They slagged off prog rock lyrics? Prog rock lyrics are no worse than any other genre's IE 99% is shit as per usual. No prog lyric is worse than "don't look back in anger" anyway. "Going for the One" is v v patchy but OTOH has "Awaken" which I think is hands down the best thing they ever did.

Godbluff I think is better than Still Life, Louis.

You watch footage of any 77 era Punk gig and I guarantee there'll be some longhairs moshing down the front. What's so annoying about the "Punk killed Prog" story is that only the crassest of lazy journos and 17 year-old NME fundamentalists still spout that shit, everybody else knows it's bollocks and can trot out the Lydon loved Hammill story and list the riffs that Magazine copped, before you even begin to think about how Fall-group and Pere Ubu and Television et al make the whole sorry myth ridiculous.

I hear ya re: Godbluff Pash but I'll still rep for Still Life uber alles.

Am now gonna spend the evening trying to make Wii Music prog jams btw

You watch footage of any 77 era Punk gig and I guarantee there'll be some longhairs moshing down the front. What's so annoying about the "Punk killed Prog" story is that only the crassest of lazy journos and 17 year-old NME fundamentalists still spout that shit, everybody else knows it's bollocks and can trot out the Lydon loved Hammill story and list the riffs that Magazine copped, before you even begin to think about how Fall-group and Pere Ubu and Television et al make the whole sorry myth ridiculous.

It was amusing listening to them talk about the "energy" of Punk, having just been exposed to equivalent energy, thrashing riffs and aggressive musicianship from a load of "soft Proggers". The two weren't polar opposites, they were different expressions of the same impulse, and far from fighting one another, they ultimately amplified one another.

Have been really digging Magazine of late fwiw. They maybe merited a mention here. But too concrete, too cliched.

Still Life is actually perfect and devastating from start to finish, ferocious and totally epic. It doesn't feel like they were striving for epicness, it just feels inevitable, like it had to happen that way, even as "La Rossa" or "Childlike Faith..." spiral off into their jawdropping, spectacular closing swells

"Childlike Faith" is back on as my funeral song. I'd guess that the Graafers refused to play ball, or where dismissed as too obscure. Also three of them made a complete fucking headkick of an album this year and there's no footage of them being anything other than thunder gods of the apocalypse so it wouldn't fit into the lol Keith Emerson on a Persian rug arc.

ELP should be fucking written out of music history if it means they give VdGG the airing they deserve

Ah yeah, apparently the 10+ minute song on the new record is absolutely astonishing, and the rest ain't far behind

Ah man ELP are their own thing and I can get with it, they're just as distant from VdGG in one direction as Atomic Rooster are in another. It probly helps to get ELP if you listen to The Nice first, they did a lot of tasty Psych-Pop tunes and are worth hearing even if you do hate ELP.

Incidentally The Nice were allegedly named after the first word heads would say after coughing up their lungs on a doobie, and how Prog is that?

It doesn't help that the only ELP I've heard is that fucking interminable live album. But they just seem to have nothing of VdGG's sophistication, righteousness, majesty.

(Or compositional skill)

Er ... people who didn't watch the doc: don't get pissy about it :)

also anything put together from a "whoa wasn't Prog funny and hippy and rong" perspective = BULLSHIT

Not a fair criticism (unlike some of your others, which are absolutely OTM): it was more from a "why is this so badly maligned, then?" perspective, or even just "OK, let's try to do something about prog in 90 minutes".

They slagged off prog rock lyrics?

Nobody was slagging off anything per se. There was a reasonably short discussion -- led by Tony Banks, IIRC -- about how they tended to look to Greek myth and sci-fi for inspiration because, umm, they were public schoolboys who didn't know any girls. A lot of the "ho ho it wasn't very sexy" or "ho ho he's dressed as a flower" stuff came from the interviewees themselves.

lol Keith Emerson on a Persian rug arc

Not mentioned. Sadly.

17 year-old NME fundamentalists

Ha. See, in 1991 that was me all over. But I have a vivid memory of Mark Radcliffe playing VdGG on Out On Blue Six one night and it blowing my (closed) mind. (I've just had a look and the only VdGG album I appear to have is Pawn Hearts, which surprises me, and suggests I need to go shopping.)

I'll admit I know very little about this stuff, but for fuck's sake: any documentary that inspires me to go and download a Yes album has to be doing something right. Yes, there did appear to be a lot of tooling going on by the mid-seventies, and I still think there's a reasonably good reason that ... Topographic Oceans became a byword for everything that was wrong about music. But fuck it, that was -- despite its flaws -- a bloody good documentary. Go watch.

(ELP, meanwhile ... nah, I've a feeling I was right about them. 1. Carl Palmer was a tool. 2. Greg Lake looked like the most punchable man of the 1970s in every piece of footage they showed.)

Yeah, for me ELP seemed to be the only act deserving of some of the vitriol displayed towards "prog rock" since the 70s. Wakeman is a prat, but a pretty clear-headed prat.

Ach, I thought Rick Wakeman was actually a likeable dude throughout the whole thing.

But yeh, ELP ... comparing Palmer and Bruford is interesting, because you've got the former sitting there looking smug in his daft shirt basically saying: "Yeh, we were making an artistic statement and we were the best thing ever", interspersed with footage of him making a racket on his stainless-steel drumkit and ringing a bell with his teeth ... and then you've got Bruford going: "Yeh, we just wanted to see if we could make more complex music," interspersed with footage of Yes and King Crimson sounding absolutely magnificent.

Only two bits of music they broadcast in that doc I liked = Crimson Hyde Park footage and 'Owner of a Lonely Heart'.

Don't worry its BBC Four they'll repeat this doc another few times and it'll get broadcast on BBC two. After Newsnight, of course.

It surprises me that someone could really like Close to the Edge and also find Tales from Topographic Oceans totally worthless. They're different but not that different to my ears. (And what makes them different certainly isn't the degree of "pomposity" or "self-indulgence".)

I like ELP's "The Barbarian". The Nice = classic.

Well, I've not listened to CTTE yet. I might hate it. And if I love it, I will go, kicking and screaming, to that topographic ocean. I'm basing my desire to hear the former on two things: 1) The fact the bits that were played from it on the documentary sounded top; 2) The fact Bill Bruford repped for it so hard. My dislike of the latter is based, fundamentally, on the fact that anything I've heard from it (including a couple of seconds last night) seemed bloody awful.

It surprises me that someone could really like Close to the Edge and also find Tales from Topographic Oceans totally worthless

Actually: has anyone said this, at any point, ever?

(Actually, yes: it seems several contemporary reviewers did. Ha. And I'm not saying I won't, either.)

Fuck it, I was going to listen to the London Chamber Orchestra playing Vivaldi while I did some work, but I'm going to whack on Yes instead. Here goes ...

GRIMLY'S CLOSE TO THE EDGE LIVEBLOG

1'57" Good grief, this is widdlesome. Not necessarily unpleasantly so.

2'00" Hah, Comedy "aah" noise ... here, they're Battles' granddads, aren't they?

4'00" This is absolutely fucking mental. Again, not necessarily in a bad way.

/mfl

6'31" Some GOOD FUCKING BASS going on here.

11'00" OK, this is patently absurd. But in a really, really good -- and, so far, occasionaly lovely -- way. I'm sold.

11'25" Actually, this bit (I Get Up I Get Down) is a bit like Mercury Rev dream of being. Probably.

12'13 ORGAN!

12'30" If this organ goes on for the next six minutes, I will be a happy dude.