by David Weigel
Every cruiser deals in his own way with the pervasive absurdity. “I’ve never been on a cruise ship,” says Mark Kelly, the keyboard player for Marillion, which along with Yes, is the week’s big draw. “It’s nice—when you’re in the theater, you could be anywhere. Well, apart from the slight side-to-side movement.”
There are cynics on board, but they begin to melt too. Two of the less storied acts onboard are Three Friends and Soft Machine Legacy—continuations of the iconic Gentle Giant and Soft Machine, respectively. Three Friends pack every room solid with renditions of intricate, baroque-inspired music. The Legacy spellbinds the small Black and White Lounge with improvisational jazz fusion.
“Roy Babbington is a big figure on bass,” says Jim Meneses, a drummer and experimental—or “new music”—artist from Philadelphia. “Obviously, the drummer is a big deal too. Programwise, this is very hip, in this setting, on this goddamn boat with Yes next door and Queensrÿche upstairs.”
But the big draw remains the least surprising. Yes had preceded the cruise with a series of lucrative shows that featured no new music. They had jumped aboard the trend of playing entire albums in single goes—something they’d done decades before that was trendy, when all eighty minutes of Tales from Topographic Oceans pummeled the audiences of 1973 and 1974. “It adds some excitement for the audience, in terms of knowing what the next track is, of knowing which track follows the other,” bassist Chris Squire says, cheerfully. “It’s a good concept.”
The unquiet secret of Cruise to the Edge is that the concept doesn’t quite come off. By playing three classic albums, note for note, Yes makes the muffed notes more noticeable. A video before each forty-minute block is synced to “The Firebird,” the Stravinsky-inspired song that Yes used to play on stage. The composer’s strings would build, and shudder, and then the band would stroll in, grabbing the melody to toss it elsewhere.
Nice touch. Maybe a bit sepulchral now. On the walk from the theater to one of the all-night lounges, you can hear megafans grumble about what went wrong.
They make the best of it. Every night, a too-small bar near the ship’s main theater is co-opted for a “prog jam.” This is not tipsy karaoke; it is a meticulously organized cycle of cover songs, planned months in advance, with the amateur players hauling their instruments onboard. Greg Bennett, a Florida musician with the nom de plume “Jack the Riffer,” even brings his business cards.
The anorak bands are tight, and word spreads. On the second-to-last night of the cruise, they play “The Gates of Delirium,” Yes’s longest and most melodically complex song, inspired by War and Peace and grounded by Squire’s floor-rumbling bass lines. Squire and his family walk in on the performance, unannounced. The crowd grows. A casino just one floor down is nearly empty; the bar at the back of the boat is the only place to be. Squire sits on a wraparound leather couch, listening to people who grew up on his music play through every note as if it were an orchestral score. He dabs away tears. When the performance ends—twenty-two minutes later—he leads the standing ovation.
1
CHILDREN OF THE BLITZ
The British music press simply did not get it. In the second week of May 1840, the Hungarian-born piano virtuoso Franz Liszt alighted in London to begin his first tour of England. He was twenty-eight years old and had little left to prove on the mainland. His prodigy had blossomed into genius. Later that year he played in Hamburg, where the audience included the poet and fairy tale adapter Hans Christian Andersen.
No grasper for words, Andersen struggled to describe what he’d seen. “The instrument appears to be changed into a whole orchestra; this is produced by ten fingers which possess an expertness that may be called fanatical,” he wrote. “When Liszt had ceased playing, flowers showered around him: beautiful young girls, and old ladies who had once been young and beautiful, cast each her bouquet. He had cast a thousand bouquets of tones into their hearts and heads.”1
Liszt had had the same plan for London. After a solo debut at the Hanover Square Rooms—walking where Bach had walked, playing where Bach had played—he joined the full philharmonic. Liszt adapted Carl Maria von Weber’s Konzertstück in F Minor; “passages were doubled, tripled, inverted, and transmogrified.” This was not the right way to play it, yet somehow it was celebrated like a conquest. “Liszt has been presented by the Philharmonic Society with an elegant silver breakfast service, for doing that which would cause every young student to receive a severe reprimand—viz., thumping and partially destroying two very fine pianofortes,” marveled the short-lived Musical Journal.2
Europe had seen prodigies before. In his work, Liszt poured all the history of the composers who had come before him. When explaining his craft, he could come off like a madman. “For a whole fortnight my mind and my fingers have been working like two lost souls,” Liszt wrote to a pupil. “Homer, the Bible, Plato, Locke, Byron, Hugo, Lamartine, Chateaubriand, Beethoven, Bach, Hummel, Mozart, Weber are all around me. I study them, meditate on them, devour them with fury; besides this, I practice four to five hours of exercises (thirds, sixths, octaves, tremolos, repetition of notes, cadenzas, etc.) Ah! Provided I don’t go mad, you will find in me an artist.”3
So he was, and the momentum built wherever he played. “His portrait was worn on brooches and cameos,” wrote Liszt biographer Alan Walker. “Swooning lady admirers attempted to take cuttings of his hair, and they surged forward whenever he broke a piano string in order to make it into a bracelet. Some of these insane female ‘fans’ even carried glass phials about their persons into which they poured his coffee dregs. Others collected his cigar butts, which they hid in their cleavages.”4
The next year, as Liszt toured the continent, the skeptical critic O. G. Sonneck struggled to understand what was new about this: “Strange, thought I, these Parisians, who have seen Napoleon, who had to win one battle after another in order to hold their attention! Now they are acclaiming our Franz Liszt.”5
Sonneck consulted a doctor, a specialist in “female diseases,” and asked him to explain the power of music played this way. “[He] smiled in the strangest manner,” wrote Sonneck, “and at the same time said all sorts of things about magnetism, galvanism, electricity, of the contagion of a close hall filled with countless wax lights and several hundred perfumed and perspiring human beings, of historical epilepsy, of the phenomenon of tickling, of musical cantherides, and other scabrous things.”6
The doctor could not define the condition. The writer could. This was “Lisztomania,” a frenzy induced by music—surely some kind of a fluke.
POPULAR MUSIC, in the century before rock and roll, was bolder than it had ever been. Folk music, with its simple chords and grab-and-go instrumentation, had always existed outside the strictures of “professional” music. All of these features appeared in early rock; the roots of progressive rock went into the nineteenth century, and earlier. “The progressive rock piano style is marked by virtuoso scalar runs and rolling arpeggios in the right hand, arpeggiated or melodically active accompaniments in the left hand, grandiose block chords, and sustained, impressionist chordal backdrops that make ample use of the damper pedal,” wrote the music theorist Edward Macan, in a successful attempt to explain the linkage.7
Some classical music echoed especially loudly in the progressive era. The decades in which Liszt played and composed were marked by increasingly complex musical forms. The end of the nineteenth century saw a kind of reaction begin. Liszt, inspired by the composer Hector Berlioz, came up with the “tone poem,” a classical-music type that abandoned form to follow an idea within one movement. “In the so-called classical music the return and development of themes is determined by formal rules which are regarded as inviolable,” Liszt wrote in 1855. “In program music, in contrast, the return, change, variation and modulation of the motives is conditioned by their relation to a poetic idea.”8
Composers began looking to folk music or other sources of more digestible melody; Modest Mussorgsky was one of the first. In 18
74 he composed a suite of songs called Pictures at an Exhibition. The melody of its theme, “Promenade,” was unbarred; other sections relied on block chords, with the sound of church music. “Musorgsky’s music I send to the devil,” Tchaikovsky told one of his brothers, coincidentally also named Modest. “It is the most vulgar and vile parody on music.”9
At the start of the twentieth century, that opinion was shared by every well-meaning defender of the old music. In his Summary of the History and Development of Mediaeval and Modern European Music, a primer meant to be definitive, C. Hubert H. Parry warned English readers that the sort of music Mussorgsky wrote—any ecstatic classical music with colors of folk music—was cultural poison.10
“The qualities of races but little advanced from primitive temperamental conditions are even more conspicuous in the Russian music which has almost submerged the world, especially England, in the closing years of the century,” Parry wrote, despondently. “The music has naturally appealed to the awakening intelligence of the musical masses by vehement emotional spontaneity, orgiastic frenzy, dazzling effects of colour, barbaric rhythm, and unrestrained abandonment to physical excitement which is natural to the less developed races.”11
That was the point, however diligently the critics decided to miss it. The flamboyance of Liszt outlived the composer; the deconstruction of classical music, without any departure from craft, continued in the twentieth century. A turning point came in 1913, when the composer Igor Stravinsky, just thirty-one, wrote The Rite of Spring and trained an orchestra to get over its disbelief and play it.
Stravinsky’s experiments with tone and melody challenged classical music, without entirely changing it. Progressive rock, which would not come into existence for more than fifty years, grew up in Stravinsky’s shadow. Introduced to the music as children, or as adults who sought something outside of the rock tropes, the prog rockers came to see The Rite of Spring as proof of experimentation’s fruits. “I didn’t, and don’t, have the technical qualifications or capacity to ‘know’ what was involved,” Fripp recollected in 2001. “We might recall that the young Stravinsky of The ROS didn’t ‘know’ what he was doing either: for him it was more an instinctive and intuitive process.”12
Some of the early-twentieth-century’s music stayed closer to the lines but found new power in repetitive sounds. Maurice Ravel began writing Boléro, which he called “a piece for orchestra without music,” by hitting one key on a piano, repeatedly, until the hook was infectious.13
Karlheinz Stockhausen, a German composer who started publishing in the 1950s, went even further in collecting influences. In 1958, Stockhausen joined friends at a club to see Count Basie. He marveled at the spontaneous invention, watching Basie extend a song until his singer ran out of words and started making sounds in time with the music. “For two hours I listened intently to music being played with incomparable skill,” Stockhausen recalled, excitedly describing the act. “It taught me a lot, both about instrumentation and about playing technique.”14
In “How Time Passes By,” an essay from the same period, Stockhausen imagined a technological advance that could allow new music to be written over the limitations of analog. He envisioned a key on which, “if one presses only very lightly, the oscillation keeps a constant phase—the pitch remains the same. The heavier the pressure, the more irregular become the phase-relationships and the more indeterminate the pitch.”
“It is impossible to say how long we shall have to wait,” wrote Stockhausen, “but one may expect that some day such an instrument will exist.”15
CHRISTOPHER DAVID ALLEN was born in Melbourne in January 1938, a couple of years and thousands of miles away from the pop mainstream. “I was a teen Beat Gen jazz & poetry performer in late 1950s Melbourne and there were very few venues other than those we created ourselves,” Allen remembered. Local drinking laws closed down bars at 6 p.m., but Allen gravitated toward the artist scene at the Swanston Family Hotel. “A youthful and indomitable Germaine Greer was the chief obstacle to masculine superiority. I lost every debate I ever started with her.”16
The displaced bohemian sought an escape route, and then found it. In 1957, he obtained an “immaculately maintained 1928 long chassis Lancia convertible” and sold it to a priest, for enough money to get him to Europe. “It broke down quite thoroughly under its new owner several hundred yards down the road,” said Allen. “This event strengthened my innate atheism considerably.”
Allen kept trying, and by 1960 he had a ticket on the Patris ocean liner, which could get him from Australia to Greece. “My sole ambition was to roam the central nervous system of world creativity until I found the cities where inspiration was peaking at that moment,” he recalled. “I wanted to ride the unpredictable waves of art’s contemporary cutting edge and feed off its juices.”
The quest took him to England, where, under the new name Daevid (he would never change it back) Allen took up lodging with two other Swanston Family Hotel exiles who had stowed away on the ship. All of them slid easily into the Beat scene; Allen even met William Burroughs. Pale and tall, Allen was a natural musician—untrained, but aware of what his audience wanted.
“He wanted me to play music at his poetry readings—I was a jazzer back then—so he suggested we first go up to his room where he got behind this desk like some Brooklyn insurance salesman,” recalled Allen. “ ‘Well, Daevid,’ he said, ‘there are two ways of doing this. One way will take ten minutes, the other will take the rest of your life.’ I assumed the first way might have involved sodomy so I opted for the latter.’ ”17
Allen quickly switched directions. “I wanted to find a cheap rental in the countryside to develop my new fascination for free jazz,” he said. Inside an issue of the center-left New Statesman, he saw an ad for a rental in the town of Lydden, near Canterbury, a country town southeast of London. The Wellington House, another community of artists, had a room. A fifteen-year-old Robert Wyatt lived there with his parents. “I went down to see the family and I immediately saw Robert,” Allen told a journalist. “The first thing we did is look at each other’s record collections, and they were almost identical.”18
Allen had met just the right teenager. He remembered “an intellectual equality”19 with Wyatt, who had been experimenting with music for years, to the bemusement of his psychologist father and journalist mother. “I took up violin early on,” Wyatt would recall, “but when I swapped it for trumpet he [Wyatt’s father] was horrified. He said, ‘There aren’t any great concertos for a trumpet.’ ”20
At the Simon Langton Grammar School for Boys, between bouts of boredom, Wyatt had befriended Hugh Hopper after a fight that started pointlessly and ended harmlessly. “His parents were Conservative, mine were Labour, so we had a fight,” according to Wyatt.21 He’d met Mike Ratledge, a keyboard player two years his senior, after the prefect asked to borrow a Cecil Taylor record that Wyatt happened to own.
There was no band yet; there was only a circle of artists collaborating and whiling the night away with parties at Wellington House. In 1961, the house got its first visit from a seventeen-year-old guitarist named Kevin Ayers, who had come east to Canterbury after a drug arrest. “The magistrate said I should leave London because it was obviously a bad influence,” he explained.22
Wyatt was fifteen years old when Daevid Allen dropped his bags at the door. We were “the same intellectual age,” Allen said, by way of mocking himself and sincerely praising the young musician.23
“I couldn’t understand reading music, and I wasn’t getting better,” Wyatt said. “I thought, ‘I suppose I could learn to do that, but I really don’t want to. I want to stop right now.’ So I just decided to try and do that. It was just a practical decision.”24
What he “decided” was to attempt suicide, by downing the sleeping pills his father took for the pain of his multiple sclerosis. He survived; he transferred to art college. Nothing altered Wyatt’s momentum until he visited the poet and author Robert Graves, an old friend, at his ho
me in Mallorca. “There were always lots of people around, and everybody had to do something at these meals,” recalled Wyatt. “I used to do vocal percussion duets.”25
When Wyatt returned, he relocated to London. There was a place to stay with Kevin Ayers and Hugh Hopper. “It was quite a big room, with a permanent smell of hot curry coming up the staircase and a pregnant prostitute in a little room next door.”26
Daevid Allen had moved to London too. He quickly convinced Wyatt and Hopper to complete his Daevid Allen Trio, an avant-garde jazz group, which was promptly ejected by managers wondering why a man was reciting Beat poetry over the music. An audience settling in for “Song of the Jazzman” heard a shuffling beat obscured by clear-ringing Allen doggerel.
“I am a bird, with aching claws,” he would talk-sing. “I am a moon and the evening stars and I can’t find the sky.” Allen was predating psychedelia by half a decade. There is a problem with being too early for a scene. “We probably did sound pretty damned awful,” said Hugh Hopper.27
When the band splintered, Wyatt returned to his wanderings. He joined Allen in Paris, where the poet-jazzer had reunited with Burroughs. The minimalist composer Terry Riley, a newer arrival, had joined the group for a life that varied “from the houseboat to the beat hotel.”28 Riley took over a newspaper delivery job when Allen grew sick of it; Riley taught Allen about tape loops, as Allen taught Riley about everything else.
“Daevid was a much hipper guy than me,” Riley told the journalist Anil Prasad years later. “He was more into the Beat and pre-hippie scenes. I was a straight UC Berkeley graduate who experimented a lot with weird music, so we had that connection. I educated him about musical ideas and he showed me things about the free bohemian life you could lead in Paris. I really liked Daevid’s fantasy drawings, poems, and the funny Australian language elements he’d use. It was captivating for me. He was very influential on me. He showed me a new kind of life, even though his was chaos.”29