The Show That Never Ends

by David Weigel

  Paris proved more welcoming to the musical improvisers. Wyatt, as Riley remembered, fit right in. “He had a trumpet with him with a turned-up bell, like the one Dizzy Gillespie played,” remembered Riley. “I had a little spinet piano there and as I remember, the three of us spent the afternoon jamming.”30

  By 1965, when Allen and Wyatt returned to Britain, the culture had started to open up. The music was still derivative. But that could change.

  THEY WERE BORN in the first years after the Blitz. They grew up in the growing shadow of London, or in a countryside that was being repopulated and reorganized under the newness of the welfare state. Their parents, in many cases, had fought in the war and rescued prosperity and opportunity for their children. They were English, at the exact moment when invocation of the word no longer instilled confidence.

  “The only reason I’ve been able to come up with as to why we became musicians was because there wasn’t anything to rebel or fight against,” remembered future King Crimson drummer Michael Giles, raised near Portsmouth, well south of London. “We weren’t doing it with another agenda as a means to escape. If we were seeking to escape, then it would have been from a kingdom of nothingness.”31

  Many of the musicians who became “progressive” said the same. Keith Emerson was raised only a short distance away, in Worthing, a seaside town equipped with cold beaches, algae, pensioners, and not much else. “The elderly came there in droves to die,” Emerson would recall. “Once there they conveniently forgot to.”32

  The circle expanded. Not very far from Worthing was the town of Wimborne Minster, where Robert Fripp had entered the world, and where he first learned to be an isolated, bored youth. “I suppose when you’re young you think it’s a fault not having friends,” Fripp said, with a shrug, to one interviewer. He corrected that instinct.33

  Gordon Haskell, a Fripp classmate with his own musical ambitions, diagnosed his friend’s life as “strange” and distant. “His mother and father didn’t seem to share their life with him and so he was left to his own devices.”34

  Other children, growing up around the same time, were more naturally outgoing and naturally inaugurated into music. The Shulman brothers, Derek and Ray, grew up in Portsmouth—their father had been stationed there during the war, and decided to relocate—in what Ray called a house “full of musicians and middle-aged dropouts.”35 Tony Banks grew up in Sussex, with a mother who introduced him to music through her piano.36 In Canterbury, George Ellidge introduced his son Robert to music, only to watch the trainee drift into jazz.37

  Jazz was easier to come across than the first stirrings of rock and roll. In Hounslow, an anonymous borough of London, the young Phil Collins heard commercial pop on Radio Luxembourg and drummed along to the music he saw on TV: “I play whenever possible.”38 Peter Brockbanks asked for an instrument from his musician father, and got a ukulele. “Whenever a guitar player was on,” said Brockbanks (who later shortened his name to Banks), “like Lonnie Donegan, I’d be glued to the screen, and just watching what his fingers would do.”39

  Television, with its carefully selected windows into the attainable culture, introduced countless young Brits to new sounds. “Around the age of twelve or thirteen I had come under the way of jazz,” Bill Bruford would say. It “was being broadcast on BBC TV every Saturday night.”40

  The Church of England was another common tutor for the boys growing up in postwar England. Its inheritance included the popular hymns that wedded the previous century’s music to lyrics with the ambition to be timeless. Greg Lake, growing up on the seacoast, remembered the power that “Jerusalem” carried even when the message did not move him. “ ‘Bring me my bow of burning gold / Bring me my arrows of desire’—what a fantastic line,” Lake would say. “All Brits love that song.”41

  “Those songs were terrific,” said Bruford of the Church of England’s music. “I still think they’re great. Wonderful bits of writing for the popular common man to sing.”42

  Tony Banks would attend chapel every day. “Twice on Sundays,” Banks said. “There were half a dozen real favorites amongst the classic hymns, with some wonderful melodies such as ‘Dear Lord and Father of Mankind.’ . . . That sort of thing was an influence on the way Genesis wrote, there’s no doubt about it. There’s something about hymns, they’re simple and they’re direct but they have a kind of connection.”43

  Greg Lake remembered seamen in the British navy bringing guitars ashore. “The local kids would buy the guitars and they would also buy records since a lot of those came over off the boats too,” he said. “And there you have the leaping off point really for British rock music.”44

  The first records that the young Robert Fripp purchased were typical of the prevailing trends: Hound Dog and Singing the Blues. He got a guitar at Christmas, learning it right-handed: “Rock at 11, trad at 13, modern jazz at 15.”45

  But he found the rock style limiting, even then. “When I was eleven,” said Fripp to an interviewer years later, “I understood that the conventional methods for teaching guitar were poor. Good rock ’n’ roll guitarists have always refused to take lessons. This symptom proved that guitar manuals were inefficient. At 13, I was teaching guitar. At 14, I drew my own exercises.”46

  Fripp sought out new teachers wherever he could. “I took lessons from Don Strike who was a very good player in the Thirties’ style,” he said. “At one time, I bought a good standard flamenco guitar and decided to take up finger style. A little while later I had ten lessons from a jazz guitarist. I don’t, however, feel myself to be a jazz guitarist, a classical guitarist, or a rock guitarist. I don’t feel capable of playing in any one of those idioms, which is why I felt it necessary to create, if you like, my own idiom.”47

  By the early 1960s, anyone comfortable with the rock idiom was doing just fine. Ian Anderson, born in Scotland but growing up in Blackpool, remembered his very credible reason for needing to start a band: girls flocked to bands. “All these fantastic birds, long hair, made up, false eyelashes and things, crowding round this group of scabby, spotty teenagers,” marveled Anderson.48

  As professional bands changed the culture, the slightly younger cohort found themselves playing covers and filling teen dance halls. “I remember doing a lot of Tamla Motown stuff like ‘Knock on Wood,’ which we thought was crap,” remembered Tony Wilkinson, the sax player in Anderson’s band.49

  The more interesting sounds were found in jazz music, but the first-wave progressive musicians came to that at different speeds. Ian McDonald got a head start. When he was very young, he watched The Glenn Miller Story and was captivated by the moment when Miller, played by Jimmy Stewart, rewrites a trumpet part for clarinet.

  “I know it sounds corny,” McDonald said, years later, “but as a kid, I thought: ‘That’s what I want. I want to find my sound. I want that moment for myself.’ ”50 He found it after seeing an ad in a music paper that read something like “Band Musicians Wanted, 15 Years Old.” He was fifteen and a half, and answering the ad got him thrown into the military to play in a band.

  “All this stuff was happening in swinging London, and all this rock music was happening, and I wanted to be part of it,” he said. Instead, he was in the jungle, teaching himself music theory, learning to play the piano and saxophone. “We did concerts where there was everything from classical overtures to show tunes, Broadway tunes and pop classics,” said McDonald.51 It was not immediately clear how that would play in rock.

  THE TWO DISCIPLINES that would create progressive rock were growing in tandem, and nearly in secret. A teenaged Keith Emerson was learning the first discipline when he attended further-education classes at Worthing College. Joining the Worthing Youth Swing Orchestra was an obvious decision, and a revelation. He had not known what he did not know. “He selected a piano chart from a pile and asked me to play it,” Emerson said of an instructor. “I’d never seen music like this before. It was full of strange lettering above each of the bars. What was a Gm7?”52

  Emer
son found an ad in Melody Maker for a jazz piano course, and each week he would get chord charts in the mail. He would learn the cycles, mail his work back, and open the mail again to find it corrected. When he felt ready, he formed the Keith Emerson Trio. It would have been impossible to do anything else.

  “I used to work in a bank for two years, and this was enough to fuck my head up,” Emerson would tell an interviewer. “I used to go there every day and I used to listen to all the normals say; ‘I’m getting out of here, man, this summer comes, I’m splitting!’ And I never used to say a damn thing. . . . I just got out of there and I’m fucking glad that I did.”53

  One morning in the early ’60s, at the Organ Center shop in the southern England city of Portsmouth, Keith Emerson arrived with £200 to spend on a keyboard. He had options. But he got distracted by something bigger, more beautiful, and beyond his means. “There it was,” he remembers in his autobiography, “resplendent in beautiful shining mahogany—the Hammond L-100 electric organ! I played it.” He heard the warm tones, engineered to sound like they came from pipes, but with distinctive warm hums. “That was the sound.”54

  Emerson had noodled around with the Hammond before. The L-100, rolled out in 1961, imitated the sound of a church organ by placing ninety-six metal tone wheels in front of ninety-six electromagnetic pickups. The tone wheels rotated, charging the pickups, generating the sound. Two keyboards shared space with nine “drawbars.” Move the bars, change the sound of your notes. Jazz musicians used this feature, as did (somewhat less inspirationally) the nice old ladies who played during the dull sections of ballgames.

  Some people could afford to put the cost of a small car into an organ. Emerson couldn’t. But he had all the training, years of piano and music lessons. The Royal College of Music had offered him a place, which he had turned down, working instead for a bank, gigging with jazz and rock groups. Emerson contemplated what the Hammond could do for him. Could he quit the bank gig full-time? His father, who had joined him on the shopping trip, broke in—“You’ve got to have it”—and paid the price difference.55

  Meanwhile, in Canterbury, the refugees of Mallorca formed a new group, the Wilde Flowers. Wyatt played drums, Hopper played bass, Kevin Ayers was on vocals and guitar, and Hopper’s brother Brian played a second guitar. The group eschewed Daevid Allen’s dark goofball antics for grounded rock-and-roll music. Debuting in January 1965, the Wilde Flowers had a repertoire that included cover songs like “Johnny B. Goode” and “You Really Got Me,” with occasional jazz flourishes inspired by Coltrane and Ellington and Monk.

  The noodling behind poems, and the angry looks from confused bookers, were left behind. The new band wrote and played original songs that followed pop formats. “I had not yet come to terms with such bourgeois concepts as keeping time and singing in tune,” joked Wyatt. Really, none of the players had.56

  Ayers, whose long hair and smoldering looks made him seem a natural front man, had a limited and laconic singing voice. After the band’s fourth gig, Ayers took flight again—for Mallorca.

  Fronted by a new singer, Graham Flight, the band took every chance to strike out. On July 10 the Wilde Flowers, led by Allen and Wyatt, played for a “near empty” Kingsmead Stadium, at the Canterbury Jazz and Folk Festival. Undaunted, the band adopted an idea inspired by jazz and pushed by Hugh Hopper: a “continuous set,” with song flowing into song, and no momentum-killing breaks for tuning.

  “Originally the idea started by linking together some of the jazz numbers that had similar riffs and patterns,” said Brian Hopper. “Then we extended the format to other numbers and eventually more and more of each set.” One reason it worked, and one reason it was necessary, was the sort of gigs that the Wilde Flowers got. They played “late into the night, where it seemed natural to let one number flow into another to keep the ravers and dancers going.”57

  The trick was perfectly suited to the gigs. It papered over the lack of success the group was having in getting anyone to cut a deal with them. “We did the experimental-type stuff with Daevid and his friends for years,” said Robert Wyatt. “Then we tried pop music and we couldn’t really do that properly either, so we had to make up our own sort of music.”58

  On Easter Sunday 1966, Robert Graves blessed the holiday parade. Among the blessed was Wes Brunson, an optometrist from Oklahoma who, like the rest of the instant clique, had come to the island to find himself. As reporter Graham Bennett would tell it, “The trip encouraged Wes to explain to Kevin in great detail how he had been instructed in a vision to serve God, preferably by using his wealth to broadcast the coming of the New Age.”59

  Daevid Allen had the same vision. He needed money to start a new-age band in England. Right away, he called Hugh Hopper with the offer. “We’re going to start a pop group and make a thousand pounds,” Allen informed the bass player. “Do you want to come in?”60

  He did. Together, Allen, Wyatt, Ayers, and Hopper, joined by a Mallorca-scene guitarist named Larry Nowlin, formed Mister Head. The group first played live in August 1966, at the Midsummer Revels gathering in Coombe Springs, joined at last by Mike Ratledge on keyboards. “The harmonic possibilities of the band started to open out,” said Wyatt.61

  “The French like arty things,” said Ayers. “What made [us] was an article in Nouvelle Observateur. . . . We got written up, I think, ’cause Mike was fucking the journalist, actually. So we got a good review, and that was it. Suddenly France just opened up. We were the darlings of the literary scene there.”62

  The band relocated, too, though Nowlin did not make the final journey back to England. The new five-piece band changed its name to Soft Machine, a tribute to the William Burroughs novel. As close as everyone was to the author—three members of the band had backed up his poetry, and Ratledge had briefly stayed with him—the name change needed his sign-off. Allen was dispatched to get permission from Burroughs. He met him at a street corner in Paddington, cloaked in needless mystery one more time.

  “He appeared out of a shopfront, hat pulled over his eyes, looking like a crumpled insurance clerk from the lower east side of Manhattan. When I told him the purpose of our meeting he blinked like an old alligator and drawled, ‘Can’t see wha not.’ When I asked him what he was going to do next he said, ‘Ahm gonna get a haircut and disappear!’ In fact I never saw him again.”63

  2

  THE PSYCHEDELIC BOOM

  The formula was simple: guitar, bass, drums, singer, and organ. In the summer of 1965, Britain was spilling over with that music, the best (or best packaged) piped to Europe and the United States. Kids who had bought the pawned guitars from seamen were playing dance halls, covering American R&B. The Paramounts would rehearse all forty-five minutes of James Brown’s Live at the Apollo, then re-create it onstage. “Any deviation from the original plan, where I might inject a drum fill, would lead to my getting a small fine,” recalled drummer Phil Wainman.1

  The Moody Blues had an honest-to-God hit in “Go Now,” a lush, bleached cover of an orphaned American R&B song. They followed it with a series of clunkers; Decca, their label, kept them on, but with no great expectations.

  The music that had brought young Britain into rock and roll, with its pulsating danger, became less dangerous. Louder—just not disruptive. Keith Emerson, who was playing his first gigs with his new organ, discovered at a Marquee Club show in 1965 just how easy it was to tweak the volume. “I couldn’t figure out how the same keyboard that I’d just played sounded louder when Manfred played it,” Emerson remembered. “A kind roadie tipped me off. He’d seen Manfred turn the Leslie cabinet down just prior to the T-Bones’ performance. On the last night, I cranked it up. We went down a storm, and Manfred Mann never spoke to me again.”2

  At one northern France show on the V.I.P.s’ 1966 tour, a fight broke out in the audience. Another band might have stopped. The V.I.P.s, though, heard Emerson messing around with the mechanics of his Hammond to make unearthly, violent noise. The band’s music was replaced by “air raid sirens�
�� and “machine gun sounds,” the products of Emerson’s experiments with his poor tortured device. Soon enough, the fight was over.

  That was on tour. In some clubs, already, there were all-night raves where bands would roll forward, one after the other—something the Wilde Flowers had discovered at their Canterbury gigs.

  And the raves themselves became mainstream on January 30, 1966, the first all-night “happening” at the Marquee Club in London. Progressive rock grew out of the counterculture, but its roots went deeper. In 1966, no obvious design had bands diverging from pop structure. “I think it was a stroke of good fortune that we couldn’t work out how to play covers,” Roger Waters would say, assessing 1966 gigs by the Pink Floyd Sound. “It forced us to come up with our own direction.”3

  Psychedelia, arriving after Daevid Allen, spread beyond anything he could have dreamed of, with mainstream acts like the Beatles glomming onto it, labels buying anything that sounded like it, and steady work for bands that understood it. Soft Machine and Pink Floyd—which quickly dropped the “Sound”—became mainstays at the Marquee and UFO clubs, the anchors of all-night shows. “I tripped three times at UFO,” remembered Pete Townshend, confessing that he kept fearing that Waters would steal his girlfriend while he was “weakened by acid.”4

  “The whole thing about Soft Machine,” said Kevin Ayers, “was that it had all these people from middle-class literary, educated backgrounds suddenly going, ‘Fuck it, I’m not going to join medical school, I’m not going to become a lawyer or doctor, I’m not going to be a professional.’ And this hadn’t happened anywhere else in pop.”5

  But the majority of bands in London were still focused on songs and melody. The Syn had done a residency in Cannes—though, as Steve Nardelli remembered, the venue was “expecting some kind of cabaret combo not a full on rock band and we were thrown out after about three weeks for being too loud and blasting the customers away.” When they returned to England, firmly established as a Motown cover band, they got an audition at the Marquee Club and played “I’ll Keep On Holding On.” John Gee, the club’s manager, waved them on: “You’ll do.” Bit by bit, the scene was building.6