by David Weigel
In August 1968, Squire introduced Banks to a lithe singer with a reedy voice named Jon Anderson. Banks knew of him, as “one of the characters that were constantly in and out of the Marquee, the La Chasse, and a little pub up the road called the Ship.” Recalled Banks, “It was me who came up with the name ‘Yes.’ Actually, a couple years before the time of the Syn, I had that name floating around. I always liked one-word names and Yes was short and sweet—it looked big on posters. Since it was only three letters, it would get printed bigger.”41
The band added Bill Bruford, the drummer who had grown up on jazz, and who by this point was exhausted and “bitter” at the scene. His shoes bore the heretical slogan “MOON GO HOME,” making fun of the Who’s drummer, who otherwise bathed in the praise of critics.42
Tony Kaye, who would wait six months before the band could replace his Vox with a Hammond organ, took over on keys. “Rehearsals could often be chaotic with everyone trying out their own ideas at the same time, almost in a state of musical anarchy,” said Banks. “There were terrible days when nothing seemed to gel; my guitar sound went to pieces, Bill would be angry, saying ‘Come on, come on,’ Chris would be too loud, Jon’s ideas would make no sense, and Tony would be noodling on the Hammond—all at top volume for hours. No organization, no discussion, but sometimes some beautiful music would arise out of all this cacophony.”43
As Yes—Banks’s name, not that he got the credit he wanted for it—the band slid right back into the scene. The sets were heavy on covers at first; “we thought we’d get more work that way,” said Bruford.44
“We stole from everybody,” said Banks. A particular highlight, a cover of “Something’s Coming” from “West Side Story,” replaced the original arrangement’s steadily rising string section with a pure 4/4 rock rhythm. “To be honest, we really stole that arrangement from the Buddy Rich Big Band,” said Banks.45
But the band was also playing with the structures of these covers, turning relatively simple Beatles songs into loud-quiet-loud tests of dynamics. They were writing too; the first original song was a ballad called “Sweetness,” but improvisation set more of the tone. “Instead of the drummer just playing the rhythm, Chris and I would set up something and the melody would have a counter rhythm on top,” said Bruford. “There would be a couple of rhythms happening at once, and that would be more fun and exciting.”46
Some elements were consistent—Squire, for example, high up in the mix. But there was a collaboration that pulled the melodies into unexpected directions. “We were all writing in as much as we would each throw bits into each piece of music and change things around,” said Banks.47
“Harold Land” was born from that technique. In its center was a cryptic, reaching Jon Anderson lyric about the horror of war. It was treated with care, the singer’s vocals floating over Kaye’s block chords. On either side was a rampage, Banks and Bruford and Squire all hammering away in changing time signatures. “I didn’t realize how liberating it was because I didn’t have anything to compare it to,” said Bruford.48
PROCOL HARUM TOURED “A Whiter Shade of Pale” and returned to the studio with the unenviable task of following it. Reid and Brooker came up with the idea of an epic suite of songs, one track with many parts, with the working title “Magnum Harum,” and with pieces pulled in from any idea that meshed, any found sound that could be imbued with meaning. The result was “In Held ’Twas in I,” a seventeen-minute track that resembled nothing else in pop music. It consisted of five parts: “Glimpses of Nirvana,” “’Twas Tea-Time at the Circus,” “In the Autumn of My Madness,” “Look to Your Soul,” and “Grand Finale.”
“You didn’t have to take psychedelic drugs for your mind to expand,” said Gary Brooker. “ ‘In Held ’Twas in I’ started out with talking, then some chanting, followed by some singing. And that was quite mind expanding in itself.”49
That song anchored Shine On Brightly, released in September 1968 to capitalize on the band’s American tour. It fell short of expectations, coming in at twenty-four on the Billboard charts. Released two months later in Britain, it sold better, but it did not dominate the landscape like “Whiter Shade” had. The people who got it, however, found an urtext worth studying. “In Held,” in particular, did not hang together especially well as a suite. But the idea of the suite was worth taking forward.
“Shine On Brightly I really think is an incredible album,” Pete Townshend told Barry Miles in a 1969 interview about the Who’s forthcoming album Tommy. “That will be from this point on a very heavy influence for me.” The interviewer was curious—why would music as square as Procol’s have anything to say to Townshend? “I think that their musical thing now is far more basically strong,” he said. “I know it had its roots in such a vague era of music, that’s why. Days of cantatas and God knows what, was a very very boring one, and there was only about 4 or 5 pieces of music which lifted their heads above the rest in that era, and so that’s all that Procol Harum have got to draw on.”50
AT THE SAME TIME, hours away from the London scene but heavily informed by it, the members of Genesis had gotten a lucky break. They’d recorded a few songs between classes at Charterhouse School, like the shouty stomper “Hey,” and sent around a demo. No one seemed interested, until a slightly older Charterhouse graduate stumbled upon it.
Jonathan King, who at twenty-one had written the worldwide 1965 hit “Everyone’s Gone to the Moon,” had parlayed that success into a job as a TV host, then as a scout for Decca. He was checking in with friends from Charterhouse when one suggested that he hear what the promising band of teenagers had come up with. “I remembered the dreams and hopes that I had had at Charterhouse two years earlier, and I wanted to be a star, so I thought I might as well listen to it,” said King. “I put the tape on and listened to them and thought: Well, they’re not so bad, actually.”51
King changed hats quickly, from skeptic to aspiring Svengali. He paid what Peter Gabriel would call the “mighty sum of £10” to record a more professional demo. “We were still thinking of ourselves as songwriters at this time, but before we knew what was happening, contracts were produced—10 years—and, of course, over a cup of tea and a chat, they were signed willingly,” Gabriel remembered. “So there we were, signed up to Jonathan’s publishing company, which leased recordings to Decca. Our parents were pretty horrified when they learned what we’d done, but fortunately we were all minors, so the contract was void. So then we entered a legal contract, supported by parents’ signatures, for one year.”52
The young musicians went back and forth with King over what the band should be. One idea was that Gabriel, Banks, and the others would be a songwriting collective. King saw them as a band and packaged them as such. “The Silent Sun” would be their first single, taken from the studio and treated generously with strings by arranger Arthur Greenslade. It sounded anonymous; it sounded professional.
For the first time, the quavering, confident voice of Peter Gabriel appeared on vinyl, singing sentiments like “Baby, you feel so close” and “Baby, you changed my life.” For the first time, the song was reviewed, with no pandering about the age of the composers. “A disc of many facets and great depth, but it might be a bit too complex for the average fan,” wrote a reviewer in NME.53
King was giddy about the band’s prospects, and infectious. “Jonathan King told us that we would be on Top of the Pops,” said Gabriel, “so we all went out and bought new clothes.” The band even had an original idea for outfitting. Other bands would explode with colors. Genesis would wear black and white. They suited up—and went nowhere. There was no “Top of the Pops” performance. There wasn’t even a spot on Jonathan King’s show. “We were all the way over the top,” said Anthony Phillips. “I, probably as much as any of the others, wanted to be a star.”54
THE NICE WAS PSYCHEDELIC too, with suitably space-cadet lyrics and Hendrix-esque guitar solos by O’List. They leaned into the image, and the association with the underground’s most golden go
d.
“The basic policy of the group is that we’re a European group,” explained the Nice’s lead singer Lee Jackson in a 1969 International Times interview. “So we’re improvising on European structures. Improvisation can be around any form of music, so we’re taking European work. We’re not American Negros, so we can’t really improvise and feel the way they can.”55
Despite the slightly weird allergy to syncopation, the live show held. Emerson, still fooling with the Hammond, realized that a flat object, if wedged between the keys, could hold them down, playing notes that grew more and more distorted even as Emerson played another instrument. Emerson used spoons at first, then knives. One Nice roadie, Emerson remembered in his memoir, “had a great collection of German army knives and gave me two Hitler Youth daggers, saying, ‘Beats the shit out of the British Boy Scouts. If you’re gonna use one, use a serious one.’ ”56 The roadie’s name was Lemmy Kilmister. Thanks to his advice, Emerson seemed to be murdering his instrument onstage, nightly.
“There’s a new group called the Nice—who are,” quipped Nick Jones in the September 1967 issue of Rolling Stone. “The group is led by organist Keith Emerson who plays like a groovy astronaut orbiting around everything . . . if your eyes are open, you’ll soon be digging these guys.”57 Melody Maker gave readers lengthy readouts on the band’s look—“leather and suede, fringed leather jackets, and trousers that disappear into tight thigh boots”58—and pronounced 1968 the “Year of the Nice.”59
The band took itself seriously. On June 6, after Robert F. Kennedy had been shot, Emerson thought about the allegorical power of the song the band was rehearsing—Leonard Bernstein’s “America,” from West Side Story. “If Bob Dylan, and his counterpart Donovan, could make protest songs, why shouldn’t we?” he asked himself. “It could be the first protest instrumental.”60
In the hands of Emerson, Jackson, Brian Davison, and O’List, “America” lasted six minutes or longer. The first sounds on it: dark organ chords, wailing chorus, muffled gunshots, screams. The last sounds: a three-year-old boy nervously saying, “America is pregnant with promise and anticipation, but is murdered by the hand of the inevitable!” Folded right into the middle of all that was a staccato figure from the fourth movement of Dvořák’s New World Symphony.
Here was Broadway, here was classical, wrenched into 1968 and given pomp and purpose. On June 26, when the Nice played the Royal Albert Hall, Jackson screamed the “America is pregnant” line—the cue for Emerson to set fire to an American flag.
Emerson decided to write a symphony. It would be called Ars Longa Vita Brevis—Latin for “Art is long, life is short,” and the motto of Lee Jackson’s grammar school. It was built out of pieces collected from here and there: a section of Bach’s Brandenburg Concertos, a nearly twenty-minute psychedelic freak-out titled “Ars Longa Vita Brevis,” and an excellent seven-note hook from Davy O’List’s guitar.
But O’List, so key to the old Nice sound, was fired while recording the album after failing to show up for a gig. (At one point, remembered Emerson, O’List had been so out of it that he had started “crumbling a chocolate bar over tobacco in mistake for the real thing.”61 O’List does not dispute this.) The band was more serious now. Seriousness meant a piece with a prelude, four movements, and a coda.
The first sound on Ars Longa Vita Brevis would be a minor chord, played by the English Chamber Orchestra. The second sound was a six-note run up Emerson’s Hammond. Two more doomy chords from the orchestra. Back to the Hammond. The notes ran together, fast, as the guy in the leather pants raced the men in bow ties.
Emerson took special pleasure in playing so fast. While recording Ars Longa, Emerson ducked into the bathroom and overheard two members of the orchestra whining about the indignity of the gig. “I can’t believe the tempo they’re taking on the Brandenburg,” sighed one of them. “It’s way too fast.”62 Emerson finished his business, returned to the organ, and cranked up the volume.
The prelude ended after two minutes, rung out by a gong. The first movement, “Awakening,” was a nearly four-minute drum solo. Ambitious and totally misguided, it tossed the listener out of the melody into a dreamworld of timpani hits and repetitive rolls. But then came the O’List guitar lick, salvaged even though he’d been fired from the band. The second movement, “Realisation,” was a pop song with vocals, and a lyric that Jackson practically spit out about a “life of bliss.”
It was more bitter sarcasm than listeners signed up for when buying a “psychedelic” record, but they were in luck. After three minutes, Emerson’s organ and keyboard took charge again, playing out the seven-note theme, until he replaced it with the Bach melody in “Acceptance (Brandenburger).” The concerto excerpt was played by organ, bass, and drum—and then, by elements of the orchestra.
To the listener, wondering what the Nice had gotten up to, it was tough to tell where this ended so that the final movement, “Denial,” could begin. By the time they sussed it out, the theme had re-emerged; Emerson and his bandmates had tied the song together and completed their symphony.
Immediate Records, the Nice’s label in the UK, decided to sell this as a serious work of art—with Keith Emerson as the genius behind it. He wrote his own ultraserious liner notes. “Newton’s first law of motion states a body will remain at rest or continue with uniform motion in a straight line unless acted upon by force,” he proclaimed in bold white text on black background. “This time the force happened to come from a European source. Ours is an extension of the original Allegro from Brandenburg Concerto No. 3.”63
“If Bach were alive today,” Emerson told Melody Maker, “he would be playing like Keith Jarrett.”64
Davy O’List would stew over this. He saw the band’s pretentious later incarnation as evidence that they’d lost their touch. His guitar had once filled out their sound. Jackson couldn’t sing “rock,” O’List thought, as well as he could. “The part of ‘Ars Longa’ that worked was the part we wrote together,” he told me.65 “The Nice had reached the pinnacle of their success all over the world by the time America was a hit in the charts,” he told another interviewer in 2006. “I don’t think I missed anything.”66
But the postguitar sound of the Nice was new. When the band played Ars Longa live, that ropey first-movement drum solo would get standing ovations. The Nice were playing bigger crowds in further corners of Europe and the States. It’s true that “Brandenburger,” released as a single, didn’t reach the top ten like “America” had. But single sales were mattering less and less; 1968 was the first year that album sales outpaced them in Britain and the United States. Listeners had bought plenty of pop; now they were ready for pomp, played by people who threw knives at Hammond organs.
Ars Longa Vita Brevis became the title of the Nice’s second record. The cover portrayed Emerson, O’List, and Jackson as interlocked skeletons with brightly colored organs. To get that photo, the three were injected with mildly radioactive solutions, then X-rayed. When Emerson was photographed, he learned that sometime earlier he had broken two ribs.
“You break ribs playing keyboards?” asked his doctor. “I wouldn’t have considered it such a hazardous occupation.”
“Depends how you play ’em,” said Emerson.67
3
A BILLION TIMES THE IMPACT
From the summer of 1968 to the summer of 1969, a British fan of the new music who couldn’t catch live bands could settle for Colour Me Pop. The BBC had been booking acts across its other, stodgier shows, but the London scene was cranking out hits and idols faster than the press could cover it. The surplus of new bands, any of which might produce the next Sgt. Pepper, would be given thirty minutes each Saturday to prove themselves.
So Colour Me Pop debuted on June 14, 1968, with a credit sequence that proudly embraced cliché. A “cool” bass line and drumroll played under psychedelically retouched photos of Jimi Hendrix, Mick Jagger, and Frank Zappa, as if asking who’d be next to join the pantheon. The answer on that first Friday was
the increasingly progressive Manfred Mann. Spooky Tooth got slotted in at the end of August; the Nice’s set aired on November 16, as their fame was cresting.
That same day, Giles, Giles and Fripp were filming their Colour Me Pop debut. Thanks to the lobbying efforts of Peter Giles, they’d finagled a full thirty-minute episode all to themselves, “when people like the Hollies were doing half a program with somebody else.”1 The Saturday night audience would hear eight tracks from an album almost nobody had bought, one of them—the spoken-word fairy tale “Elephant Song”—given its own animation.
It was the last-ever gathering of Giles, Giles and Fripp. After one day of filming, Fripp and Michael Giles stayed up past midnight to figure out what the band needed to break through. Fripp wanted a new vocalist, one he’d already known for years. Greg Lake, a twenty-one-year-old singer and guitarist in the Bournemouth scene, possessed the pipes and star quality that the band had always lacked. “In my circle,” Fripp would say, “Greg Lake was considered one of the front-runners for fame.”2
Lake looked and sounded like a star. He was tall and handsome, full lips and eyes framed by a sharp Roman nose. He had shared a guitar teacher with Fripp but hadn’t trained his voice; his lusty, accented croon came naturally, and found drama in every lyric. The two of them bonded when Fripp accompanied Lake as a roadie, on an ill-starred series of southern England gigs.
“We ended up in Ventnor in the Isle of Wight and got to the gig and there was literally no one there,” remembered Lake. “No audience. The promoter had booked the show and somehow or another mystically failed to get any people to buy tickets. The band was ready to play, the doors opened, and no one came in. So Robert and I decided that what we would do was just play our guitar lessons. We started playing things like Spanish malagueñas and did duets with them. That’s how Robert and I started playing together.”3