The Show That Never Ends

by David Weigel

  It worked. So did the band’s relentless touring, which started in the summer of 1970 and continued through the summer of 1971, as Yes snaked its way across the United States.

  “We can use our instruments theatrically and incorporate asides, exits, dramatis personae,” said Bruford. “The day of playing chords is over now. Formulated music is finished. Now the bass player might be playing a drum line. You can use good lighting to create a theatrical effect and make the whole thing more dramatic.”29

  Yes were innovators, but not alone. Hawkwind, a band that started as a coalition of buskers—street musicians—but made a quick pivot to psychedelic rock, brought in a light show that spun around a blue-painted, six-foot-tall Aphrodite named Stacia. Arthur Brown, the surrealist who’d created so much of the scene, had assembled a new band—unimaginatively, the Crazy World of Arthur Brown—and had been playing in Paris. He found audiences ready to lose themselves with or without much new stage drama.

  “It was strange,” Brown told one weekly, in an understatement. “The biggest mistake we made with that band was calling it the New Crazy World, because people came along expecting the fire act, and of course we weren’t doing it,” he said.30

  AS THEIR FIRST ALBUM climbed the charts, Emerson, Lake & Palmer wondered whether they could continue to exist. Lake was wound down. At the band’s third gig, Emerson insisted that the crowd needed an encore of “Nutrocker.” Palmer went along merrily, but Emerson noticed his bassist moping through the instrumental. When the song ended, the bass thunked down to the floor, its player beelining for the green room. Emerson followed him with a bottle of red wine and smashed it on a radiator. “You fucking cunt!” he screamed. “You fucking unprofessional cunt! Don’t you ever show me up like that again!”31

  The incident “cleared the air,” for the rest of the tour. Yes played through its 1970 gigs in Europe and returned to the UK.

  “I’m getting much more inspired by contemporary music than the classics now,” Emerson told Palmer.32 The keyboard player had remained obsessed with the Argentine composer Alberto Ginastera’s Piano Concerto no. 1, which he’d first heard at the “Switched-On Symphony” concert, a recital of classic music on electronic instruments. “I wanted to be able to get that kind of sound from the instruments I was using,” he told a researcher years later. “I had also always wanted to write atonally, although I wasn’t sure what that was.”33

  Palmer gave Emerson his opportunity. One day in early 1971, Palmer played Emerson a thundering drum pattern and asked him for the time signature. “It’s either 10/8 or 5/4,” Emerson speculated. He ran through an ostinato, a repetitive, self-contained melody, that he’d been playing around with. It fit like a dream. Weeks later, Emerson called Lake over to his home to see what he had.

  “I’ve been working on this piece since Carl played me a rather obscure drum pattern,” said Emerson. “I’ve got this image of us creating a vast ‘sheet of sound’ that defies conventional structures. There doesn’t appear to be one set time signature or key signature but the total effect played by the three of us could be very prolific.”

  Lake wasn’t following. Emerson sat down to play the ostinato and looked back up to see his singer “staring blankly” at him. “I think if you want to play that kind of music, you should play it on your solo album,” said Lake.

  “But I want us to play it,” beseeched Emerson. “I know it sounds complicated, but it’ll have a tremendous effect with all three of us playing it together.”

  “I’m really not interested in that sort of thing,” said Lake. He headed for the door. Emerson picked up the phone and dialed John Gaydon at EG to tell him that the band was “finished.” All sides settled for a meeting, where spleens could be vented in full.34

  “It’s just not commercial,” said Lake.

  “Was the unison line in ‘20th Century Schizoid Man’ commercial?” asked Emerson. “No! But it was King Crimson’s biggest hit.”

  “But that had a song!”

  “What’s to say that this piece shouldn’t go into a song?”

  “By the time you’ve got through playing all that esoteric rubbish you won’t have a fuckin’ audience,” said Lake.35

  The two of them kept squabbling, until Gaydon suggested they head to Advision to record what they had; it was too late to cancel the studio time anyway. In the studio, learning the music at their own pace, the band congealed again. The 10/8 pattern with the melodic figure became “Eruption,” the first movement in what was to be the “Tarkus” suite.

  “When I suggested anything a bit freaky then, people were a bit funny,” Palmer would tell Sounds. “I had a 10/8 riff when I was sixteen which people didn’t want to know about because they thought it was too hard. And of course, that 10/8 riff is applied to ‘Tarkus.’ I was labeled as a rock and roll drummer and I couldn’t get out of it. With Rooster I got out of it a bit and with ELP I am fulfilled.”36

  “Tarkus,” according to Emerson, was written in only six days “because there was an awful lot of inspiration and one idea triggered another idea.”37 The ideas ended up chasing each other, section upon section, in a musical suite that filled half of the eponymous Tarkus LP. Emerson’s 10/8 pattern became the overture for a science fiction tale of allegorical monsters warring for the future. A musical section—always driving on that 10/8 drum line—would be snapped short, and a pop melody and Lake lyric would tell the story.

  The rest of the album came together just as smoothly, if less bombastically. Side two was a song cycle that traveled through some of the same musical territory, just with more humor—in “Jeremy Bender” a song about a transvestite, in “Are You Ready, Eddy?” a rockabilly tribute to the band’s producer, Eddy Offord.

  The real heft was on side one, and artist William Neal designed a gatefold cover illustrating the battle that listeners were supposed to be transported away by. “Tarkus” became a creature from some lost Godzilla film, half armadillo and half tank.

  It “was simply a doodle created from a fusion of ideas,” Neal explained years later. “I had produced a gun belt made up of piano keys, which somehow led to WW1 armoury, nobody liked the idea, but the little armadillo remained on the layout pad.” But it played with ELP, who let Neal hear the album on acetate, and the band collaborated with the artist in fleshing out the story and the name. “Tarkus” was a combination of “a condition of deep spiritual debasement” (the “Tartarus”) and of the word “carcass.” The name of the album was spelled out in painted bones.38

  It hit shops on June 14, 1971, shooting straight to number one, refusing to vacate the charts for seventeen more weeks. The UK press embraced the album, which was promoted by a single that julienned two of the pop sections of the title track. American reviewers, meanwhile, expressed confusion at what the Brits had inflicted upon them. “Tarkus records the failure of three performers to become creators,” wrote David Lubin in Rolling Stone. “Regardless of how fast and how many styles they can play, Emerson, Lake and Palmer will continue turning out mediocrity like Tarkus until they discover what, if anything, it is that they must say on their own and for themselves.”39

  But the Americans were showing up to the shows anyway. The supergroup label was taken seriously; each member of the band was suddenly talking in the most rosy terms about what they accomplished together. “I’m sure people think Carl and I are shivering in Keith’s shadow and hate it,” Lake told Sounds. “That’s their problem. And I know there are people whose minds are so closed they can’t think of anything but Keith with the Nice and keep saying he’s doing the same things. That’s rubbish. We never control our act. What Keith does on stage are just ideas he’s had on the spur of the moment that have stuck. I don’t want to do explosive things to get attention. You’ve got to work as honestly as you can, and that’s exactly what we do. If you do something else people know you’re putting on a false front. They’re not stupid.”40

  COMPETITORS STARTED TO FLOW into the charts. Island signed Curved Air, which offere
d something no progressive group had: smoldering sex appeal. Sonja Kristina, an aspiring folkie and member of the West End cast of Hair, roamed the stage in high-heeled boots and shimmering tops, black hair tumbling over her shoulders. Island printed ten thousand copies of the first-ever picture disc, which ringed the vinyl with sixteen female figures, holding hands as if gathering strength for a Busby Berkeley performance. The buyer who put the record on the turntable could watch, accompanied by the substance of his choice, as the image blurred into a hypnotic pattern.

  “Some of the so-called Heads and some of the people in the business, especially those companies we’d turned down before signing with Warners, said it was all a hype,” Kristina told an American interviewer. “But it wasn’t conceived as that.”41

  What made it progressive? The picture disc spun, and keyboard player Francis Monkman let loose a glissando, then a minor-key boogie-woogie, played under a scaling guitar riff. Kristina’s voice swooshed in, double-tracked, singing a melody that was as sideways from pop as the rest of the track. The album raced across the styles, taking a little Jefferson Airplane here (“Propositions”) and a little folk there (“Blind Man”). The highlight, as critics soon decided, was seven and a half instrumental minutes—driven by violin, quoting baroque melodies—titled “Vivaldi.”

  “I think Vivaldi’s a terrific piece,” Monkman told an interviewer. “There’s not a progression that couldn’t have been written in 1700, and yet at the same time it couldn’t have been written anytime before the late 1960s.”42

  Deram signed Egg, an experimental group that grew out of a psychedelic band called Uriel. They had formed it in college, fronted at the time by a dervish guitarist named Steve Hillage. When he left, Egg slimmed down to Dave Stewart on keyboards, Clive Brooks on bass, and Mont Campbell on drums—no guitarist, none necessary. Their first single—their only single—was called “Seven Is a Jolly Good Time” because its chorus was played in 7/4 time.

  “[Deram was] a classical music company trying to redeem their mistake in turning down the Beatles by signing up anyone and everyone, including us,” said Campbell. “A very expensive strategy, and they soon went out of business. They understood nothing about pop/rock except that it made a lot more money than classical music! We celebrated being signed by going out and buying a transit van, a Hammond L-100, and a WEM PA. Total cost: £2,000.”43

  From Genesis to Revelation had flopped, but Genesis had been signed anew, by Charisma, and headed to Trident Studios to record a set of progressive songs. Jonathan King was out too; their new producer was John Anthony, who had manned the studio for the first two Van der Graaf records. The result was Trespass, an ambitious suite of lengthy numbers that showed off Gabriel’s storytelling and, for the first time, a mellotron. Banks had purchased it from Robert Fripp himself.

  “Was that the one actually used on In the Court of the Crimson King?” asked Banks. “Oh yes, yes!” said Fripp, with a smile. That was Banks’s recollection anyway. “He must have had about three or four of them there and I’m sure he was trying to sell them all with the same spiel.”44

  Trespass didn’t ignite the charts—it didn’t flop either—but that wasn’t the group’s problem anymore. Anthony Phillips was out. “He didn’t like the road, felt too nervous playing in front of people, and he thought that playing the same numbers over and over again, night after night, was causing it to stagnate,” Gabriel explained to ZigZag.45

  The band was hunting for a guitarist. It stumbled across an ad:

  Imaginative guitarist/writer seeks involvement with

  receptive musicians, determined to strive beyond

  existing stagnant music forms.

  An audition was arranged with Steve Hackett. “We had the feeling that he also had the personality to become a band member rather than a hired hand,” said Gabriel.46

  “Having listened to other groups like Family, Fairport Convention and Procol Harum—and obviously to what Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band and Pet Sounds suggested—we realized that there were no rules, that we could go somewhere else if we wanted to,” recalled Tony Banks. “And so we went to orchestrated strings. We had a 25-minute piece that never got recorded, but bits and pieces got pillaged later on. . . . The music was all long and weird. That sort of approach interested me most because I felt the pop style had been pretty well covered.”47

  In August 1971, Genesis headed into Trident Studios to record the first album with Collins on drums and Hackett on guitar. “The Fountain of Salmacis” was the first real mellotron song. “I had a chord sequence which became very much a Genesis trademark, where we would be in E minor and go to the chords C and D, often keeping the bass note down on E,” Tony Banks would say. “Taking this little sequence and then adding the Mellotron sounded really good and made me realize that you could take what was almost a classical piece and make it sound very exciting.”48

  The album was blurbed in ads by Keith Emerson. “People are a lot more swayed than one thinks,” said Gabriel. “They think ‘if Keith Emerson likes them, they must be good.’ I know it influences people because I am as bad.”49

  When it appeared in 1971, Nursery Cryme established Genesis at last. The group graduated from university halls to larger venues, touring Italy and France. In the summer of 1972, Genesis played the Reading Festival, for which the band members were each paid £175. (Curved Air, a larger draw, took in £1,000.) And by that point they were in and out of Island Studios, recording what would be their breakout album, Foxtrot.

  The previous two records had begun with recognizable-enough sounds. Trespass kicked off with “Looking for Someone,” and the first thing a listener heard was Peter Gabriel’s voice twinned with Tony Banks’s block keyboard chords. Nursery Cryme showed off Hackett’s versatility on the twelve-string guitar, as he plucked his way through “The Musical Box.” Foxtrot started in outworld, on the mellotron, Banks alternating between B-major-7/F-sharp and C-sharp/F-sharp, then careening into a melody from out of a Hammer horror film.

  “On the old Mellotron Mark 2 there were these two chords that sounded really good on that instrument,” Banks explained. “There are some chords you can’t play on that instrument because they’d be so out of tune.”50 The result, as Steve Hackett would later call it, was “an aircraft hangar type of rumble ideally suited to spacecraft impersonation.”51

  Banks’s melody lasted ninety full seconds, ending abruptly, as producer David Hitchcock stitched in the main groove of the song. It started quietly, but the elements grew louder with each bar—a sort of Morse code drum fill and bass line and guitar riff, another heavenly mellotron melody, and finally, after two full minutes, a lyric about an Earth emptied of its people. “Has life again destroyed life?” sang Gabriel.

  The tone was set. On “Time Table,” Gabriel put the listener at a gathering of proud medieval knights and asked why “we suffer each race to believe that no race has been grander.” That ran into “Get ’Em Out by Friday,” an allegory about Brits being shunted into council homes that imagined “Styx Enterprises” and “United Blacksprings International” profiting as humans were degraded and exiled. A public service announcement, from “Genetic Control,” announced a “four foot restriction on humanoid height,” the better for packing more people into less space.

  Tasters—all preparing the listener for the longest and darkest song Genesis would ever write. Side two of Foxtrot was devoted to “Supper’s Ready,” a multisection suite of music that stretched to nearly twenty-three minutes. “Mike and Phil created a 9/8 riff,” Banks would recall, “but I didn’t want to be tied to the time signature, so I just took it as a 4/4 thing and played right against their riff, starting off with cheeky little major tunes, almost a pastiche, and then slowly making it more and more sinister and unsettling, so you’re not quite sure where it’s going to go.”

  The song kept building, kept changing form. “I brought in the really big chords again,” said Banks, finally going back out of the minor key to an E major chord, w
hich created this very serene, simple chord sequence, a strong, uplifting moment. “It’s like the angels have arrived, the heavens have opened. And it had taken about 20 minutes to reach this point: that was what was so great about it.”52

  It was Gabriel, fittingly, who gave the song a hook that elevated the menace while adding a dash of self-parody. As the 9/8 riff thundered, Gabriel recited the number of the beast. “There is a line in Revelations which says ‘this supper of the mighty one,’ ” Gabriel explained to one reporter. “Anyway there are very straightforward levels at which you can take the lyrics if you want.”53

  “When Pete suddenly started singing over it—666—I thought, ‘Oh shit, he’s doing it again, he’s singing on my best bit,’ ” said Banks, “but I have to say this time it only took me about 10 seconds to think ‘This sounds fantastic, it’s so strong.’ ”54

  It came across even stronger, and stranger, when the band took it to the stage. Since the first tour, Gabriel had been wearing simple full-body costumes and filling time between songs with short, absurd stories. “The storytelling had emerged as a means of filling in the gaps when we had thirty-six strings being tuned by people who weren’t very good at tuning them,” he explained, “and during long debates about which strings were in or out of tune. It was out of pure necessity, because during those moments everyone looks at the singer to fill in the gaps.”55

  Paul Whitehead’s cover for Foxtrot—the third of Genesis’s gatefold covers, and the third by the artist—was rather literal. The first thing a prospective buyer would see was a shapely female figure in a red dress, with the head of a fox. “It contains aberrations from a human situation which are so slight as to be absolutely bizarre,” wrote a reviewer for Sounds. “Gruesome heads are seen on perplexed horsemen and as the hunt arrives at the sea there stands the beautiful lady with the fox’s head—and hence the title of the album.”56