The Show That Never Ends

by David Weigel

  The people crowding into Genesis shows got to see Gabriel in the exact same getup. “It was a shock, this apparition coming towards me in a fox’s head and a dress,” Banks remembered. “I thought ‘Christ!’ but carried on playing . . . and the audience loved it. Even more importantly a picture of him in this bloody fox’s head was on the front page of Melody Maker the following week. Hey, this is interesting. Because we knew we had difficult music to get across, and with no TV, no national press, no singles, what do you do? You need something more than just music to attract a bigger audience.”57

  “The word Elgar comes to mind for some reason,” joked Hackett. Elgar on acid perhaps. “We weren’t on acid, we weren’t on drugs; we were on beer and wine and Earl Grey.”58

  IT TOOK TIME, and some gimmickry, for the musical establishment to consider the ambitions of the progressives. In the summer of 1970, the producers of the BBC’s Proms, its annual celebration of classical music, allowed one night of experimental music that did not fit the straitjacket. Soft Machine would be allowed to play—news that titillated a press corps that was reserving its biggest rock headlines for the deaths of ill-behaving young stars. It hardly mattered that the Royal Albert Hall had been playing host to other bands, or that it had even hosted the Softs at their reunion show, a year earlier. The move needed to be explained.

  “For most, this must have conjured up visions of wild young men in outrageous clothes playing, very loudly and very badly, the latest Top 20 hits,” reported Richard Williams in Radio Times. Not to worry: “The Soft Machine is one of the most unusual groups in pop music,” with music “as far from Top of the Pops as Chopin is from a Vaudeville Act,” wrote Williams.59

  “I hope that introducing pop music into the Proms will be a popular move,” said Sir William Glock, the BBC’s controller of music, in a sheepish interview with the Daily Mail. In the same interview, Glock reassured the conservative paper, and its readers, that pop groups shouldn’t be backed by orchestras.60

  “I don’t suppose the powers that be at the BBC knew what they were getting at all,” Robert Wyatt told an interviewer. The band showed up, and according to Wyatt, “Before our bit, I went out the back for a quick fag, and then the doorman didn’t want to let me back in.”

  “I’ve got to play in there,” Wyatt remembered saying.

  “You must be kidding,” said the doorman. “They only have proper music in there.”61

  That night, they had Soft Machine. The band had just released Third, a double album consisting of four side-long, improvisational-sounding pieces. At the Proms, Soft Machine played three-quarters of the album, starting on a misstep. “Out-Bloody-Rageous” was supposed to begin with an electronic sample, leading into a bass line from Hugh Hopper. The fuzz box didn’t work. The ambient noise was followed by stop-start clatter, until the rest of the band rushed in.

  Neither reviewers nor audience members complained about the sound. The rest of Soft Machine’s set, shortened versions of the album tracks “Facelift” and “Esther’s Nose Job,” smoothed away some of the experimentation. On the record, “Facelift” was a blending of two live performances, ending as the tape was sped and slowed; played live, it was a tour of quiet-loud dynamics, nudged along by Hopper’s subtle bass lines.

  The performance stopped cold before midnight, as every Proms concert was required to do. The reviews were glowing in the pop press, recounting the predictable tale of the most daring group in progressive rock and how it had failed to prove the snobs right. “In those days the Royal Albert Hall was a terrible place to play because it wasn’t designed for live music,” said Hopper. “It wasn’t a bad performance, considering it was very artificial.”62

  TARKUS WAS NOT SUPPOSED to be ELP’s second public statement. The band had done something even more ambitious: it had adapted, played live, and recorded Modest Mussorgsky’s 1874 suite Pictures at an Exhibition. Emerson had heard Pictures played in full years earlier, when he was still with the Nice, and he’d kept the piano sheet music. After ELP recorded its first album, he took it to the band. “I wanted to use it sort of as an educational piece, exposing our audiences to this great work of classical music,” he said.63

  They set to cutting up the source material. Mussorgsky had written a ten-part suite, with five “promenade” interludes, all based on paintings by the late painter Viktor Hartmann. Emerson excised most of that, leaving the main promenade themes but adapting only four of the “pictures”: “The Gnome,” “The Old Castle, “The Hut of Baba Yaga,” and “The Great Gates of Kiev.” On December 9, 1970, ELP debuted the new arrangement at London’s Lyceum Theatre, a former opera house in the West End. That recording, meant for film, simply wasn’t releasable. “The film and everything was so bad, and the soundtrack on the film was so bad that we just had to re-record it,” Palmer explained.64

  That left the official recording for March 26, 1971, after most of Tarkus had been set down. Emerson introduced the piece to an audience at Newcastle City Hall—“We’re going to give you ‘Pictures at an Exhibition’! ”—and when the cheers subsided, he sat behind a pipe organ to play the “Promenade” processional. After a few bars, the full organ rattled the room.

  Then came the drums. Palmer banged out the introduction to “The Gnome,” joined by Emerson, then by Lake, who was running his bass through Emerson’s Moog. The melody was all Mussorgsky’s, until Emerson introduced his own arabesque on the Moog. Back to “Promenade,” now handed over to Lake, who added lyrics about “endless years” and “tears as dry as stone.”

  There was no time to settle—Emerson re-emerged with a flurry of Moog noises, interrupted by Lake, picking out a new song called “The Sage” on his acoustic guitar. Back to Emerson, who introduced “The Old Castle” by yanking the ribbon controller from the Moog. “I got so many freaky sounds out of a Hammond organ—sounds which weren’t thought up by the people that made the thing—that I wanted to go further,” Emerson later told reporter Penny Valentine. “For me the Moog was the only answer.”65

  It was dizzying. “Blues Variation,” another new composition, was the only musical moment that bopped along like the Nice or Atomic Rooster. When the band got to “The Hut of Baba Yaga,” Emerson treated it like he’d treated “America” and “Rondo,” wrenching the melody out and splattering it with glissandos. “The Great Gates of Kiev” became a six-and-a-half-minute workout, starting off close to the melody, but at the midpoint breaking back into the “Promenade” melody.

  Emerson had found a way to evoke the rising-fourth, falling-third theme through buzzing synthesizer feedback. Above the clatter rose one more Lake lyric—another meander through some grand, meaningful-sounding themes. “Day is night!” howled Lake, as the band let the song drop and explode with feedback.

  That was the piece. After a suitable wait, ELP returned with another sort of classical adaptation. They covered “Nutrocker,” a rock version of Tchaikovsky’s suite, as made famous in a one-hit wonder by B. Bumble and the Stingers.

  The March recording went to Eddy Offord’s studio and was mixed for an eventual November release. The band remained on tour, no longer playing “Pictures,” instead playing sets of maybe seven songs that were anchored by “Tarkus.” From June to November they toured the US, and on September 1 they played in New York’s Gaelic Park. Robert Moog himself showed up, to finally meet the man who had turned his machine into a concert set piece.

  “There were 10,000 kids standing on a soccer field and here’s Keith Emerson sticking knives in a Leslie cabinet,” Moog remembered a decade later. “A New York musician who had bought some of my equipment was there and he was in complete shock. He said, ‘This is the end of the world.’ ”66

  Reporters ran to their stashes of superlatives. “The theatrical aspects of ELP’s concert moves them out of the class of ordinary rock musicians,” wrote Jody Breslaw in Sounds, after covering the Gaelic Park show. “The syntheses which can be said to have succeeded in the fullest sense, opening new possibilities for the future
, are those for which the label ‘rock’ no longer applies.”67

  A few months later, when ELP returned to the UK, another Sounds critic praised the band’s new cohesion. “There’s no sound or sight quite like it, when Keith Emerson disappears from stage twenty yards into the audience, shouting at them with a machine gun pattern on the ribbon keyboard of his moog.”

  The rapture continued when the album finally hit. “A perfect showcase for their musical flamboyancy” (New Musical Express). “One of the finest British group albums of the year” (Melody Maker). “One to convert nonbelievers” (Record Mirror).

  “Before ELP played ‘Pictures at an Exhibition,’ classical music was only reserved for the elite, for clever people, for the intelligentsia,” said Lake in a 2012 interview. “It wasn’t for your ordinary people on the street. They would never be really exposed to or in touch with classical music. Now, you get classical music on your cell phone. You get classical music at sports events. You get the Three Tenors playing rock ’n’ roll arenas. All this was partly due to ELP’s first brave move to play ‘Pictures at an Exhibition’ at a rock ’n’ roll show. It’s something that I take quite a lot of pride in.”69

  And at the time, at the end of 1971, it was just accepted wisdom that ELP had taken pop where it always needed to go.

  5

  A HIGHER ART FORM

  Tony Kaye’s relationship with Yes came to a sad and graceless end. At the end of July 1971, on the strength of the Yes Album’s success, the band closed out a tour with a gig at the Crystal Palace Bowl. Elton John was the headliner, and years later Yes would recall how he burst into the VIP area looking in vain for a “naked man.” And then things got awkward.

  The reasons for jettisoning Kaye were simple. The first was puerile. “Tony liked to drink and he enjoyed the company of women,” Squire told the journalist Chris Welch. “The problems arose when Tony and Steve were sharing a bedroom which they did in those early days of touring and staying at Holiday Inns.”1 The second reason was a sense that Yes could do better than a keyboard player who anchored songs with mammoth block chords.

  Kaye would be replaced by Rick Wakeman, twenty-two years old and reportedly bored with the more traditionally song-focused Strawbs. That band had just opened for Yes in Hull. “Everything was wrong,” Wakeman recalled. “Every band then had a lead singer who was 6'7" who hadn’t washed for three years, forty-eight stacks of Marshall amps for the guitar player and the bass player.” Here was a band led by a tenor, with a bass player who played like a guitarist, and “drummer who mics up his kit—unheard of, in 1970.”2 The band was watching Wakeman, from the rafters. “We saw this guy with five keyboards onstage, and we said: That’s the guy,” said Jon Anderson. “Listen to what he does, and what he would do with Steve.”3

  Squire dismissed Kaye and lobbied Wakeman in person, at one point treading into Wakeman’s yard and negotiating through the keyboarder’s curtains. It worked; it had to work. “Tony Kaye was mostly playing B-3 and not much else, and not wanting to do much else,” said Eddy Offord.4

  “Steve had very much established himself as a guitar star,” said Squire, “and when it came to deciding on who was gonna stay and who was gonna go, I suppose that’s when Steve stayed and Tony went.”5

  It was the second purification of the band in less than a year, the second Lego switcheroo of an original player for someone more talented. Tony Kaye, who would re-join the group several times, sued in 2002 on the grounds that he had quit over internal band issues and wasn’t properly paid.6 “As soon as they found someone with a better organ he got booted out,” Bill Bruford said of Kaye, years later. “And so you got a bigger and better organ, and eventually we got Rick Wakeman with it. But there was no big change for the drummer, it just got bigger, a bigger band and more scope but all mostly emanating from the keyboards which were a combination of Mellotrons and organs followed by synthesizers.”7

  Hendrix drummer Bruford was lucky. As he half-reasoned, half-joked to Welch, “If Mitch Mitchell had become available, I probably would have been history.”8

  There was no more need to worry. Wakeman completed the Yes lineup, and his hiring was front-page news in Britain’s music magazines. He’d been with the Strawbs only a year, appearing live with the band and on two records. Songs like “Sheep” and “I’ll Carry On Beside You” had established him as a daring player, layering multiple keyboards and bargaining time for running, skipping solos.

  The press had gotten to know him, all 6 foot 3 of him, bantering and riffing about how he played. He came off like a younger, stranger Keith Emerson—more mystical and more at home in a pub. “It seems almost impossible,” wrote Penny Valentine in Sounds, “despite the band’s acceptance of the possibility, that Yes will do anything but rise to even greater heights from now on in.”9

  “Up to the age of 13 or 14 I was totally immersed playing classical music,” Wakeman told Sounds, in one of many awed pieces about his technique. “Until I heard a Springfields record. On that, someone bent a guitar note. I realized that you couldn’t do that on a piano, and a whole new world opened up to me.”10

  The first sound on The Yes Album had been the unified stomp of Howe, Squire, and Bruford. The first sound on Fragile, the record the band started recording with Wakeman, was sui generis—a piano, played backward, a single note ending with the single plug of Howe’s acoustic guitar. “What we did was turn the tape over and record the piano forward, and stop at exactly the right time so it coincided with the first note of Steve’s guitar,” Offord would recall, crediting Jon Anderson with the idea. “It all kind of blended together. It was a physical tape manipulation, rather than putting it into the sampler and hitting the button.”11

  This was the start of “Roundabout,” eight and a half minutes of hooks alternating with rhythmic looseness. In a cut-down form it would be Yes’s first hit single; on the album, it raced from theme to theme in a manner unlike anything Yes had tried before. The intro gave way to a nimble, jarring melody with Squire’s 8/8 bass line high in the mix. Near the three-minute mark, everything paused in midair; another melody had begun, the first to really show off Wakeman. Then Wakeman played a rapid run down the keys, the lake’s water flowing in the form of notes.

  The song changed again, to harder rock, bass and guitar playing ominous and syncopated triplets. Then, at 4:57, there was a return of a loping, babbling-brook keyboard figure and the reprise of Howe’s gentle picking. The intro theme, played on Howe’s acoustic guitar, came back at the very close of the song, but instead of ending on an up note, it shattered on a major chord—a Picardy third. Yes had just closed a major pop single with the sort of flourish previously and familiarly reserved for classical music.

  Everything about Fragile screamed, We are virtuosos. “Roundabout” was followed by “Cans and Brahms,” the first of five solo pieces on the record, one for each member. Wakeman, the new arrival, played a quick cover of the third movement of Brahms’s Symphony no. 4 in E Minor, op. 98: Allegro Giocoso. It ended quickly, and the record spun on to ninety seconds of overdubbed Anderson harmonies called “We Have Heaven.” Then to another suite: “South Side of the Sky,” anchored by an out-of-nowhere Wakeman piano solo.

  Fragile’s second side began with the album’s only concise pop song. “Long Distance Runaround” began with the beguiling harmony of Howe’s guitar and Wakeman’s keyboard playing nearly identical sounds—harmonics for Howe, soft tones for the star keyboarder. Squire’s bass rolled in, and he and Wakeman played in 5/4 time as the rest of the band played in 4/4. It was disorienting, which matched well with an Anderson lyric about (in his words) “how religion had seemed to confuse me totally.”12

  “Long Distance Runaround” segued into “The Fish,” Squire’s solo piece, which led to “Mood for a Day,” a flamenco guitar composition inspired by Howe’s affection for Sabicas and for Carlos Montoya.

  And that led to “Heart of the Sunrise.” It started with a rumble, a 6/8 bass line from Squire and a drumroll from Br
uford. Then came Wakeman, with a horror-film keyboard melody in 3/4. Back to the ascending riff, joined by Howe’s guitar. The melody suddenly changed, to a 4/4 beat, with the original riff being phased in slowly by the mix. Then a dropout, to a melody that Anderson had written on his acoustic guitar. The themes repeated, announced at various intervals on keyboards, by what the band came to call “Rick-recapitulation.” Critics would quickly point out how much this—the riff, at least—sounded like King Crimson. “I always thought the riff was influenced by ‘21st Century Schizoid Man,’ but I suppose we got away with it,” shrugged Howe.13

  They did. Fragile was an instant hit. “South Side of the Sky,” according to a review in Rolling Stone, put “everything they’ve got into a wide-ranging and most impressive package which demonstrates that progressive (remember progressive rock?) doesn’t mean sterile and that complex isn’t the same thing as inaccessible.”14 Even at that point, early in 1972, “progressive” was a pejorative. Rolling Stone preferred to compare this music to the best of the Kinks.15 But it was no use to pretend Yes wasn’t “progressive,” as Fragile also introduced most of the record-buying public to the artist Roger Dean.

  Yes had narrowly missed working with Dean years earlier. Atlantic Records had discovered Dean, then twenty-five and recently out of architecture school, before the band’s debut album. Dean had scored a job designing the discotheque at Ronnie Scott’s Jazz Club in Soho, the venue where the Who would debut Tommy. Disco-goers were greeted by a kind of landscape, seats designed in topographical shapes and filled with foam. “The fire brigade who inspected the club were very concerned about the amount of foam we had used,” Dean later told Chris Welch. And yet, when a fire finally came, “the foam furniture wasn’t touched, but the murals were burnt off the walls.”16