by David Weigel
There was no such risk in the album cover racket. Dean established himself quickly, painting alien landscapes that beckoned the listener and promised an unpredictable danger. The afro-fusion band Osibasa got a yellow-brown portrait of a doomed planet being patrolled by an insect. The acid rocker Billy Cox got a portrayal of a man on a horse being pursued—or accompanied—by insectoid airplanes.
“It really came as a surprise to me at first that people were liking the drawings for their own sake,” Dean told an interviewer in 1972. “I really had to teach myself to draw when I started doing this stuff. Most of them were done towards an end rather than being ends in themselves, to show [that] things I’d designed but couldn’t possibly construct because it was too expensive could fit into some sort of scheme.”17
The art, at first, wasn’t really identified with any kind of sound. “If you take a piece of music and put it as a soundtrack to a piece of film of a bird eating seeds, of a volcano erupting, of a dogfight in the air, of a little girl blowing seeds off a dandelion clock, it would probably fit all those things,” Dean shrugged. “So I don’t think that side of it is really important. You could fit an amazing number of different visual images to almost any piece of music and it wouldn’t jar.”18
Dean approached the Yes job literally, having heard the title but not much of the music. Given very little time to create, he disappeared inside his studio and emerged with two icons. The album’s title was given a science fiction weight, now represented by a planet hanging in space and punched through with holes, being circumnavigated by a wooden ship. The band’s name was displayed in transparent bubble letters, linked as if drawn in one strike. “We went into the New York office, we banged our hands on the table,” said Howe. “Work this record. We felt it could break us, and it did.”19
“It was all a fairly natural progression,” said Bruford, “and you just waited every week to see if the keyboard player would turn up with something new. And indeed he did, and then he surrounded himself with four or five instruments, and that was extraordinary, but then he got a monophonic synthesizer, then a polyphonic, and so on and so forth. In a way percussionists were looked on to do something similar by producing gongs, percussion racks, perhaps even xylophones and little percussion instruments and whatever. It was an expansive time.”20
“I’m never sure that the things I’ve written are going to last any kind of time, so much music seems a momentary thing,” Jon Anderson told Sounds at the end of 1971. “We were only talking the other day about the possibility of rock music—in the next 10 years—really developing into a higher art form. Building up the same way classical music did into huge works that last and stand the test of time. Rock musicians will make music that will last a hell of a lot longer in the future.”21
PETER BANKS DID NOT want for work after Yes. He quickly joined Blodwyn Pig, a more straightforward rock group than Yes—another one that had just seen off its guitarist. Mick Abrahams had played with the first iteration of Jethro Tull, gotten bored, and left to join something louder. When he got bored again, he moved right on, freeing up the job for Banks. “It was just getting too noisy,” Abrahams told one journalist. “Towards the end, there were too many different ideas in Blodwyn Pig.”22
Blodwyn Pig never recorded a new album; both Banks and Abrahams started new bands. They watched as Yes and Jethro Tull achieved real greatness. Banks was full of praise for the new Yes. Abrahams wondered whether rock was tumbling down a rabbit hole. “Rock music isn’t and never has meant to be an intellectual exercise,” Abrahams said at the end of 1971. “There are performers who adopt a very cynical attitude and they would never dream of thinking of themselves as entertainers. I think in a lot of ways rock is going the same way as jazz did. Jazz was a happy music originally until a few people started intellectualizing it and after that the musicians thought to themselves, ‘yeah, we’re on to a good thing here,’ and started playing up to it.”23
He wasn’t wrong. Yes and ELP and Genesis were able to sustain what they’d built. So was Jethro Tull; so was a clutch of other bands being signed to labels where ambitious music was encouraged and quickly released. Hawkwind had played at the Isle of Wight, just like ELP; just like ELP, they had gussied up the show with special effects. Dik Mik, the band’s engineer, had brought on a ring modulator to create drones that could be pitched at the audience. It was revolting, but didn’t stop Hawkwind from winning over the press.
“Can you imagine 400 people together and the force field given off by each—it could really be unbelievable,” guitarist Dave Brock told Sounds, in an early story about their ambitions. “You can force people to go into trances, and tell them what to do; it’s mass hypnotism, and you’re really setting yourself up as God. . . . Dikmik’s hustling for a Moog, and some quite incredible things could happen when we get that—it could stretch people’s minds. The sound waves we produce are ruining us, and some of the sounds we produce are beyond registering on the metre.”24
Hawkwind’s stage show only grew more psychedelic and ornate. So did the music. At the end of 1971 the band released In Search of Space, six songs making up a vaguely connected concept album. It was far more rudimentary than contemporary “progressive” music; the band never pretended otherwise. The point of the music was the groove, a concussive, writhing thing created by Brock’s guitar, Nik Turner’s saxophone, and the bass lines of Robert Anderson—replaced in August 1971 by Lemmy Kilmister, Keith Emerson’s old roadie.
“Here was Hawkwind at Powis Square with no bass player,” remembered Kilmister, “and somebody was running around asking, ‘Who plays bass?’ Dikmik, seeing his opportunity to have a full-time partner in speed, pointed at me and said, ‘He does.’ ‘Bastard!’ I hissed at him, because I’d never played bass in my life.”25
All of this undergirded the megalomaniacal lyrics of Robert Calvert, who was happy to explain his ambitions. In 1972, as the band toured In Search of Space, Calvert excitedly told NME of the song suite that was in the offing. “It doesn’t have a plot like a traditional opera,” he explained, “but is an opera nevertheless in the way it presents a situation. It concerns dreams people might have if they were suspended in animation in deep space. Whereas our last album concerned a journey into space, this is more about actually being there. On stage it’ll be a totally theatrical event, with dancers, mime and a new way of using light techniques which will cover the whole audience. Hopefully we want to get together the best-ever light show ever put on the road. And it won’t just be complementing the music but actually part of it. The guy operating the lights will be playing them, if you like, just as the others play their instruments.”26
That was exactly how Hawkwind played. Years after the Summer of Love, after the hippies had vanished, the band was creating “be-ins” out of endless songs composed of riffs piled atop riffs. “They don’t say ‘me,’ ” said Kilmister of the band’s faithful audience. “They shout ‘us.’ It’s a growth of a collective conscious.”27
Jethro Tull’s live reputation was growing too, though there were no pyrotechnics, no instruments of sonic torture. There was dancing, but it was Ian Anderson doing it. When Creem magazine sent reporter John Ingham to explain Tull to American readers, he described Anderson as “Leonard Bernstein on Speed.” This was a compliment. “Many of his actions are contrived,” wrote Ingham. “Playing on one foot, and hitting himself on the head to end a riff, for example, but the way he crouches back, arm swirling and flying into the air, and then surges up to the mike stand has a vitality and excitement missing from nearly all current groups.”28
The band had been in a bit of a holding pattern since it broke out at the end of the 1960s. In early 1970, it retreated to the suboptimal recording conditions of what Anderson would call a “badly acoustically treated church building that sounded really quite horrible.”29
They were nasty sessions, marked by false starts and failures of confidence in what had just been recorded. Toward the end, Anderson personally called Terry Ellis at
Chrysalis, begging him for a rescue mission. “I’m not happy with the band,” Anderson said, according to Ellis. “They’re not playing well. They’re not playing what I want them to play.”30
Anderson was simply establishing himself as the singular force in the band. Aqualung, he would later explain, was the record where he “started to make more of an effort to write songs that were not the kind of songs other people were writing.”31
From the first track, the title track, this was a record that listeners and critics could overanalyze. It started with a six-note riff in G minor, then an Anderson lyric—the listener could only surmise—about the creature on the album’s cover. This was a heavy metal song, seesawing between G minor and D major, until one minute in, when the riff disappeared and a distorted Anderson vocal trilled over an acoustic guitar. A whole new song cracked through, Martin Barre ripping through a guitar solo that, during recording, was visually accompanied by “Jimmy Page waving” Martin on.32 But at 5:08, another sharp shock: the folk melody sliced by the prodigal six-note riff. The song was a small epic, seemingly the start of a concept album. In the second track, “Cross-Eyed Mary,” the eponymous “poor man’s rich girl” was being watched “through the railings” by Aqualung.
Yet this would be Aqualung’s final appearance on his eponymous record. The vinyl spun on with longer, multisection rock tracks—“Locomotive Breath,” “My God”—alternating with short songs composed on Anderson’s acoustic guitar. “My God” had been the album’s working title, and a metaphor-stuffed song titled “Hymn 43” (“his cross was rather bloody, and he could hardly roll his stone”) was the only radio single.
The album, rough as the recording had made it, did everything Anderson had hoped it could. Jethro Tull broke out and toured America. Anderson, who’d always been noticed for his stage presence, started being covered as an actual musical genius. He rejected it at every turn. “Most of the songs on the record have nothing to do with the others. So it could not possibly be a concept album,” he explained.33 Was “My God” some statement about the power of the creator, or the effects of his absence? According to Anderson, it was “really a lament for God that he has to try and be so many different things to different people!”34
The culture beseeched Anderson to be deep. He decided to have fun with that. “We’ll give them the mother of all concept albums next time!” he remembered thinking. “So we did the completely over-the-top spoof concept album.”35
That would be Thick as a Brick, released in 1972, featuring one track that ran over forty minutes and occupied both sides of a disc. One track, but not one song. Anderson, who had now firmly taken the songwriting reins, composed thirteen identifiable pop melodies, stylistically similar to what had been on the previous few records. There was a theme this time—a pastoral guitar tune that opened and closed the album, as Anderson sung the titular insult.
But the overarching pomp of the record was, as Anderson promised, a piss-take. He insisted at first that the album was taken directly from the writings of a young savant who’d been punished for his individuality. His “story” was told on the album cover, a faux newspaper that folded out into a serviceable-looking broadsheet. The ruse initially fooled Melody Maker, whose correspondent Chris Welch described the album as “based on an impressive poem by one Gerald Bostock,” and rated the source material as “one of those poems that fixes one with a penetrating gaze and snaps somewhat bitterly.”36
Anderson abandoned the ruse quickly, before the album was released or fans could truly get lost in the mythos. It hardly mattered, with multiple papers asking whether the codpiece-wearing auteur had created “Tully’s Tommy.” On the road, the new music was folded into an epic-length rock show, a service for the growing Tull cult.
“The opening night of their first British tour in a year at Portsmouth was the best rehearsed and most cleverly executed show staged for a rock band,” wrote Welch, the Melody Maker reporter. “Their performance came somewhere between the musical excellence of Yes and the inventive audacity of the Mothers of Invention. Many groups have tried a little stage ‘business’ but few have succeeded in pulling it off so well.” Tull was doing it with a “barrage of pre-recorded tapes, startling use of stage props, lights, and dynamics that in turn baffled, amused and finally delighted a crowd who responded by roaring great cheers of approval.”
And Anderson was still joking around about the swollen ambitions. “Ian was moved to apologize for the discomfort caused to patrons glued to their seats for a show that eventually lasted nearly three hours,” reported Welch. “ ‘It’s a bit like Ben Hur,’ he admitted solicitously.” Later in the show, John Evan “began a berserk imitation of his leader, only to be led gently back to the organ and put firmly in his place.”37
This was more pantomime than “progressive,” which was how Anderson wanted it. “We did see the slightly annoying spaghetti noodling of long, drawn-out instrumental passages, and we did kind of spoof that,” he would say years later. “There are some rambling, free jazz moments . . . that were more of a piss-take on some of the bands that were rapidly disappearing up their own arses.”38
“Jethro Tull may think they are making art, which is something that isn’t of much use in the twentieth century in the first place,” wrote Dave Marsh in Creem, “but it looks from here as though they are only making an ultra-sophisticated lounge music for the post-lunar space age.”39
“It will undoubtedly impress an awful lot of dull minds with the superficial grandiloquence of its scope,” wrote John Swenson in Crawdaddy! “Jethro Tull ought to think about coming down from the clouds to do their next one.”40
But what if the listeners were in the clouds? Thick as a Brick, a forty-three-minute song cycle based on a nonexistent poem and written to be performed in its entirety, went straight to number one in the United States. It stayed there for two weeks, dislodged only by the arrival of the new Rolling Stones album.
ON MARCH 27, 1972, Yes ended thirty-two stops in the United States with a show in Boston. They had “broken” in America at last, and it had been exhausting at the level of the soul. Bill Bruford was nearly ready to quit the group. He gave Melody Maker a tour diary from New York, reporting on how Americans “believe that anything British is ‘better’ in music,” and describing the band’s conquest of the States as a run through a sensory deprivation tank. “The musicians are pumped with antibiotics and kept closed off from America in the capsule’s womb-like interior,” he wrote. “The walls of the pod may be hotel walls, aeroplane walls, or walls of roadies and managers. There is nothing at all to say that I haven’t got it muddled up, and in fact we fly to gigs in a Holiday Inn and check into a United Airlines DC9 to stay the night.”41
But the gigs were coming off perfectly. The Boston show started with Stravinsky’s Firebird Suite, an idea of Jon’s, some time-marking music while the band emerged from backstage and set up. As the strings subsided, the band tore into “Roundabout,” which was only then finishing its residence in the top ten.
King Crimson was marking time backstage. They’d been duct-taped together to tour their latest record, Islands, an intermittently beautiful and atonal suite of songs that had not sold well and featured the final Crimson lyrics of Peter Sinfield. As a Melody Maker reporter listened, Robert Fripp described Yes’s true role in the ecosystem: “As you know, Yes started their band, their original band, with Pete Banks and Tony Kaye, just as Crimson had established itself. Yes attended our first gig at the Speakeasy in ’68. When they saw that we were playing exactly what they had set out to accomplish it blew their heads and they never actually recovered you see. Yes is a very good band, mind you. We had Jon Anderson sing on our ‘Lizard’ album and they asked me to perform on one of theirs but I declined.”42
Right in time to squelch the awkwardness, Anderson bounded off stage with a sunny quote: “That was a really fine set by King Crimson, wasn’t it?”43
Melody Maker’s write-up focused on the “internecine warfare” anyway. After
the Boston concert, Yes received a gold record for $1 million sales of Fragile. They showed up, they collected the prize, and they left. Fripp was left alone to talk to reporters, waxing philosophical again. “You have no idea how it pains me to have to force my ideas on other people,” he said to one reporter. “They couldn’t play their parts without careful instruction. The arrangements were difficult for them to begin with. How can they be expected to embellish on it properly? But I don’t delude myself in thinking that I am King Crimson. King Crimson is merely a way of doing things.”44
What the press didn’t know was that the dour-sounding Fripp had, through all the misery, made a sale. It was true that Yes had tried to hire him, but he had an eye on Yes’s talent too. When he got a moment with Bruford, the drummer evoked the harsh judgments Fripp had delivered on Yes and asked how he—Bruford—had measured up. “Well, what do you say?” Bruford asked Fripp. “I think you are about ready now,” said Fripp, according to Bruford.45 And he nearly was.
In 1972, after returning to England and enjoying a respite, the band walked back into Advision to top Fragile. Pop structures had been abandoned completely. Fragile had begun with roughly forty seconds of distorted piano and plucked guitar. “Close to the Edge,” the first song on the eponymous album, would begin with forty seconds of nature sounds. This was Jon Anderson’s idea. “It took about a thousand tracks to make that opening!” said Eddy Offord.46
Of course it did; Yes was composing in the studio, splicing together what it had. According to Wakeman, the loop tape for the bird sounds was “forty feet long,” sprawling across and around the room. “We couldn’t play any of the tunes all the way through because nobody knew what they were,” Bruford said. “They were being invented in the studio.”47
Rich inventions, though; the band that had come together for Fragile had learned to layer disparate melodies over disparate melodies. “We don’t play 12-bars and we are quite envious of other groups who do,” Howe told Welch. “We’d love to ramble away on a 12-bar but it would be too easy and not fair on the audience.”48