The Show That Never Ends

by David Weigel

  Yet there were sixty more minutes to go. There were detours, like the vaguely Eastern drum pattern and whining Howe guitar lines that dominated the beginning and middle of part 3: “The Ancient (Giants under the Sun)”. But the band scattered hooks in every song. The vocal-and-organ duet in “Ritual (Nous Sommes du Soleil)” sounds like Funkadelic. It would show up three decades later as the key sample in De La Soul’s “The Grind Date” on the eponymous album.

  The record went gold in the UK from advance sales alone—seventy-five thousand copies. Yes sold out everywhere, but audiences at the Tales shows were given a warning: there would be no seating after the performance had started. You grabbed your place for the show, and you were locked in to a piece of music longer than almost any individual baroque symphony.

  “Already the piece is being applauded as a masterpiece of contemporary music,” wrote Tony Palmer in the Observer, “classical in structure, mystical in realization.” But in concert, he continued, “the players themselves appeared confused as to what was expected of them, the lead singer being unsure whether each section should be described as, for example, the second movement or the second side of the record.”81

  The band planned to play it all. Wakeman went along for a few shows, until the November 1973 gig at the Manchester Free Trade Hall. “There were a couple of pieces where I hadn’t got much to do,” Wakeman would recall, “and it was all a bit dull.”82

  During every show, a keyboard tech reclined underneath Wakeman’s Hammond organ, ready to fix broken hammers or ribbons and to “continually hand me my alcoholic beverages.”83 That night in Manchester, the tech asked the bored Wakeman what he wanted to eat after the show. Wakeman, the lone carnivore in Yes, ordered the curry.

  “Half the audience were in narcotic rapture on some far-off planet,” Wakeman wrote in his 2008 memoir, “and the other half were asleep, bored shitless.”84

  Wakeman kept on at the keyboards, adding gossamer organ melodies and ambient passages to the songs. And then, about thirty minutes later, his tech started handing up “little foil trays” of curry: chicken vindaloo, rice pilaf, some papadums, bhindi bhaji, Bombay aloo, and a stuffed paratha. Wakeman began placing them on top of his keyboards. “I still didn’t have a lot to do,” he wrote, “so I thought I might as well tuck in.”85 The food was obscured by the instrument stacks, further obscured by Wakeman’s cape, but the aroma danced over to Yes’s lead singer, Jon Anderson. He took a good look at the culinary insult. Shrug. Papadum in hand, he returned to his microphone to sing his next part.

  But as the tour went on, Yes dropped the third section of the album from the show, then the second. Soon, Wakeman vented to reporters about the band’s screwup. “Tales from Topographic Oceans is like a woman’s padded bra,” he told one interviewer. “The cover looks good . . . but when you peel off the padding there’s not a lot there.”86

  The band had gone along with the live edits and tolerated Rick’s behavior. “Rick had a problem with the song that featured him, and the basic improvisational content of side two,” explained Steve Howe.87 “We started to take two out, three out, and it was a great disappointment to me. The group’s got a right to do what the hell it likes. We can’t be guided by our audience.”

  At the next shows, Yes started dropping sections of the suite. “We could tell the audience wasn’t reacting,” said Anderson.88 By the end, they were only playing the energetic first and fourth sections, then switching over to the hits. They rented a 63-foot-high balloon with the Yes logo, hoping it would follow them around the country. They scrapped it when the balloon and their bus nearly crashed.

  “One of the members of the band got misled by his friends,” said Howe, “but Tales is possibly one of the masterworks of Yes. I was one of the guys who never said anything bad about the album. We were behind it. We were the guys that built it.”89

  Wakeman would never agree. Tales, he would say, was too loping, too pretentious, too unplanned—boring, pompous, obese music. But him? He was going to write concept albums based on classic British themes. The Six Wives of Henry VIII had gone gold everywhere, eventually selling fifteen million copies. His second experiment, Journey to the Centre of the Earth, was recorded during a pause in the Tales tour, and it went to number one in the UK just as he was parting ways with Yes.

  British audiences weren’t done with pomp. Wakeman’s excess was just more relatable than Yes’s excess. Journey, a four-part compression of the Jules Verne story, was recorded live with the London Symphony Orchestra, which beefed up Wakeman’s twelve keyboards—three of them mellotrons. (It was a busy 1974 for the orchestra; they would later guest on the Mahavishnu Orchestra’s Apocalypse.) There are no strange time signatures. This is pop music. And Wakeman’s timing was perfect, putting him at the center of British music fandom just as Keith Emerson was taking a few years off.

  “Hopefully, my music will develop in the way Yes would have developed,” Wakeman told Chris Welch. “In fact Journey is how I would have liked Yes to have gone.”90

  6

  HAMMERS AND BELLS

  In the spring of 1973, progressive artists released two of the biggest-selling albums in the history of pop music. March brought Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon. May brought Tubular Bells. The first record sold roughly fifteen million copies; the second sold about seventeen million. They did not depart the best-seller charts until, respectively, 1978 and 1988. The people behind them remained demigods on the music scene for the rest of the decade. The labels that had stuck by them became fabulously rich. There might be no Virgin Empire, no Virgin Airlines—much less Virgin spacecraft—had Mike Oldfield not attacked a leftover bell with a spare hammer.

  And there would have been less solace for outcast teenagers, had Pink Floyd not decided to craft a concept album. The origins of Dark Side were in discussions that bassist Roger Waters had with band members about the “pressures and preoccupations that divert us from our potential for positive action.”1 He would write a song cycle about madness; it would bring together elements that the band had been kicking around but be woven into one piece, played live.

  It would not be about the moon—not literally. The band behind “Interstellar Overdrive” and “Set the Controls for the Heart of the Sun” was not making a space-rock album, and Waters blanched when the theory was raised. “None of it had anything to do with that. I don’t know what’s wrong with people.” By his admission, he took “the enormous risk of being truly banal about a lot of it, in order that the ideas should be expressed as simply and plainly as possible.”2

  The lyrical content was simple. Nothing else was. Pink Floyd began playing the suite (temporarily retitled Eclipse, so as not to conflict with a contemporary album by the band Medicine Head) in January 1972, bringing with them a quadraphonic sound system and a twenty-eight-channel mixing desk. The concert began with the taped sound of a heartbeat, cascading into other carefully “found” noise, like a clanging cash machine, and then into the slow groove of the studiously banal “Breathe.”

  The piece took a while to sink in with people. It was daring, and difficult; the tape loops malfunctioned during the first performance, forcing the band to regroup with a different set. But Dark Side came together over the course of 1972. In the hands of producer Alan Parsons, the album drifted away from Pink Floyd’s norms and into a sound that was simultaneously otherworldly and radio ready. On tour, the lengthy “Us and Them” had been anchored by an organ solo. On the record, this was replaced by a saxophone. The song “Time” was given an intro of clanging clocks that was recorded when Parsons went “to an antique clock shop and recorded a horologist’s delight of chimes, ticks, and alarms.”3

  KEVIN AYERS WAS THRIVING without Soft Machine. The band had sprinted away from his style of cracked pop music; his new backing band, the Whole World, could play exactly what he wanted. The bassist, Mike Oldfield, was a young and curious savant.

  One day, Oldfield grew fascinated with “We Did It Again.” It was the song that repe
ated without regard for time, the song that the Softs had once stretched to forty minutes as a crowd tripped on. “Why do you keep going round and round?” Oldfield asked Ayers. “Why not?” Ayers asked. “That’s what you’re supposed to do. It’s a thing that just repeats. Like the seasons, they repeat. Clocks do that. They’re supposed to do that.”4

  Oldfield took note. If he was going to compose for himself, he would begin with a repetitive riff. In the same mood, he played around with the Farfisa organ that Ayers sometimes played on stage. “I fiddled around for a few minutes on the Farfisa,” he remembered, “and came up with a riff I liked. I thought of it as one bar in 7/8 time and one bar in 8/8 or 4/4; I wanted to make it different from 16/8 so I thought I’d drop a sixteenth beat. I probably chose the key A minor because it is the easiest key to play on the keyboard.”5

  It was not the music that Ayers might have come up with. Ayers had broken up the Whole World out of boredom and disarray. “I got more and more drunk and despairing,” said Ayers, “and the gigs got worse.”6

  Two French horns, two flutes, a trombone, two violins, a cello, a double bass, and the Whole World. “The thing that always upset me about performing was the idea of ‘entertaining’ people,” he told an interviewer. “It’s like that when I go to a movie; I think ‘why I am sitting here, letting someone else live my life for me?’ That’s why this trance thing would be good. As a musician, I’d simply be useful to the audience, creating a method for people to release their energies. It would be a very communal thing.”7

  Ayers’s bandmates, including Oldfield and keyboard player David Bedford, were stranded. “I had taken my demos to loads of record companies,” said Oldfield, “but they all looked at me as if I was mad. They said, because there were no vocals, no words, no drums or anything, that it was not marketable.”8

  At twenty-two, the bassist was basically stranded and done with the band. “The last tour was a very drunken affair,” he remembered.9 Oldfield recalled being “desperate enough to go to the Soviet Union to become a state musician,” and he had nearly done that. But “almost at the moment that I decided to call the embassy to say, ‘I want to go live in Moscow,’ ” he related, a representative from Caroline Records rang him at his apartment.

  Caroline had been founded by an entrepreneur just about Oldfield’s age: Richard Branson. In the summer of 1972, Branson bought a mansion located in Shipton-on-Cherwell in Oxfordshire and transformed it into a studio where bands could hang out and record. “I was looking at Country Life magazine one day while waiting to see Richard,” said Tom Newman. “I spotted this house in Oxfordshire in its own grounds. It just looked beautiful and it was thirty thousand quid.”10

  Branson brought Oldfield to his office, and offered to record at the manor. Oldfield rattled off the instruments he’d need. “A good acoustic guitar, a Spanish guitar, a Farfisa organ, a Fender precision bass, a good Fender amplifier, glockenspiel, a mandolin, a mellotron, a triangle, a Gibson guitar . . . oh, and some chimes of course. What are chimes? Tubular bells.” Branson paid for it all. The engineer would be Tom Newman, who, unbeknownst to his benefactors, had no idea what he was doing.11

  “I tried to live up to my claim that I was the world’s gift to the recording industry,” said Newman. “I read up all the back copies of ‘Studio News’ in order to find out what I was talking about . . . and I put the studio together with a soldering iron in one hand and a text book in the other.”12

  So Oldfield’s scrappy crew started recording the suite that was tentatively known as “Opus One.” But there was no pomp or pretense. “I’m not the world’s greatest pianist,” said Oldfield. “My timing wandered all over the place. So all that first day’s work had to be done again the next day with a metronome running to keep me in time.”13

  The second day saw an improvement. “I had this organ chord which I wanted to slowly slide into another chord,” said Oldfield. “It would be simple now, but the only way we could do it then was to record the first chord on a tape loop, then put that onto this great big machine with a huge speed control dial on it, and as the engineer turned the dial, the chord went up in pitch. Once we got that sound, Tom was completely converted.”14

  “We had this huge champagne bottle, a jeroboam or something,” said Oldfield. “Someone would go down to the pub to have it filled with draught Guinness, and we would drink that while we were overdubbing. At the time I was smoking cigarillos, little cigars. The engineers would be furious with me, as all my ash would fall down into the faders and between the knobs.”15

  Oldfield’s twiddling built toward an epic track, enough to fill side one with all of the melodies that had been kicking around in Oldfield’s head and apartment. New melodies and riffs were written on the spot; the bass line at the end of part one came together, said Oldfield, after “a few swigs of the Jameson bottle.”16

  “They were complete melodies in themselves,” said Newman, “with intros and fade-outs or ends. I liked them very much and was a little nonplussed when Mike strung them all together.”17

  Yet the songs made more sense as part of a single piece. Toward the end of the sessions for part one, Oldfield remembered that a set of bells had been left in the studio from John Cale’s time in the mansion. “When I tried playing the bells, they didn’t sound very impressive,” he remembered. “So I asked if anyone had a bigger hammer. Someone found one, but it still didn’t do it. ‘Anybody got a really big hammer?’ I asked, so someone went out to the garage and got a massive hammer.” Hammer in hand, Oldfield “walloped a bell and made a huge dent in it, and it made this amazing sound.”18

  “I was quite rebellious, so I said, ‘You want lyrics? I’ll give you lyrics!’ There was a big wine cellar at The Manor, so I went down there one night—it was flooded with a foot of water—and found this bottle of Jameson whiskey. I drank half of it and ordered the engineer to take me to the studio. I screamed my brains out for ten minutes and I couldn’t speak a single sentence for two weeks.”19

  They mixed away, five hundred or so separate pieces of music to get into sixteen tracks—all by hand. And they seemed to be finished, until they played back the piece and heard their edits memorialized by audible, jarring clicks. “Simon started to cut them out physically,” said Oldfield, “and join the tape together with sticky tape. Then, when we played it through, instead of a ‘click’ sound, there was a ‘thunk’ sound.”20 Oldfield and Newman came up with a Gordian knot sort of solution: they cut the transitions. Instead of easy segues or fades, the music would skip from section to section.

  They were done. The album was taken to a trade fair in Cannes, where Richard Branson himself played the life-changing album and was greeted with advice that Oldfield would never follow: “It needs vocals, it needs lyrics.”21

  Duly panicked, Virgin went back to work on its star. “One night I found Richard and Tom Newman in the studio trying to remix the album,” Oldfield said. “There was nothing I could do about it. I didn’t know what the hell they were up to. As it turned out, they gave up after a day and left it as it was.”22 It was up to the artist and the label to sell the thing.

  MEANWHILE, A NEW VERSION of King Crimson was taking a stage in Frankfurt’s Zoom Club. It was October 13, 1972, half a year since the last iteration of the band had played the Islands tracks on tour with Yes. There would be nothing from Islands—nothing from any King Crimson album before.

  Instead, there was Bill Bruford, taking his place behind a drum kit and then jangling a set of bells. The only other noise was coming from Jamie Muir, a percussionist who’d been expelled from the Edinburgh College of Art and found homes in experimental free-jazz bands across Great Britain. “I had been hearing of Jamie Muir for several years with remarkable frequency,” Robert Fripp would tell Rolling Stone. “I knew it was inevitable that one day I would work with him.”23

  Shortly thereafter, the percussionist was on stage, rapping out an Eastern rhythm on a xylophone. This was the start of “Larks’ Tongues in Aspic (Part I),�
�� a name that Muir had come up with. Fripp had played him a section of the piece and asked him what it sounded like. “Why, larks’ tongues in aspic,” Muir had said. “What else?”24 He’d compared the sound to tiny delicacies trapped in gelatin. This, the band all agreed, was brilliant.

  “I was very much more an instrumental style of musician rather than being song-based,” Muir explained to a biographer, “and there weren’t many other bands that I would have been any good in.”25 He preferred “sheets of tin rattling and ripping, piles of crockery breaking” to the norms of songwriting.

  The Zoom Club crowd heard the results. There was no song to hang on to for the first minute of the new King Crimson’s set. Not until the arrival of a violin, in the hands of new hire David Cross, playing a clipped, ascending, melody. The tension built, joined by a few spare riffs from Fripp. Then the whole song exploded, with new bassist, John Wetton, joining in on a six-note battering of noise from Fripp and Bruford and Muir and Cross.

  The new Crimson had recaptured something of the first band, but abandoned the usual structures of songs. Half of the Zoom Club show revealed the tracks the band had been working on in rehearsals over the summer. Half of it consisted of total improvisation.

  Fripp was thrilled. “The Zoom club was amazing—all those little bums and tits all tightly concealed within denims and blouses, eager to break free their confining clasp,” he told Sounds. “I didn’t think it possible again that I’d have the energy to take on the fairly enormous task of being involved with King Crimson. But then of course I wasn’t as well tuned in to cosmic energy as I am now.”26

  There were two more nights at the Zoom Club, then a stop in Bremen, and then King Crimson spent November and December aggressively touring the UK. They returned to the studio in January 1973 to cut Larks’ Tongues in Aspic, an album bookended by the eponymous tracks, all informed by the improvisations worked out on stage. The concerts had been exactly the same: the first title track, followed by the sweet, Wetton-sung ballad “Book of Saturday,” then three more songs that skittered around the edges of pop but quickly raced elsewhere.