The Show That Never Ends

by David Weigel

  The album and the concerts culminated with part two of the title track, a genuinely terrifying piece. The song started with Fripp playing flatted electric guitar chords in 11/8 time (theme 1). Bruford came in on the second measure, hitting a cymbal on the downbeat, and the scales went higher and higher until—swoop, at 0:45, everything fell away and a softer, less unsettling violin-and-bass-driven melody (theme 2) arrived, courtesy of Cross and Wetton. The pattern repeated, but the second appearance of the violin was accompanied by the distorted voices of laughing gremlins. At 3:40 a new, slower 6/8 melody (theme 3) began. At 4:00, Cross started subjecting the violin to what sounded like torture on the rack. Its death rattle continued until the return of theme 2, and at 5:55 a Bruford drumroll inaugurated a full forty seconds of soft noise, ending with a final, minor Fripp chord.

  “Some of the sounds Jamie got on that!” Wetton marveled to Sounds. “He used a glass rod through a thundersheet, pulling his hands along it to get the friction. It sounds like a bloody helicopter.”27

  The five-member Crimson completed two tours, as Muir’s interest gradually frayed. The improvisation was sort of the problem. “I had a lot of equipment,” he’d recall, and “with King Crimson the drum roadie would start to complain bitterly and get shirty because of the problems of setting it up and putting it back down again.”28 These petty concerns made a poor match with Muir’s spiritual interests. After two tours, he informed the band and EG that he was out, and that he would decamp to a Buddhist monastery in Scotland.

  Yet this didn’t alter the mode King Crimson had gotten into. Before the tours even started, Fripp sat with Brian Eno at his studio in London and started running his guitar through tapes. The two men opened a bottle of wine, then Fripp got to work with effects pedals, playing along to some wordless Eno music. The producer fed the Fripp sounds through his reel-to-reel Revox A77 tape machines, looping hypnotically, bouncing the sound between playback heads. “He did all the clever stuff, for sure, but the sound that he was hearing was routed through my machinery,” Eno would tell Mojo’s Andy Gill, decades later. “That kind of got me into the idea of the studio, not as a place for reproducing music but as a place for changing it, or re-creating it from scratch.”29

  After Muir left Crimson, before Fripp had to lower himself to the hotel-bus-plane-hotel grind of a new tour, the guitarist trekked back to Eno’s studio. They recorded more music, using the same techniques. When he gave interviews, Fripp insisted that the Eno tapes were changing music in a way no lumbering rock band could. “It’s the most expressive thing I’ve done,” Fripp told Guitar Player magazine. “It’s all guitar, but ‘The Heavenly Music Corporation’ is recorded so there’s a build-up of guitars, so that though there’s only two guitars playing, because of the manner in which it’s recorded, in one place it sounds like fifty guitars.”30

  “The Heavenly Music Corporation” ended up running to twenty-one minutes, taking up the entire first side of an album called (No Pussyfooting). The second side was devoted to “Swastika Girls,” composed in exactly the same way, and with a slightly busier guitar part from Fripp. There were no lyrics, no singles, nothing identified with hairy rock and roll. In another interview promoting the album, Fripp insisted that the cover would portray its creators “in a state of undress,” ideally “as an invitation to all those ladies in the future who’d like to help us develop even further.”

  “We’re both incorrigible womanizers,” Fripp told NME, “both wonderful examples of young Taurian virility.” The music paper illustrated these quotes with a cartoon of a fuzzy, unsmiling Fripp stripped down to his underwear. But he wasn’t truly joking, and he wasn’t out of place. The experimental musician as sex symbol; it was real, and the record buyers and concertgoers were proving it.31

  ON MAY 25, 1973, Tubular Bells dropped into the record shops. The cover, designed by Trevor Key after an idea that Oldfield had had when crossing two bones, was spare and unforgettable: a twisting, sci-fi bell floating across a cloudy sky. Virgin was releasing Gong’s latest album on the same day, Flying Teapot, a slab of glistening psychedelia with a cartoonish cover by Daevid Allen himself.

  Four days later, Top Gear host John Peel spun a song from Annette Funicello’s greatest-hits album, then asked his listeners to steady themselves for the first part of Oldfield’s “rather remarkable” album. He had not exactly stumbled across it in a shop. Branson had given him the hard sell, playing the album after treating Peel to dinner.32

  And luckily for him, luckily for Virgin, Peel heard everything that the rival labels and the snobs in Cannes had not. Peel rattled off all the instruments credited to Oldfield—“taped motorwave amplifier organ chord, mandolin-like guitar, fuzz guitar”—and then listeners heard it: the minor-key piano theme, the gateway into neo-orchestral music that could not have been further from the Mickey Mouse Club. Twenty minutes later, the song faded and Peel returned. “I’ve been introducing Top Gear for nearly six years now,” he said, “but I think that is certainly one of the most impressive LPs I’ve had the chance to play on the radio.”33

  Branson was thrilled, and even more thrilled when Peel doubled down with a review of the album in Listener. This was a host with no time and many sharp words for “progressive rock,” yet he couldn’t get enough of Oldfield. “In twenty years’ time,” wrote Peel, “I’m ready to bet you a few shillings that Yes and ELP will have vanished from the memory of all but the most stubborn and that the Gary Glitters and Sweets of no lasting value will be regarded as representing the true sound of the 1970s. Having said that, I’m going to tell you about a new recording of such strength, energy, and real beauty that to me it represents the first breakthrough into history that any musician regarded primarily as a rock musician has made.”34

  Peel had ushered in a phenomenon. There had been so many ways for Virgin to fail, but Oldfield’s record was going to be a sensation. Oldfield’s album, the “breakthrough into history,” soared to number one. It was everything the composer had asked for, so Branson asked him for a little more. Tubular Bells needed to be played live; Oldfield needed to write a score.

  This was no easy task, considering that Oldfield had stitched the music together from years of juvenilia and weeks of in-studio experiments. “I’d been quite happy doing my thing with Kevin Ayers, standing at the back next to the drummer, or getting blind drunk and going wild,” he thought. “It took ages to write it all out in multistave form. Eventually someone came in and helped me write out the parts.”35

  Yet this, at least, distracted the newly minted genius from the incipient nightmare of the live show. “I felt awful,” Oldfield remembered thinking. “I thought it was all going to go horribly wrong.”36

  Branson’s star was ready to bolt, after all of that prep, on the day that a crowd at the Queen Elizabeth Hall was supposed to witness history. The mogul invited Oldfield on a London ride-along in his Bentley.

  Branson knew his artist. “I’ll get out here and walk home,” said Branson. “You just keep driving and the car’s yours.”

  “Come off it!” said Oldfield. “It was your wedding present!”

  “All you have to do is then drive it round to the Queen Elizabeth Hall and go up onstage tonight,” said Branson.

  Oldfield took the deal. Branson would never stop congratulating himself for solving the crisis so easily. “If he was successful,” Branson would later write of Oldfield, “I would be able to pick up any car I wanted.”37

  The show may have been destined for success. Peel wasn’t alone in worshipping the album; in Sounds, Steve Peacock praised it above all the other Virgin releases, and above anything coming out of rival labels, for inspiring “the same kind of feeling as I had when I first heard bands like Pink Floyd and Soft Machine.”38

  But onstage, Oldfield could hear only the bum notes. “Without the benefit of the huge hammer,” he remembered, “the compressors and microphones, they just went ‘dink’ instead of that fantastic sound we had on the album.” He fretted throughout the conc
ert, and when it ended, silence enveloped the hall. And then the silence was replaced by a standing ovation. “They clapped and cheered and whistled, they just went totally bananas, they were in rapture. I was just sitting there with a huge question mark over my head, thinking to myself, ‘You liked that? You actually enjoyed it?’ ”39

  “Even the band applauded him,” Branson would write in his memoirs. “He was a new star. That night we sold hundreds of copies of Tubular Bells.”40

  Still, Oldfield didn’t buy it. He’d been in agony on stage. Why was the piece played as one whole, with no break? Because he wanted to race through it as quickly as possible. When Branson tried to congratulate his star, he found a sullen and unbelieving artist who wanted to flee, convinced that he’d blown it. “We were faced with the nightmare of a #1 artist who would not be interviewed, who would not play in public—who just wanted to compose,” Branson told an interviewer later.41

  The album sold, and sold, yet Oldfield bristled at promoting it. He sat for an “agonizing” interview with Melody Maker’s Karl Dallas, puzzling for twenty minutes over “why” he’d written the album, because a journalist wanted to know. What was the right answer? “I did things because that’s what I did,” the genius thought.

  Oldfield groped for a way out. He performed Tubular Bells live again, for the BBC, with the Softs’ Mike Ratledge on keyboards, but he wanted out. “The whole bubble about fame had burst in my mind.” The Bentley, the legendary Bentley he’d been given to save Virgin, was “clapped out” and not worth repairing. “If you pressed too hard on the floor on the passenger side, your foot would go straight through.”42

  So Oldfield fled west. He spotted a house for sale near England’s border with Wales, with a “beautiful view” of the Black Mountains. Before even going inside, Oldfield called Branson and asked for permission to spend £12,000 and buy the house—“The Beacon,” it was called. Permission was granted.

  All Branson wanted, anyway, was another hit from his shooting star. Oldfield, who’d paid little attention to details or contract negotiations when he signed with Virgin, jawed with Branson about the equipment he might need. “There was this organ that David Bedford used to have in Kevin Ayers and the Whole World,” he remembered saying. “A Farfisa? Not a Continental, a Professional Two or something.” The next weekend, back at Beacon, Oldfield looked out his window, onto the vista that was meant to clear his mind, and there was Branson, “staggering up from the car park at the bottom of the hill, actually carrying this monstrous, ugly Farfisa organ.”43

  Oldfield was left to stew, and compose, and think about what he really wanted in his music.

  AT THE SAME TIME, another veteran of the Kevin Ayers circle, another artist regularly consulted by the music press for visions of rock future, had been forced into the same position. Robert Wyatt, the drummer for Soft Machine, had left that band in 1971. “I was the only lout in the group, and I think they found my loutishness tiresome,” Wyatt said years later.44

  Wyatt went on to found a more song-focused outfit called Matching Mole, its name being a piss-take on the French translation of “soft machine”—machine molle. “There wasn’t any theory there,” said Wyatt, “except everybody just played what they knew that might go with what everybody else was doing.”45

  Matching Mole instantly found a following and bridged the gap between the Canterbury scene and the experimentation of the London bands. Robert Fripp had produced the band’s second record; Brian Eno had come into the studio to add some synthesized textures. All expectations were that the band would record a third record, or that Wyatt would record a second solo record, until June 1, 1973. “Lady June,” June Campbell Cramer, was throwing a party for Gong’s Gilli Smyth, who, like Oldfield, was about to release a record with Virgin. Cramer had gotten to know the Softs in their bohemian Spanish days.

  Reunited in a flat outside Paddington, Kevin Ayers and Robert Wyatt reverted to type. “God. I really was too drunk to know,” Wyatt remembered when a documentarian asked him to recall what happened. “I certainly wouldn’t have the courage to climb out of a fourth floor window.” However he did it, Wyatt fell from the window and woke up in a hospital to be told that he would never walk again. The fall had broken his spine. “It’ll probably knock 10 years off your life, 20 if you smoke,” said the doctor, according to Wyatt.46

  It was too horrible to believe: one of the most inventive and exciting drummers in British rock could no longer play the drums. Pink Floyd’s Nick Mason learned of the accident the very day that he received a postcard from Wyatt, asking him to produce his next solo project. Mason sprang into action, helping to organize a benefit concert for Wyatt at the Rainbow Theatre in November 1973.

  And then the two of them went to work. “The idea, basically, was just to make a nice record,” Wyatt told an interviewer, “not to explain what a terrible time I was having.”47 Just six months after being paralyzed, Wyatt was in the studio recording songs that, out of necessity and style, were more ambient and vocal than anything he’d done before. In July 1974, the buyer who took Rock Bottom home and put it on a record player heard barely any drums at all. “Sea Song” opened the record with the sound of a clipped metronome, woozy organs, and Wyatt’s nervous, warm words, which had as much or as little meaning as the listener wanted from them.

  Virgin signed Wyatt and advertised the album with a composite image of the singer’s half-smiling face superimposed on a garden gnome. The ad copy listed the personnel, including Mike Oldfield on guitar, and ended with some of the change-your-life verbiage that was becoming essential to the Virgin pitch. “In Robert Wyatt’s opinion, Rock Bottom is the finest album of his entire career. And there’s nothing Virgin can say to improve on that. So, temporarily suppressing our euphoria, we leave the rest to you.”48

  The Mason-produced album was released in July, to wide acclaim, and very little pity. Two months later, Wyatt released a pop single of a song that sounded nothing like the record. Backed by roughly the same band, Wyatt covered the Neil Diamond hit “I’m a Believer,” a faithful and affecting version of the song that veered into the unknown only when Fred Frith added an avant-garde viola solo to the second refrain. It was backed by “Memories,” the pop song that the Wilde Flowers had written to great success, for other people.

  “There was a bit of a misunderstanding with the avant-garde rock scene, because I think I was sort of swimming the wrong way, really,” Wyatt would explain. “A lot of the rock thing came out of people who’d started out doing covers of versions of the English scene and the American scene, the Beatles and Dylan and so on, and then got more and more involved in instrumental virtuosity and esoteric ideas. I was really going the other way. I was brought up with esoteric ideas and modern European music and Stockhausen, Webern, avant-garde poets, and all the kind of avant-garde thing in the ’50s, before pop music—the beat poets, the avant-garde painters at the time, and so on. To me, the amazing thing was to discover the absolute beauty of Ray Charles singing a country and western song or something like that. So my actual journey of discovery was I discovered the beauty of simple, popular music.”49

  After years in the spotlight, Wyatt would experience a first: a hit single that got him on Top of the Pops. In September 1974, the whole band arrived at the BBC to complete the ritual of syncing their movements to a track of their rump shaker as an audience of teens danced and nodded along. There was a hiccup. Wyatt would be making his return to live performance in a wheelchair. The BBC was hesitant about showing that, until the musicians lobbied, hard. “The director was eventually shamed into giving way,” said Mason, “and a good time was had by all.”50

  On the day, there was Wyatt in a robe, eyes sometimes fluttering closed as he bobbed his head and held the mike. There was Frith, re-creating his viola solo. And there was a young guitarist named Andy Summers, filling out the set. “I really had this dilemma about being a drummer, which is really a social act,” Wyatt would tell Melody Maker. “You have to be in a group. I really
wanted to do notes. Actual notes. And I’d always sung songs. So not being able to play drums anymore, not being in a group anymore, absolutely got me out of my dilemma.”51

  IN SEPTEMBER 1974, Melody Maker gathered the musicians it had been covering for a virtual symposium. The subject was stark enough to lead readers to a set conclusion: Was British rock “facing disaster?”

  The answer was yes. “I don’t feel there is anything new happening of any consequence,” said Greg Lake. “It seems to be the same bands doing the same things in the same places.” There was, he said, no new Jethro Tull, no new Led Zeppelin.52

  Robert Wyatt was more optimistic, largely because he didn’t see a need to defend “British rock” as a monolith. “In my own circle I can’t really see the woods for the trees,” he said, “and two of my favorite trees are Fred Frith and Hugh Hopper, who continue to write beautiful tunes.”53

  Wyatt, by necessity and by choice, had retreated from the grind. Lake had not. “There are no new sensational musicians coming along,” Lake explained. He was excited about ZZ Top, a band out of Texas: “For years they’ve been surrounded by cows and farms down there.” Other bands were new, but not exciting. “In New York there’s a fuss about the New York Dolls, and they’re okay—in Max’s Kansas City. But they’re not going to appeal on a world level.”54

  ELP did appeal on a world level. The band had spent much of the year touring Brain Salad Surgery, the most ambitious album in a career that had hardly been humble. Its cover was a jarring horror show, a two-piece work of art by a Swiss fan of the band named H. R. Giger. The record was contained in a white-hued painting of a woman, eyes closed, buried under some combination of dreadlocks and insectoid tubes. This small sleeve was shipped inside a cutout sleeve, the painting visible inside a circle framed by what seemed to be a sarcophagus decorated with a skull.