The Show That Never Ends

by David Weigel

  And the name of the album? A sex joke, basically. “When we were on tour, we would check into a hotel or restaurant and ask the desk clerk or maître d’ if they had any Brain Salad,” tour manager Stewart Young told Circus magazine. “They always said no, they didn’t. We just couldn’t seem to get any!”55

  Side one began with “Jerusalem,” the Anglican church hymn based on William Blake’s poem, given the full Emerson organ treatment. “It’s just a fantastic lyric,” Lake would explain. “Bring me my bow of burning gold / Bring me my arrows of desire. It’s worth playing the whole song to get that lyric.”56

  The album continued with an adaptation of the fourth movement of Alberto Ginastera’s Piano Concerto no. 1, which Lake had retitled “Tocatta.” (According to Lake, Ginastera himself had heard the arrangement and pronounced it “Diabolico!”)57 Lake was next, with an original composition called “Still . . . You Turn Me On,” and a lyric that he would never explain: “Every day a little sadder, a little madder, someone get me a ladder.”

  Side one ended with “Benny the Bouncer,” a trifle of the sort that had appeared on Trilogy—with one difference: Peter Sinfield, no longer part of the reformed King Crimson, was collaborating on lyrics. “It worked in King Crimson,” Lake told Melody Maker. “Of all the musicians, he’s the one closest to me. He’s the only one I could write lyrics with and he writes exactly the lyrics that I want.”58

  Sinfield’s influence was all over side two, a suite called “Karn Evil,” broken into three “impressions” and four parts. The album cover finally made sense: This was an epic about a dystopian future ruled over cruelly by a computer, whose name was an ominous deconstruction of the word “Carnival.” “Karn Evil is a place,” Emerson told Circus. “Everything is heading for that place unless something is done about it.”59

  The emotional apex of the song, and the part that would send audiences roaring when they heard it, was sung from Karn’s perspective. “Karn Evil 9: 1st Impression, Pt. 2” began with a seemingly random assortment of Moog sounds, joined by Lake’s vocal: “Welcome back my friends to the show that never ends.”

  The song built, and built, until the band broke into three simultaneous displays of skill. From February 1973 to August 1974, ELP played 145 live shows, and the full power of the “Karn Evil” suite revealed itself. This was the tour that cemented ELP as one of the biggest live acts on the planet, behind only the Rolling Stones and the Who, capable of entertaining a third of a million people at the outdoor California Jam.

  A fan showing up for that tour would find the band at the biggest venue in his city, with a stage show that included more than two hundred pieces of equipment. According to a New York Times story on the phenomenon, the show required “thirteen keyboard units” for Keith Emerson, including a “brand new prototype Moog synthesizer”; a $5,000 Persian rug “for bass player Greg Lake to stand on while playing”; and a stainless steel drum kit, topped off by an “old church bell from the Stepney district of London,” surrounded by Chinese gongs.60 The kit could rotate 360 degrees while Carl Palmer pounded out the solos in “Tarkus.” The cost of this: $25,000.

  The 1973–74 tour did not start with a Brain Salad Surgery track. Keith Emerson’s Moog was the first sound of the set, playing deafening notes, pitches that rose fast and fell faster. This, knew Rob McDonnell and everybody else in the audience, was the opening of the Aaron Copland cover “Hoedown.” It was ELP’s first song for practical reasons. “You could get away with it by just sort of really screwing the instrument just totally up and just freak out with it,”61 Emerson would explain. The one sure thing was the space-invader noise you’d get when turning it on.

  All of the songs were played on one of the biggest sound systems yet built. ELP’s sound designer, Bill Hough, assembled a 28,000-watt surround-sound system, controlled by a three-tiered mixing desk. (The three mixing boards, by themselves, weighed 285 pounds.) If you could put up with a little echo, a little delay, you were getting the same concussive sound waves in any part of the venue. You just had to live near a stadium that could handle it.

  “In a lot of venues we played it was kind of impractical,” Emerson remembered, “because we were blocking fire exits.”62 The first thing many people would see upon entering the stadium was a projection screen, 156 feet in diameter, that would display disturbing skull/erotica imagery from Giger under two sixty-foot proscenium arches that held a hundred spotlights.

  Times were good for the supergroups. Yes, minus Wakeman, approached the burly Vangelis, who had hardly stopped working since Aphrodite’s Child split up. It wouldn’t work; Vangelis did not want to tour, much less jump on a caravan that flitted around the world. So, Yes recruited the Swiss-born experimental keyboard player Patrick Moraz and produced Relayer, with some songs as ambitious as anything on Tales from Topographic Oceans. “The Gates of Delirium” interpreted scenes from War and Peace over an entire LP side, with keyboard parts that sounded, at times, like rubies falling on the ground.

  “To tell you the truth I was having nightmares beforehand,” Moraz told Melody Maker, as the band took the album on tour. “In ‘The Gates of Delirium’ there are 17 changes of keyboard in the first 22 bars. Of course the audience doesn’t notice, but you have to think like a computer. Now I’m past that stage, and it’s become second nature, and I can put in the most expression possible.”63

  WAKEMAN, MEANWHILE, PERFORMED The Myths and Legends of King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table outdoors, at Wembley Arena with a full cast acting out his drama. The concept-cum-play ended with a fight sequence for “The Last Battle,” which would send knights clambering around a stage. Problem: The stage couldn’t be deiced before the show. So he hired skaters instead of dancers. “Lancelot,” wearing a dummy horse on his torso, glided back and forth across the ice to battle a similarly attired ”Black Knight,” as Wakeman commanded the action behind his tripartite wall of keyboards.

  Wakeman’s departure from Yes made that band look a little less colorful and helped his own paradoxical celebrity shine even brighter. Here was a classically trained Englishman, a savant, writing pieces from the sorts of epic themes that had inspired the great composers, while at the same time bragging about his conquests at the pub. At the end of 1974, Wakeman gave the New Musical Express a tour of the “beers of the world,” with some extra details about how Yes had drained liquor cabinets in every time zone. “On our rider for the tour of America—for the seven of us—we had twelve six-packs of Budweiser, two bottles of tequila, two bottles of scotch, two bottles of brandy, a bottle of grenadine, and a bottle of orange juice to mix Tequila Sunrises,” he boasted. “This is apart from all the ordinary lagers and other beers you get. And on the very first gig we had to send out for more at half time.”64

  It was on to the beers. Young’s Special was deemed a “a very good bitter.” Watneys Special was “the kind of beer that I was actually weaned on,” while Ruddles County was “bloody ’orrible.” Ind Coope’s Double Diamond “had the sweetness and the glorioso of wandering through a forest on a spring day with the sight of those first leaves and the gentle tweeting of birds.” Wakeman’s only warning was that the beer “does make you fart.”65

  Wakeman’s former bandmates were occasionally asked what had happened to the guy. They obliged with theories. “His humor was ours completely—Python and everything,” Steve Howe told one reporter. “Drinking wasn’t disallowed in Yes. It’s never been disallowed. What I’m saying is . . . Rick did take things to extremes. He doesn’t have any trouble holding it but during the recording of Topographic Oceans he started to realize that none of us wanted to indulge. Everybody has fun. Everybody has vices. But when they’re talking to me, if they’re not talking honestly, constructively and creatively then they can sod off for all I’m concerned.”66

  This was the Rick Wakeman that starred in Lisztomania. Ken Russell had just directed Tommy, the hit adaptation of the Who’s quasi-plotless rock opera. The natural follow-up was an impressionist biopic abou
t Franz Liszt, the pianist who had made European audiences lose control and applaud after every piece. Wasn’t he the true ancestor of the sexualized rock star? And if it was 1975 and you were looking for a keyboard player, how could you not choose Wakeman? Russell gave him control of the entire soundtrack.

  “Liszt was a bit of a rock and roller at heart,” said Wakeman in a Creem interview, “but he was a bit of a puritan on his sounds. I just had to update the guy’s music to fit his image.” He wrote a score to accompany scenes in which Liszt (played by Roger Daltrey) rode a hippo-sized rubber penis and a gigantism-afflicted Nazi slaughtered Hasidic Jews with a guitar/machine gun, the victims dropping gold on the ground as they fell. “I think the sun shines out of Ken Russell’s asshole,” said Wakeman.67

  The movie was basically unwatchable, not that that meant Russell had failed. His vision of rock excess and brain-dead rock fandom is bleak and cruelly cynical. In his world, pompous music is produced by men with monster egos and unresolved sexual hang-ups. Wakeman, who appeared on some promotional posters, got one of the strangest cameos. (And we can’t forget Ringo Starr, who played the pope.) At the start of the film’s third act, Richard Wagner summons Liszt to his lair, over to an operating table surrounded by “Hammer Horror” electric poles. “We need a superman,” cries Wagner. “Such virtue will never be born of woman, Franz! Such a creature must be—created!” He turns the levers. “They do say music is the gay science, Franz! My music, and my philosophy, will give him—life!”

  Wagner’s machinery emits beeps and fart noises as his sheet music is fed into it. Thus arises Siegfried—Rick Wakeman, painted in silver and dressed to look exactly like the Marvel Comics version of Thor. He stands up, his 6-foot-3-inch height elevated by golden boots with elevator heels. He drains a stein of beer before Wagner commands him to “go forth!” Wakeman/Siegfried trudges out of the laboratory. He stops at a fireplace, grabs his crotch, and urinates all over the flames.

  “Who’s going to follow him?” laughs Daltrey-as-Liszt. Wagner, chagrined, puts Siegfried back on the operating table. The experiment is over.

  But the big bands and stars kept getting second chances. Jethro Tull recovered fitfully from the backlash to A Passion Play. “People seemed to object to the fact that they actually had to listen to it more than once,” Ian Anderson grumbled to a biographer. “We had to come back with an album that was a bit more to the point, less pompous and overbearing than ‘Passion Play’ had been, so it was just a bunch of songs.”68

  That album, War Child, was supposed to be ambitious in a whole new way. Imagining a dramatic film, a concept album growing across the formats and the senses, Anderson met with choreographers and directors. He had Monty Python’s John Cleese on board to punch up the humor of the script. But the project floundered, and Anderson’s band put the songs together for a less ambitious LP.

  “I remember starting to write an opera when I was at the Royal Academy,” Tull’s orchestra arranger David Palmer recalled later, to convey just how disappointed Anderson was. “I hadn’t got far past Mozart’s operas, let alone Wagner, Verdi and the other lot. I was a mile out, but I still desperately wanted to do it, to keep moving onwards. And I’m sure that was the motivation behind Ian wanting to write that film.”69

  Anderson’s disappointment acted like some sacrifice to the fickle gods. “Bungle in the Jungle,” the leadoff single, became an American top forty hit. In the US and in Britain, the album won back the nattering classes. “The critics have had their way,” wrote Chris Charlesworth in Melody Maker, “the Passion Play has been forgotten, and Jethro Tull are once again playing the kind of music that won them their hard-earned reputation as brilliant showmen.”70 In another issue, the paper asked whether Tull had become the biggest band in the world again. They had shed some pretention without trading away any of their massiveness.

  Hawkwind were finally downsizing a part of their spectacle. They were on tour in Canada, crossing the border from Windsor to Detroit, when customs nabbed Lemmy Kilmister’s supply of amphetamine sulfate. The bassist spent five days in jail, and the band bailed him out and fired him. Undeterred, Kilmister promised to create a band of his own—one he could not be junked from for something as petty as a drug bust. “They’ll be the dirtiest rock and roll band in the world,” Kilmister told Sounds. “If we moved in next door your lawn would die.”71

  A few weeks later, Kilmister started putting together a band that he wanted to call Bastard. The commercial downsides of that name were made clear to him, so he borrowed a portmanteau from one of his more propulsive Hawkwind songs: Motörhead.

  Hatfield and the North grew out of another impulse: pure experimentation. Formed by veterans of Caravan and other Canterbury groups, it debuted with a self-titled 1974 song cycle of absurdist jazz fusion. After another year, and another album, cofounder Richard Sinclair moved on. The music, he decided, was ambitious but frigid. “The band wrote songs that their structure wasn’t so interesting to me,” Sinclair said. “I want songs to have more outside references. I wanted to have more interaction when we played live. In those days, the music was so loud and noisy. We weren’t performing music that we came up [with] together live. It was all about playing the music correctly. It wasn’t about really enjoying it; it was about how you played it.”72

  IN THE SUMMER of 1974, Melody Maker reporter Karl Dallas was granted an on-location interview with Mike Oldfield. The composer continued to detest interviews—nothing personal, according to Virgin, just the attitude of an individualist genius. Tubular Bells had blown up internationally without his intervention, thanks in large part to the use of that Farfisa organ in the trailer and on the soundtrack of The Exorcist. Oldfield knew nothing about the movie, but he had finished Hergest Ridge, and Virgin was banking on another hit, so he would grant a conversation in his new habitat.

  Dallas asked about the album title, and what it meant. “I dunno,” said Oldfield. “It’s a nice hill. It looks different from whatever direction you look. And it has all sorts of associations with old Welsh legends. You find it in the Mabinogion. There’s iron age relics right on the very top.” The reporter followed up, asking Oldfield whether the new record, with eight distinct sections, had been inspired by the setting, or programmed according to the rhythms of this bucolic countryside. “There’s no program,” said Oldfield. That was all he said.73

  Everyone associated with Oldfield’s work got fresh attention—but the people granting it seemed unsure of what they had. Ayers found himself being promoted heavily by Island, packaged into a world-conquering rock star mold that did not fit him at all. “They thought that it would be a kind of launch for me as a megastar,” Ayers recalled, ruefully, in 2008. “They dressed me in silk suits and silver shoes and stuff like that, but I obviously wasn’t going to be that, and so I was dropped.”74

  Island Records even assembled Ayers in a supergroup—a onetime, one-show collaboration with John Cale, German singer-songwriter Nico, and Brian Eno. The most sarcastic acronym was the one most used: ACNE. “Personally, I would never have put that together,” Ayers said. “Given the choice, they were not the people I would have chosen to do a concert with, because of the dissimilarity of our work and what we did. The only thing we really had in common was being on the same record company, and being from the same era, and being associated with the so-called underground.75

  Oldfield, meanwhile, had hardly warmed to a role as the next great composer. When the reviews for Hergest Ridge came out, he felt justified: critics who had sucked up to him before were raring to pan him. The problems started with the cover, which paid tribute to Oldfield’s new pastoral surroundings and to the plane he was learning to fly with his earnings. The music was structured just the same as the megahit had been: one long track split across two LP sides. It zigged where Tubular Bells had zagged. Instead of hammer-pounding brass, there was a jingling of sleigh bells.

  “The textures of a lot of rock music and the textures of a city street, they’re really a similar sort o
f feel,” Oldfield told Dallas in another interview. “Lots of confusion and lots of nasty overtones; things going bang, crash, car doors, horns. . . . Hergest Ridge, on the other hand, is smooth, uncluttered. There are no tube trains, very few car doors, lots of open countryside, smooth hills, a general feeling of smoothness and well-being and non-hysteria.”76

  The criticism did not stop the album from selling, and the record swiftly passed one million in worldwide sales. No, it didn’t blow past the sales of Tubular Bells, but what could? No one could tell what Oldfield was doing. A Sounds reporter, on site in Oldfield’s lair, inspected a record collection of “only a handful” of albums—mostly Bach, Sibelius, Ravel, Delius, and what he’d borrowed from Steve Winwood “to find out what’s going on.”77

  Karl Dallas, the Melody Maker reporter who had given Oldfield such conniptions, returned to Oldfield’s home for a 1975 profile and called his subject—with some hyperbole—“the best-selling twentieth century composer, with gold records up in the loo to prove it.”78

  By then, Oldfield had started living in a pattern. He would ignore Virgin as much as he could and record an epic whenever he was inspired. When Dallas sought him out in 1975, Oldfield was readying a new one-song-two-sides epic called Ommadawn. “I just had two tunes which ran together on acoustic guitar, and it sounded nice, and I developed it from there,” he said, cryptically. “After Hergest Ridge, I couldn’t imagine me doing any more. But after this, I can imagine me doing loads and loads more.”79