The Show That Never Ends

by David Weigel

  Oldfield had found a way out of the muck. “Ommadawn (Part Two)” ended the way the previous two opuses had, and then transformed into a completely different type of song. There, for the first time on record, was Oldfield singing—talking really. “I like beer,” said Oldfield, picking an acoustic guitar. “I like cheese. I like the smell of a westerly breeze. But I love, more than all of these, to be on horseback.”

  The great composer was singing, with no irony, about the joy of riding. “Big brown beastie, big brown face, I’d rather be with you than flying through space,” he sang. When Dallas asked about the meaning, Oldfield described the song as a kind of therapy, a way to reverse the negative energy of part two’s ripping guitar solo. “When I did that electric guitar, I found it really frightening. I couldn’t sleep,” he said.80

  It was around this time that the documentary filmmaker Tony Palmer profiled Oldfield. The composer didn’t know what to make of the guy, other than that he drove a Maserati with personalized plates. But Oldfield allowed himself to be filmed in his studio, marking up charts for his songs—a few bagpipes here, some African drums there, a mandolin over there. Cameras followed him as he took introspective walks along the vale. They tracked him as he talked in bland terms about how he composed, then sat for a quiz session about how the rock business worked.

  “The pop business?” said a distracted Oldfield, his eyes looking in every direction where the camera wasn’t. “It’s a bit silly isn’t it? I don’t really get involved in it.”

  “What sort of things?” asked Palmer.

  “What sort of things are silly?” laughed Oldfield. “Well, I can’t pretend at all. Unless I’m very drunk, then I don’t pretend. I just make an exhibition of myself. I suppose most of it is making an exhibition of yourself, isn’t it? I’d just rather do it here.”81

  It was Richard Branson, filmed separately, who got to do most of the talking. Oldfield, he explained, was an artist who had sold millions of albums and never been limited to one style. “He works more or less entirely on his own, in isolation and in peace,” said Branson. With a chuckle, he recalled how Oldfield’s album had been rejected, how one company had called it “self-indulgent rubbish” and missed out on a sensation. “A composer such as Mike Oldfield is among the best hopes we have for contemporary popular music.”82

  Neither Branson nor Oldfield got to see the results of these interviews until 1977. Palmer’s documentary All You Need Is Love told the full history of pop music in seventeen segments. Oldfield closed out the series. “Ommadawn (Part One)” was the last song music viewers would hear, all of the elements—African drums, bagpipes, electric guitar, everything he’d looped—blasting over images of Chuck Berry and Jesus Christ Superstar and the Beach Boys and Mississippi delta blues.

  “I was the last chapter in the story,” Oldfield wrote in his memoir. “So, at the time, Tubular Bells was thought of as the zenith of the achievements of rock and roll, where it was all supposed to be heading. By then, though, I was not happy with Tubular Bells at all. To me it represented nothing but stress and hard work.”83

  7

  COMPLEXITY FREAKS

  In 1971, the government of Ontario made a decision that would alter the history of progressive rock. The Canadian province dropped its drinking age from twenty-one to eighteen. It was a moment of liberation for high schoolers. It was especially good for Geddy Lee, Alex Lifeson, and John Rutsey, teenagers who had been playing high school dances and had hit a wall. “We played a lot of dances where nobody could dance well, because we weren’t a dance band,” said Lee, the band’s bassist, whose reedy voice handled the vocals on countless cover songs and blues-based originals. “We probably bummed out a lot of people on their high school memories.”1

  Lee, Lifeson, and Rutsey had grown up a thousand miles away from the wellsprings of progressive rock. The bassist was the son of Jewish immigrants; Lifeson, the guitarist, was the son of immigrants from Serbia. He’d met Rutsey when they were teenagers and formed a series of bands. In 1968 they added Lee, and in 1971 they could play the bars. “It was like when the Beatles played for weeks at a time in Germany,” said Ian Grandy, the band’s first roadie, of the drinking-age breakthrough. “So much time to fill, so songs would come and go, and you’re playing them again and again. We were a big band on that circuit and filled the bars, leading you to think you could actually make a living doing this.”2

  Rush delivered what was in demand: hard-riffing, Led Zeppelin–esque rock music. In 1973 the band self-released its first single, a cover of “Not Fade Away,” a Buddy Holly song that the Rolling Stones had turned into a shuffling hit. Rush deconstructed it, silencing its famous beat for the entire first verse. There was Lee’s controlled squeal, wrapping around the lyrics; there was Lifeson’s guitar, chopping out the chords. The drums kicked in, turning a simple song into an invitation to headbanging.

  The band’s eponymous first album followed that pattern. Lee’s vocal mannerisms sounded so much like Robert Plant that American DJs, spinning the record, began to get questions about the new Led Zeppelin album. There were few hints of progressive rock, though the band was absorbing it. “I have a very high voice,” Lee conceded to an interviewer from Circus years later. “So does Robert Plant, but it’s an entirely different voice. Both bands play at a pretty high volume, but the music is different. And when you look inside at what motivates the music, you see it’s very different.”3

  The departure of Rutsey came just as the band was earning major label success, as their own Moon Records became a unit of Polygram. Rush, with a two-record deal, found a replacement drummer in Neil Peart. “To be a drummer in 1965, all you had to do was play one beat,” said Peart. “Suddenly, through ’67, ’68, ’69, what happened? What it took to be a drummer was so daunting as a teenager at the time. ‘That’s what I have to do to be a good drummer? I have to play a complicated time signature, exotic percussion instruments, intricate arrangements, inventive drum fills?’ All of that was coming at me as a teenager. That became my new benchmark.”4

  Peart was also a lyricist, with an immediate impact on the band’s approach. For their second album, he dug into Tolkien for inspiration (“Rivendell”). Blues rock was subsumed by progressive rock. “We were influenced by bands like Yes, Genesis, Van der Graaf Generator, Gentle Giant and ELP,” Lee said. “When the progressive movement came along, we were so impressed with the musicality and the complexity, we became complexity freaks. So we wanted to write things that were heavy but complex.” It was not calculated. “There was no, ‘Let’s synthesize these two styles; if we take that element and combine it with this element, we’ll have something new,’ ” said Peart. “It was nothing like that. We were not that self-aware, let alone that calculating.”5

  Rush’s new material sent it even further into the unknown, and almost at odds with what had been commercially successful. The band’s third album, Caress of Steel, offered some proudly Canadian rock in “Bastille Day” and chased it with “The Fountain of Lamneth,” a side-long epic to match anything by Yes. “The idea originally came from a time when I was driving from the top of a mountain to the bottom,” Peart explained to Sounds. “Seeing the lights of the city beneath me, I got to thinking, ‘What would life be like if you could only measure your position as a person by the level at which you lived up the side of a mountain?’ I got to drawing relations, seeing kinds of comparisons in this metaphor, and eventually put down a rough sketch of the six different parts I thought there would have to be . . . it was all very naïve, I admit that now, it was a ridiculous thing, like writing a thesis on metaphysics or something.”6

  The album was a costly flop, and the material was not finding an audience. As they gigged across Ontario, the band made up passes commemorating the “Down the Tubes Tour,” bowing to the judgment of the ticket buyers and the panicky label. “The worst was Northern Ontario,” Geddy recalled a few years later, when the gigging had finally paid off. “They don’t care what you do. They don’t care if you
do the greatest original material in the world if their ears haven’t heard it before. They just want to get drunk and hear their favorite tunes.”7

  Polygram now had the option to drop the group. “There was a lot of pressure from us, from the record company, and, to some degree, from management to go back to our rock roots, make another Rush album,” said Lifeson. “And we basically said, ‘You know what? That’s not what we’re about. If that’s what everybody wants, then that’s what they’re not going to get. If we go down we’re going to go down in flames.’ ”8

  The result was 2112, the fusion of the rock sound, the progressive influences, and Peart’s libertarian-humanist fantasy lyrics. Its entire first side was taken up by the band’s most ambitious song, the eponymous seven-part hero’s journey of a lone man taking on the priests of the “Temples of Syrinx.” There were briefer songs on the second side, but nothing devised as a radio hit, nothing watered down for single status. “Our manager went in and lied to them and basically told them, ‘Yeah, the band is working on a great record. It’s gonna be a real commercial success and the songs are very straightforward,’ ” said Alex Lifeson. “And then we delivered it. The fortunate thing is our deal at that time was a production deal. So, really, we had full control over content, including artwork. Once we delivered it to the record company, it was theirs to work with. So we were really lucky.”9

  The album was released on April Fool’s Day 1976. Just months after “going down the tubes,” Rush had crafted a slow-burning success. In six months, two hundred thousand copies of 2112 were sold. The band was playing larger venues and had a less depressing theme for the tour: “All the World’s a Stage.” Just five months after the album dropped, that tour was culled for a live album. A band that had struggled to back up Kiss had built a reputation as a touring act, and in 1977 it would go international. “The next album,” Lee told Circus that year, “will be recorded in England.”10

  PROGRESSIVE MUSIC, INSPIRED by American rock and roll and by the roiling scenes of Europe, took new forms when it returned to those countries. From the beginning, bands from continental Europe shared billings and influences with bands from the UK. In the early 1970s, when the music was dominant, the first wave of progressive bands found themselves the accidental fathers of similar-sounding acts, competing for the same market.

  It was England, at first, where the early bands got their breaks. Aphrodite’s Child was one of the earliest and luckiest, releasing the 1967 single “Plastics Nevermore” shortly before a coup overthrew the socialist government in their native Greece. The four-piece ensemble of Evangelos Papathanassiou (keyboards), Lucas Sideras (drums), Demis Roussos (bass), and Anargyros Koulouris (guitar) headed north—until Koulouris was conscripted. The band could not get a visa until it proved that it was, indeed, a band.

  Once it did, the hits seemed to flow like water. “End of the World” was the first hit, a song with plenty of Procol Harum DNA and a dark lyric. The most striking element was the keyboard, played by Papathanassiou, and clearly the dominant force. He had taken a new name: Vangelis. And conquest, easy as it came, seemed to bore him. “We had one million-selling single after another,” he told an interviewer years later. “I hate it when a project I’m involved in, but don’t particularly like, becomes successful. I found myself doing things that I couldn’t bear at the time, but I don’t have any regrets as they were the means to an end.”11

  The “means” included the group’s final album, 666, a two-LP concept about the apocalypse. The “ends” were the makings of Vangelis’s studio, where he would compose and produce with no care for whatever trends wound through rock music. A visiting journalist recorded his setup with awe: a Hammond B3, a Fender Rhodes, a “little semi-pro keyboard called a Torendo” to simulate church organs. “Keyboards today are more polyphonic and have many other possibilities and they are also popular because they are new,” Vangelis told an interviewer. “Today we are very well equipped, but we don’t have the people to play. People buy synthesizers and things like that, and they can’t play them. I have the synthesizer because it has been used very badly and for very cheap effects—cosmic things, just to try to impress.”12

  Holland’s Focus began in much the same way, as a Jethro Tull soundalike. It broke out in 1972, with a single that deployed a sound that few bands dared use: the yodel. “Hocus Pocus,” a lyricless song with an unforgettable riff, anchored the band’s hit record Moving Waves and established guitarist Jan Akkerman as one of the great players of the genre. “We never listened to English guitar players except maybe the Shadows and Clapton,” Akkerman told an interviewer. “I was into jazz and rock and roll. When I heard somebody like Beck or Clapton playing they just dated what I was already doing. I was doing it before them, as simple as that.”13

  Moving Waves ended with Focus’s other persona, a side-long suite called “Eruption”—again with no lyrics. “We don’t go back to, let’s say, Bach and stuff like that,” Akkerman said in 1973. “No, we even go back a little further, and I like that. By the way, the whole point of bringing classical pieces into pop music is what I really like. Pop music will be enriched by that.”14 Akkerman talked freely about the influences of the composers. “[Bach’s] Fuga for instance, it’s very well built, very major,” he said. “A composer like Bartók, is the opposite. He tried to create heavenly music, but it became very earthly. In his music I hear waterfalls, I see beautiful trees and butterflies, alternated with weirdness, strange dissonants, and so on.”15

  English bands had not been shy about their influences, but the continental bands were even prouder. Premiata Forneria Marconi, which translated in English to “award-winning Marconi bakery,” formed in Milan in 1970 when drummer Franz Di Cioccio, guitarist Franco Mussida, bassist Giorgio Piazza, and keyboard player and vocalist Flavio Premoli of the group I Quelli met multi-instrumentalist Mauro Pagani. They joined forces, and Pagani helped expand their sound with such instruments as flute and violin. In 1971 they released their first single, “Impressioni di settembre,” intended to break the usual patterns of pop music. “The most important thing is that the musical phrases sound very strange and its sensation is like being in another world,” said Di Cioccio. “We are very proud of this sound.”16

  The band’s debut album, Storia di un Minuto, came out in the prog salad days of 1972. While other progressive music swaggered between modes, this was all moodiness, channeling “The Court of the Crimson King” and “Lucky Man.” A rerecorded version of “Impressioni di settembre” opened the album; it ended with “Grazie davvero,” the sort of music that could sound-track a Disney villain’s death march.

  Premiata Forneria Marconi kept recording and put out Per un Amico, their first album with access to sixteen-track recording technology. The opener, “Appena un po,” recalled Genesis circa Foxtrot; and “Generale!” recalled Emerson, Lake & Palmer.

  Soon enough, Greg Lake signed the Italian band to ELP’s own Manticore label. With their name now shortened to PFM as a favor to native speakers of the English language, the group’s first album for Manticore was Photos of Ghosts, which was basically the Per un Amico album released with English lyrics written by King Crimson’s Peter Sinfield. It also contained one anglicized song from the debut album Storia di un Minuto (“È festa,” changed to “Celebration”) and a new track, “Old Rain.” The album was released widely throughout Europe, the United States, and Japan, and even cracked the U.S. charts. “It was the first and only time that an Italian band was on a Billboard chart,” Di Cioccio told the Greek publication Hit Channel. “I’m very proud of this.”17

  Bassist Giorgio Piazza left the band and was replaced by Patrick Djivas. The next album, L’Isola di Niente, came out in 1974, with an English-language version released by Manticore at the same time: The World Became the World. The band’s sound began to incorporate hints of fusion, as shown on “Is My Face on Straight.”

  Americanization did not change the band, but it changed the audience. PFM toured the US to support t
he album, accompanying such completely unsuitable acts as the Allman Brothers Band, the Beach Boys, Poco, Santana, and ZZ Top. Nineteen seventy-five’s Chocolate Kings saw the debut of lead singer Bernardo Lanzetti, formerly of another Italian prog group, Acqua Fragile. Because Lanzetti spoke English, the group could record “Chocolate Kings” in a more marketable tongue. The song was successful in the States, despite lyrics about the American soldiers who had stayed in Italy after the war, doling out candy to the children of the conquered.

  The Italian band Banco del Mutuo Soccorso—which translates literally as “mutual aid bank”—followed in PFM’s trail. The group released its self-titled debut in 1972: three main pieces and three moody instrumental showcases. “R.I.P. (Requiescant in Pace)” offered a compact, six-minute dose of up-tempo, odd-metered riffing, which was buoyed by the twin keyboards of brothers Gianni and Vittorio Nocenzi and the soaring tenor of Francesco Di Giacomo, which carried much of the album, right through the two extended pieces, “Metamorfosi” and “Il giardino del mago.”

  Like PFM, Banco chased the debut with a same-year album that got even more attention. Darwin! was a concept album about the birth and evolution of man, beginning with the fourteen-minute “L’Evoluzione.” The story continued with a furious keyboard and drum workout in “La conquista della posizione eretta,” which told the story of early man learning to walk upright. That was nothing compared to the maniacal sixteenth-note keyboard runs in “Cento mani e cento occhi.”

  The group followed Darwin! in 1973 with Io Sono Nato Libero, and then began to shed members. Guitarist Marcello Todaro left after gracing Banco’s first three albums—a huge loss to the band’s sound. However, some famous Englishmen were about to enter the picture with an irresistible offer—again, from Manticore.