The Show That Never Ends

by David Weigel

“If you delve into their lyrics and direction, you quickly realize that it’s very similar to Italian opera in its truest sense, and seeing as opera originated here in Italy, they have almost turned the wheel full circle,” Keith Emerson told NME. “In the past, Italy was always regarded as being the center of musical culture and now it would seem that it’s spreading out again. I honestly feel that, very shortly, America will start listening quite seriously to a lot of new European bands. I don’t think it will be restricted to Italy.”18

  Throughout the decade, “progressive” music came to include ever-more-exploratory sounds from Europe. The British press embraced, and unfortunately named, the “Krautrock” movement of German bands that were more experimental and less wedded to old European song structures. Daevid Allen’s Gong, built when he was separated from Soft Machine by the English Channel, returned triumphantly to England as a hippie group unfrozen from a cryogenic sleep, with lyrics about flying saucers and “glissando guitar” hypnotics by the English guitarist Steve Hillage.

  Even Gong was startled by Magma, the French band led by drummer, singer, and composer Christian Vander. Having once suffered nightmares about the fate of humanity, Vander felt compelled to form the group to exorcize the resulting anxieties through music—abrasive, uneasy and difficult music, which was sung in a wholly fabricated language called “Kobaïan.”

  “The sounds of the English language weren’t necessarily suited to this kind of music,” Vander said of the process that led him to inventing his own language. “When I wrote, the sounds came naturally with it—I didn’t intellectualize the process by saying ‘Ok, now I’m going to write some words in a particular language,’ it was really sounds that were coming at the same time as the music. And often they expressed more than if I had translated them.”19

  The band’s 1970 self-titled debut told the story that formed the Magma mythos—enough to start a religion on, and more than enough to start a band. In it, earthlings escaped to the planet Kobaïa after their home planet had been rendered uninhabitable by disasters of man’s own doing. That album and the follow-up, 1971’s 1001° Centigrades, were jazzy and almost accessible. But 1973’s Mëkanïk Dëstruktï`w Kömmandöh introduced a new nightmarish sound. It featured such signature elements as the vocals of the drummer’s wife, Stella Vander, and the bass playing of newcomer Jannick Top.

  The album began with “Hortz fur dëhn štekëhn `wešt”—all buildup and none of the expected release. The lead vocal was a chanted, staccato nonsense overlaid with bleating horns and shrieking female screams. Next came “Ïma süri dondaï,” an urgent, looping sequence in 7/4 time, which led seamlessly into “Kobaïa is de hündïn.” It followed the structure of “Ïma süri dondaï” carried by the piano, breaking after two minutes into a repeating, midtempo, 4/4 chant. It even had a brief rock guitar lead as it faded out. “Da zeuhl `wortz mëkanïk” continued the 7/4 motif and led into the moodier and more restrained “Nebëhr gudahtt.”

  W`urdah Ïtah followed in 1974. None of its twelve songs exceeded five minutes, but it was no pop album. It was carried mostly by piano and avoided the 5/4 and 7/4 time signatures that Vander seemed so enamored of, preferring instead to pound away at the same quarter note for ten minutes before the up-tempo, cruising speed of “Fur dïhhël kobaïa.”

  Köhntarkösz came in 1974, featuring just four songs, including the two-part title suite. After the 1975 live album Live/Hhaï, Magma released 1976’s Üdü W`üdü. There was something approaching funk in “Tröller tanz (Troll’s Dance),” carried by Jannick Top’s throbbing bass, a tritone keyboard figure, and high-pitched shrieking. The second side of the album was taken up by the eighteen-minute “De futura,” with room for Vander to play every polyrhythm, texture, and breathtaking sideways fill he could summon.

  “There was no outlet for musical creativity at all in France when Gong and Magma were born,” Daevid Allen told Richie Unterberger. “We were like the alternative, had no road to follow. And they basically created this incredible network throughout the whole of France, and allowed a whole generation of very interesting bands to come up.”20

  ON APRIL 27, 1973, a King Crimson that was nearing the end of its natural life shared a bill with a new band—Todd Rundgren’s Utopia. The Philadelphia-born Rundgren had been writing hits for years, and he had followings in England and the US for a style of music that borrowed as much from garage rock as it did from Carole King.

  He was trying something new. Something/Anything?, a double album that had produced the biggest hits of his career, was played almost entirely by him alone; only the fourth side used a full band. His follow-up, A Wizard, a True Star, relied on different audio tracks to enable him to compose everything. The Utopia project was coming from another direction, an experiment to see what he could achieve with a full band and ambitious music. “It was a disaster,” said Rundgren. “We were a highly technical sort of production. King Crimson—they were playing the kind of music that we all sort of admired, but they pretty much based their show on that, on their musicianship. And while we considered ourselves adequate and progressive, we had this layer of theatricality that wasn’t necessarily an aspect of progressive rock.”21

  Rundgren’s vision of a stage show that simulated a war was part boldness and part goof, inspired by the excesses of progressive rock. “More or less everything went wrong,” said Rundgren. “We set ourselves up every night for spectacular success or for spectacular failure. We had these things that were as big as your head, a dozen of them on the stage, and at a certain cue we’d play the Utopia Theme, with the stage supposedly looking like a Martian invader movie. Unfortunately, none of that happened. Half the flashbulbs didn’t go off, my guitar never made a sound, and then we were just like chickens with our heads cut off.”22

  Rundgren persisted, and in the mid-1970s he dabbled in progressive rock—the parts of it he liked. He was joined by a plethora of American bands that processed the progressive rock they’d heard and introduced more of a rock sound. In 1974, with Utopia, he tried his hand at a progressive song, “The Ikon,” a rambling monster of ideas that was inspired by jazz fusion.

  “In some ways you have to slow the process down to something that makes sense or advances the larger musical agenda,” said Rundgren of progressive rock. “Yes was a band that really embodied that: ‘I’ll be the roundabout.’ I’ll be a traffic circle for you, right? Progressive rock has two almost competing aspects to it. One of them is compositional—how do you, in the traditional way, find something for everyone in the band to play. The other is improvisational. You want to allow the players to get their rocks off but still find a framework to have it that evinces the traditional aspects of songwriting.”23

  Progressive rock was a persona for Rundgren, one of the many he changed into from year to year. In a 1975 interview, he pronounced the death of the pop Rundgren that people knew. “That is my official goodbye to those who want the romanticist Todd Rundgren,” he said. “He’s not coming back. Or, there again, it could literally be goodbye. I might move into another medium or I might not express anything and become contemplative—absorb as opposed to produce.”24

  The product of that thinking was his most ambitious album, Initiation, with the longest song that Rundgren ever wrote: “A Treatise on Cosmic Fire.” It stretched over thirty-five minutes, longer than anything by Yes, longer than most LP sides had allowed. The theory behind it: “Go crazy and get it all on tape.”25

  Kansas also started off as a progressive band, with a self-titled debut in 1974. “Can I Tell You,” its first song, set the mode for plenty of American rock-forward progressive music. The odd-metered song is upbeat and up-tempo, while still operating in an unconventional meter. It led directly into “Bringing It Back,” a shuffling rave-up carried by thirty-second-note violin runs. But “Journey from Mariabronn” was the band’s first truly progressive statement, an extended and meandering piece with colors from Yes and Deep Purple. The other side showcased “The Pilgrimage,” offering pure southern r
ock—before a head fake back into ambition with the ten-minute “Aperçu” and the “Death of Mother Nature Suite,” alternating between Black Sabbath riffing and quieter, sparse playing.

  British critics did not know how to handle this. In a typical pan, NME’s Max Bell mistakenly identified the state of Kansas as part of the Confederacy and surmised that its album art portrayed “North and South being held apart by a gargantuan figure, presumably Kansas State.” (It was John Brown, the abolitionist.) “All the elements for subtlety are there; good violinist, guitarist, keyboards, busy rhythm section, not to mention the Confederacy theme itself,” joked Bell. “Bristling with hard rock commonplace, speed and beat, they rapidly cancel any hints of originality.”26

  But Kansas was less interested in originality than in fusing what worked. The band’s cofounder, Kerry Livgren, listed his influences as British bands like “Yardbirds, Kinks, especially Procol Harum, and some of the psychedelic American bands such as H. P. Lovecraft, Touch, Iron Butterfly, Quicksilver Messenger Service, Spirit, the Doors.”27

  It was derivative, and critics noticed, but the band pushed on. The year 1975 brought Song for America, featuring only six cuts, dominated by the eight-minute “Lamplight Symphony” and the twelve-minute “Incomudro—Hymn to the Atman.” Later that same year, Kansas released Masque, and their approach came more sharply into focus. Even the epics, such as “Icarus (Borne on Wings of Steel),” began to flirt with hard-rock territory.

  In 1976 the band released Leftoverture, and with it, a hit that scaled back on the length but kept the progressiveness: “Carry On Wayward Son.” Rife with tempo changes, dynamics changes, and multiple solos, it was nonetheless a pop song, and it broke the band. The album’s extended pieces—“Cheyenne Anthem” and “Magnum Opus”—were tucked away at the end of the album, a reward for fans who successfully completed the laborious task of flipping the record over.

  Next was 1977’s Point of Know Return, distinguished by the presence of “Dust in the Wind.” Consisting of nothing but acoustic guitar, vocal, and a violin solo, it brought Kansas to their absolute commercial peak. Its origins were in nothing fancier than a Kerry Livgren finger exercise. “My wife was listening to me play it one day and she said, ‘You know, that’s really pretty. You should make a song out of that,’ ” he said. “I didn’t think it was a Kansas-type song. She said, ‘Give it a try anyway.’ Several million records later, I guess she was right. Musically, though, it’s not one of my favorite songs. I tend to like the more bombastic things.”28

  Toronto’s FM followed the same path. The group was founded by vocalist and multi-instrumentalist Cameron Hawkins, who was joined by drummer Martin Deller and violin and mandolin player Nash the Slash, who performed while wrapped up in bandages like a mummy. This lineup created the group’s debut, Black Noise. The 1977 album was slick, cobbling from new wave and fusion, and was initially released by CBC Records in a limited run of five hundred copies. It was sold exclusively by mail order and advertised only on the radio. Despite its limited availability, it sold out, and it received a wide release the following year, eventually going gold—Canadian gold, with fifty thousand copies sold.

  Nash the Slash left the group for a solo career and was replaced by Ben Mink. This lineup produced 1978’s Direct to Disc, which consisted of just two extended tracks, “Headroom” and “Border Crossing,” each taking up an entire album side. The group was dogged by lineup changes and problems with the newcomers’ labels throughout most of its existence, and those problems, combined with the quirky nature of the music, conspired to keep FM permanently obscure below the forty-ninth parallel. Indeed, the most high-profile thing associated with the band was Mink’s guest appearance on the song “Losing It,” on the 1982 Rush album Signals.

  THE SUCCESS OF 2112 pushed Rush into international markets, outside of America. For the first time, on June 1, 1977, they played for an English audience. Backed by the progressive rock also-rans of Stray, they took over Sheffield City Hall, then traveled south. The mythos of the journey was not lost on them. “We’ve always looked up to the English progressive bands and it’s gonna be a good opportunity to go over there and try to capture the same sort of atmosphere,” Lee told Circus. “We’re also expanding what we can play. We’re getting into more instruments, there will be more texture. We would never forsake our hard rock framework, though! We’ll just update it.”29

  The timing was perfect, in a way. Progressive rock was, at that exact moment, being chewed up by a critical backlash. The fans showing up to hear Rush were the wrong kind of fans—the mockable ones, with mockable taste in music. “Rush failed to deliver the killer punch I had half-hoped was coming,” Paul Morley wrote in NME. “Instead it was heads down for the first of their long Science Fantasy epics and, after that, epic after epic. As far as I could tell, there was little point to them. They were no more than a lot of riffs, mostly derived from Sabbath, Purple and Zeppelin, and loosely thrown together around various concepts. Titles like ‘By-Tor And The Snow Dog’ and ‘The Fountain Of Lamneth’ give a fair indication of what to expect—the fairytale castles of Yes meet Sabbath’s headbanger.”30

  The rise of punk benefited Rush, and painted a target. The bar for entry was dropped so low that a band with actual prowess, and ambitious songs, looked positively virtuoso. “Punk legitimized us immediately,” said Lee. “We were adept and competent musicians. Punk threw us to the top of the pile.”31

  But the authenticity and left-wing politics of punk, embraced almost immediately by critics, made a poor contrast with Rush. The band found this out in a rough landing of an interview that they gave to Barry Miles, a reporter for the New Musical Express. Like seemingly everyone on staff, he was cold on the music. Unlike his peers, however, he had read up on Ayn Rand, and was utterly offended that Rush had written a paean to her with 2112.

  When the band met with Miles, Lee and Lifeson sat gobsmacked—“bystanders”—as Peart and Miles went multiple rounds over libertarianism. “The thing for me about Ayn Rand is that her philosophy is the only one applicable to the world today—in every sense,” Peart insisted. “If you take her ideas, then take them farther in your own mind, you can find answers to pretty well everything on an individual basis. Putting the individual as the first priority, everything can be made to work in a way that it can never be made to work under any other system.”32

  When the interviewer started to raise his doubts, Peart tore into him. “You’re living in the best example,” he said. “Look at Britain and what socialism has done to Britain! It’s crippling! And what it’s done to the youth. What do you think The Sex Pistols and all the rest of ’em are really frustrated about? They’re frustrated because they’re growing up in a socialist society in which there’s no place for them as individuals. They either join the morass or they fight it with the only means left. They have literally no future and I lived and worked here and I know what it feels like and it’s not very nice.”33

  Miles was dumbfounded. Was his subject, was this rock star, not being arch? Was he actually explaining to English readers that socialism was breaking their country? Was he putting the Sex Pistols in that context? “Yeah!” said Peart. “Why is there no future in England? What other reason is there? I really think that’s the root of it.”34

  If it felt rough at the time, it was scabrous in print. The leading music paper and taste maker branded Rush’s music—music partially composed by a Holocaust survivor’s son—as “fascistic.” The reputation, which the band rejected, was folded into a narrative of Rush as a throwback band for slow-witted listeners. “The reason for Rush’s actual popularity becomes clear: It’s rooted in the immaturity of both the group and their fans,” wrote Paul Morley in NME, reviewing a 1978 box set of the first three Rush albums meant to reintroduce them to Britain. “Immaturity of emotions, responses, ideals, character. A striving for something they’ll both never have. Rush are musically a superficial splodgy mess of the stun of Led Zeppelin, the excessive structures of Yes and th
e melody of later Beatles. There’s six sides of music here in this package, 24 songs and two suites. None, except for maybe the title track of Fly By Night, has any genuine melodic and structural presence.”35

  But Rush was an international act now, with a fan base inherited from progressive rock. Most of the first-wave bands had wound down by 1978. It was the three Canadians who were producing thorny, proudly metaphysical albums and suites. The band’s 1978 album, Hemispheres, included a Peart composition whose libertarianism was almost mockingly obvious. “The Trees,” a sort of inverted Lorax tale, was an Animal Farm–styled story about punier trees forming a union to chop oak trees down to size. “La Villa Strangiato” was inspired by Lifeson’s dreams. “Sometimes, when we’re all supposed to be fast asleep in our hotel rooms, he’ll wake up either Geddy or me with a phone call in the middle of the night and start telling us all about these terrible dreams he’s been having,” said Peart. “When you’re barely conscious, some of the stories he comes up with can be quite mind-blowing.”36

  Years later, and without endorsing the snarky critics’ critique, Lee appraised Hemispheres as the rough end to an old and spent style. “We burned ourselves out on the concept,” he said. “The music was becoming slave to the concept, instead of being lifted by it. We were suffocating, becoming formulaic. It was time to break the mold.”37

  THE “NEW” SOUND of Rush was defined by an instrument that had been lurking: the keyboard. Lee, who had taken piano lessons in his youth, began adding textures to the band’s music. That was the extent of it; there was no fancy playing, just colors underneath some slightly more accessible rock songs.

  Lee’s gadget came into full view on Permanent Waves, the band’s first album of the 1980s. “Freewill” galloped along with 13/4 and 4/4 time signatures, and a smooth synthesizer emphasizing the Peart-provided libertarian lyric. (Decades later, the libertarian-leaning Republican senator Rand Paul would walk out to the song, until Rush asked him to stop.) “The Spirit of Radio” was a bigger hit, cracking the top twenty in the UK—rising after punk’s popularity had ebbed away.