The Show That Never Ends

by David Weigel

  The album might have been more ambitious; for a short while, an epic suite about the tale of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight was written and revised. But it was scrapped, component parts turned into a shorter environmental song called “Natural Science.”

  From that point, Rush abandoned the old tropes of progressive rock and developed songs that retained all the allegory but ditched the zigzagging between musical themes. Lee’s Oberheim polyphonic was a source for sweeping, futuristic bleeps. A band that could seemingly do anything created a defining electronic sound—the mashed opening chord of “Tom Sawyer,” a blunt story about modern alienation that led off the next album: Moving Pictures.

  The Rush fan base had already been growing, but “Tom Sawyer” became a crossover hit. The storming progressive sounds were blended with something metallic—not new wave, but not far off. “The fact that it is so popular still just confuses the heck out of me,” said Lee.38

  On the strength of Moving Pictures, Geddy Lee, the bassist and singer, was named Keyboard magazine’s newcomer of the year. Later, he would talk down his use of the instrument. “Keyboards are a necessary evil to me,” said Lee. “I have an arsenal of sounds, and that’s really what keyboards represent to me: Sounds and textures.”39

  Yet as Rush progressed further into the electronic sound, they were in sync with the 1980s. Critics still welcomed new records with spittle; Rush was able to ignore that. Signals was even more programmed than what had come before—a function of what Yes had heard from the synthpop of producers like Trevor Horn. “I think we were influenced a lot by those kinds of bands at the time,” said Lee. “They seemed to bring keyboards into it in a very cool way.”40

  By the early 1980s, Rush had elbowed into the pantheon. The progressive bands that had preceded it, and inspired it, had gravitated toward the same new sounds. “I remember a lot of musicians saying, ‘What am I supposed to do? Forget how to play?’ ” said Peart. “You know, ‘I’m not doing this crap!’ And okay, bye. Whereas others . . . think of Peter Gabriel coming out of Genesis and becoming so influential and so vital at the time. Trevor Horn came out of Yes, and look what he spawned, a whole plethora of interesting and vital music of its time. Some people were able to adapt to the modern-ness without losing anything of what they had.”41

  8

  FRIPPERIES

  In 1974, Robert Fripp made a final tour of Britain’s music reporters to explain why King Crimson had to die. In one interview, he recalled the grimness of a show in Rome, where the band had nearly been ripped off and the crowd had nearly rioted. In another interview, with Melody Maker, Fripp waxed much more philosophically about the reasons for the split. There was no saving King Crimson, because there was no saving the system that people were then living in. He provided three reasons. “The first is that it represents a change in the world,” he said. “Second, where I once considered being part of a band like Crimson to be the best liberal education a young man could receive, I now know that isn’t so. And third, the energies involved in the particular lifestyle of the band and in the music are no longer of value to the way I live.”1

  The way he had been living would no longer be available to him—to anyone, really. Fripp shared a sort of apocalyptic vision, based on conversations with “people I respect who have direct perception of these matters.” Society was in decline. He’d seen it. “The transition will reach its most marked point in the years 1990 to 1999,” he explained. “Within that period, there will be the greatest friction and, unless there are people with a certain education, we could see the complete collapse of civilization as we know it and a period of devastation which could last, maybe, 300 years. It will be comparable, perhaps, to the collapse of the Minoan civilization. But I hope the world will be ready for the transition, in which case there will be a period of 30 or 40 years which will make the Depression of the Thirties look like it was a Sunday outing.”2

  This was not a one-off joke. Fripp told basically the same Cassandra story to Rolling Stone, adding that as society collapsed, he would be “blowing a bugle loudly from the sidelines.” And there were more explicitly musical reasons for ending the band. Fripp had been talking for a while about the megatouring rock group as a “dinosaur,” unfit to survive in an individualist future. The ideal situation for any artist was as a “small, self-sufficient, mobile, intelligent unit.” This was what Fripp could have with Brian Eno, with whom he’d never stopped collaborating, making music he found more adventurous.3

  “It won’t reach the mass of people in the way King Crimson did,” Fripp admitted. “I hoped, you see, that Crimso would reach everyone. In terms of most bands, of course, it was remarkably successful. But in terms of the higher echelon of bands like Yes and ELP, it didn’t make it. My approach, therefore, has now changed and what Eno and I will try to do is influence a small number of people who will, in turn, influence a great number. I’ve always known that I will not be a rock ’n’ roll star, the guitar idol that millions of young guitarists learn their licks from. I’m not prepared to get involved with that star syndrome, if you like. Eno and I will be creating energies different to King Crimson.”4

  The band scattered. Bill Bruford went to play with Hatfield and the North, an experimental offshoot from the Canterbury scene. John Wetton joined Uriah Heep, a long way down from Crimson’s headiness. “I always found a certain frustration playing with Crimson,” said Wetton. “Basically I had come in through rock and roll. I was never a jazz player. I was never really interested in jazz.”5

  And what interested Fripp? He took a short respite, then reunited with his electronic muse. In April 1975, they met again to marry Eno’s looping experiments with Fripp’s improvisations. Their first new piece was their most pristine yet. Eno played a small, slight melody on a VCS3 synthesizer. He made some small changes to the timbre but otherwise let the music play, produced by an echo box as it looped. “The phone started ringing, people started knocking at the door, and I was answering the phone and adjusting all this stuff as it ran,” Eno would tell Interview magazine. “I almost made [the song ‘Discreet Music’] without listening to it.”6

  In May, when Fripp and Eno traveled through Europe for six shows of experimental music, this tape loop would be a “landscape”—Eno’s word—for whatever the guitarist wanted to build. A half-hour segment, sans Fripp, would become the eponymous first side of Eno’s November 1975 album Discreet Music. A smaller, isolated section, titled “Wind on Wind,” would appear on the duo’s December 1975 album, Evening Star. “It’s one of a very select handful of pieces which I constantly return to and which I never seem to exhaust,” Eno later told NME. “They have this capability of being appreciated on any level. They don’t dictate their terms. They’re always fresh because they’re always modified by their context.”7

  The tour ended, but the small, mobile Fripp-and-Eno unit continued its experiments. In late summer, Fripp joined Eno in the studio as he laid down the songs for a third solo “pop” album. Another Green World would feature three Fripp guitar solos, none of which sounded alike, and none of which sounded much like Crimson. All were pop songs. On “Golden Hours,” a languid and gently self-pitying song about passing time, Fripp played a series of burbling sixteenth notes. The bashful love song “I’ll Come Running” found Fripp playing a lightly distorted, loping solo over the second refrain.

  “St. Elmo’s Fire” was a deceptively eerie pop song built on a hammering piano figure and a synthesizer that twinned Eno’s vocals. Eno talk-sang about “splitting ions in the ether”—Fripp’s cue for a thrilling guitar solo that changed speeds and timbres, jumping in and out of sync with the vocal melody. “I had this idea and said to Fripp, ‘Do you know what a Wimshurst machine is?’ ” Eno told Lester Bangs in an interview for Musician. “It’s a device for generating very high voltages which then leap between the two poles, and it has a certain erratic contour, and I said, ‘You have to imagine a guitar line that has that, very fast and unpredictable.’ And he played that part, whic
h to me was very Wimshurst indeed.”8

  Both albums fell into shops at the end of 1975. It was time for Robert Fripp to disappear. Other members of King Crimson had done it; David Cross, Fripp reminded one interviewer, had left the band and gone to traipse around Ireland with his violin. Fripp became intrigued with a higher pursuit: the theories and guidance of George Gurdjieff, an Armenian spiritual teacher who died in 1949. When Fripp gave a particularly loping interview, there were echoes of Gurdjieff, of his advice.

  Remember that here work is not for work’s sake but is only a means.

  Man is given a definite number of experiences—economizing them, he prolongs his life.

  The highest that a man can attain is to be able to do.9

  Long before he died, Gurdjieff told an English adherent named J. G. Bennett that he needed to found a school where this way of living and thinking could be shared. Bennett did so in 1971 and then died three years later. Robert Fripp was among the people who came upon Gurdjieff’s work. “The top of my head blew off,” Fripp said. “I needed someone who knew a lot more than me, and not only knew, but knew how to do something about it.”10

  Gurdjieff’s work made the rounds with progressive musicians, none of whom seemed as thrown as Fripp. “What I really liked about him was, he was a total charlatan,” said Kevin Ayers. “He didn’t make any bones about it. His thing was that you cannot present the truth to people in simple form. You have to elaborate. Otherwise they’re not interested. Did you ever read his book? It’s just bullshit, absolute bullshit.”11

  In the fall of 1975, Robert Fripp arrived at J. G. Bennett’s International Academy for Continuous Education at Sherborne House in Gloucestershire, England, intending to complete the first ten-month course not led by Gurdjieff’s pupil. The man who’d played in Hyde Park and Central Park shared a room with four other men. “The place had a chill about it,” Fripp told an interviewer years later. “The place was also haunted, and any kind of school which works like that obviously attracts the other side, if you like. The opposition poke around.”12

  Days at Sherborne began around 6 a.m., when students woke up. They would continue with psychological exercises, then on to breakfast, and then to practical training, like the metal workshop where Fripp became a pupil. “[On] the outside . . . if you’re feeling a bit pissed off you can go to the pictures or watch television or get drunk or do whatever,” Fripp explained. “But in Sherborne you had to sit there and find a way of dealing with it—the expression would be working with it. Not easy. The woman I was living with left me while I was there, which was awful for me. I was pretty suicidal. It was not easy. But, on the other hand, that was certainly the beginning of my life.”13

  WHILE ROBERT FRIPP was scattering King Crimson, the five members of Genesis were busy at work at Island’s studio in Wales. They’d really broken out in 1974, a year that started with an American tour that one Rolling Stone reporter captured in dazzled quotes from the audience.

  I haven’t cried at a show since I saw Nureyev dance, until now.

  This reminds me of the response Jethro Tull was getting when it was starting out.

  The Genesis live show had become hypnotic—had been hypnotic for a while, actually—but Peter Gabriel was aware of how the “Brit puts on silly outfit” pull could look to people. “The gimmickry is remarkably good at getting pictures in the paper,” said Gabriel during the tour. “I’m only too happy to play that game, because I enjoy playing it. It does make a difference. It’s a means to an end.”14

  They were cutting back on costumes, but not on scale. In October 1974, as The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway was being mixed, Gabriel told Melody Maker that the band had made a double album “split up into self-contained song units,” but “based on one story, happily more direct than in the past, although still involved with fantasy. . . . This will break all bounds and records previously set for pretentiousness,” he deadpanned. “No—nobody’s said it yet—we’re waiting, in anticipation.”15

  The band had held a vote, and Gabriel’s concept had won out. The new album would tell the story of Rael, a name chosen because it had “no traceable ethnic origins” apart from being the name of the rock opera hero on The Who Sell Out. “I don’t know if my memory has been playing subversive tricks on me but I was annoyed,” said Gabriel of the coincidence.16

  Rael, to be played on stage by Gabriel, was “a greasy Puerto Rican kid” (Mike Rutherford’s view) who found himself on a spiritual and sexual journey through New York. “I was trying to give it a street slant, and that was before punk happened,” Gabriel told one biographer. “I felt an energy in that direction, and it seemed that prancing around in fairyland was rapidly becoming obsolete.”17 This was the condensed version. The album was not meant to be digested easily. Record buyers unfolded the package to find not just lyrics, but a narrative that darted between verse and prose.

  The new references, untethered from fantasy, were meant to drive Genesis into the heat of the 1970s. When audiences showed up for the 1975 tour, they could buy an official booklet that began with a lengthy essay placing Genesis in the history of progressive music and explaining how they’d broken loose. “Back in the late 60’s progressive music seemed all but dead,” read the booklet, “barely kept alive by the faint spark of a lingering mellotron. Rock audiences had overdosed on loud psychedelic riffs and gentle acoustic flower-power tunes, wondering all the time if there was anything more to progressive music than strobe lights, incense and the odd synthesizer. Just when adventurous rock seemed forever moving backwards, Genesis began flirting with multi-media concepts.”

  The booklet promised that Genesis, “not a terribly wealthy band,” was plowing its earnings back into a one-of-a-kind stage show. “To convey the complex story line of the new album, visual aids will be used on three backdrop screens, hinting at three dimensional illusions, slowed down slides will also add to an animated feel. As always, these new technical improvements will serve as painted landscapes adding to the fantasy and clarifying the story line.”

  This description might have undersold the drama of the show. Gabriel appeared on stage in jeans and a leather jacket, as Rael. “We’d like to play the whole thing for you tonight,” he would say. “It tells of how a large black cloud descends into Times Square and straddles out across 42nd street, turns into a wall, and sucks in Manhattan island. Our hero, named Rael, crawls out of the subways of New York and is sucked into the wall to regain consciousness underground.”18 Gabriel stayed in costume for most of the set, until reaching “The Lamia,” when he descended into a rotating cone called “the tourbillion,” Rael’s portal to a new world. When Gabriel emerged again, he was clad in a yellow body sock decorated with bulbous objects somewhere between genitalia and gourds.

  In February, with most of the tour left to go and positive reviews from every city, Gabriel decided to tell Genesis that he would leave the band. He was unshakable; they were distraught. “Their position was that we had worked eight years to get this far,” said Gabriel, “and now, finally, we were about to make it, and I was pulling the carpet out from underneath it all.”19

  Yet nobody broke faith with the press. Genesis did no interviews for the rest of the tour. In July 1975, NME reported on the rumors of a Genesis split. Phil Collins remembered picking up a better-sourced Melody Maker story—a cover story—and readying for the press to completely write off the band. In August, Gabriel asked the papers to publish, in entirety, an essay about his departure. They complied. “I believe the use of sound and visual images can be developed to do much more than we have done,” wrote Gabriel. “But on a large scale, it needs one clear and coherent direction, which our pseudo-democratic committee system could not provide.” This, even though he had won the most recent committee vote. “My future within music, if it exists, will be in as many situations as possible.”20

  Gabriel slowly—very slowly—retreated from the music scene. On the way toward his hiatus, he gave a few interviews about the new sounds he’d been hea
ring and the directions Genesis could not have gone. “I’m optimistic about the future,” he said at the end of 1975. “There’s plenty of people going to get their bits out—your Patti Smiths and your Bruce Springsteens.”21

  Todd Rundgren approached. “He was a very quiet, shy guy, and it seemed like he was in this transitional space and not super confident about where he was going with everything. I think he was looking for me to give him something ‘certain’ to hang onto, but I didn’t know what exactly it was he should do at that point.”22

  The rest of the band was accepting demo tapes from aspiring singers. “He’s got to be able to be a stage performer who can jump in at the deep end,” Tony Banks told Melody Maker. “Either he’s got to have had some experience or he’s got to be a natural.” This was not easy to find. In one promotional photo, the band hoisted a portrait of Frank Sinatra—problem solved! The actual submissions from vocalists, more than four hundred of them, were landing with wet thuds. “We had a guy called George Gabriel, would you believe?” Steve Hackett told Melody Maker. “That was really his name. Doing ‘Norwegian Wood.’ Then we had a transvestite.” Mike Rutherford confirmed this. “Yeah, a guy who called himself the Red Hooker,” he said. “He sang a song called ‘I Got the Sex Blues, Baby,’ and sent us a picture of him wearing what we assume was a red dress, singing the sex blues.”23

  “We’re looking in a leisurely manner,” said Phil Collins.24 How leisurely? Fans figured that out at year’s end, when Genesis pushed Collins to the front of the stage as the new, full-time singer. “People are going to be looking for a great gap but they won’t find it,” Collins told Sounds. “It’s not as if we’ve lost an Ian Anderson leader and here we are, a band without a leader.”25