The Show That Never Ends

by David Weigel

  Genesis was actually thriving without its star. They released A Trick of the Tail in February 1976, backing it with a full tour, and musically the album grabbed the baton from Lamb. “Dance on a Volcano” began with Hackett playing eighth notes that zoomed from speaker to speaker, leading into a burst of synthesized chords from Banks and beats from Collins and Rutherford.

  Then came Collins’s voice, approximating Gabriel’s in a few ways—the quick leap up to high notes, for example—but telling simpler, more optimistic, romantic stories. The title track bounced along with a nursery rhyme flair—something that had been traded away in the Lamb days. “Ripples,” which was adapted into one of the band’s earliest videos, was a nearly straightforward song about love. “I think people who had found Peter a bit difficult maybe preferred the album because it was a little bit less dense,” said Banks.26

  The new Genesis made its debut one month later, at the London Arena in London, Ontario. Collins was replaced on the drums by Bill Bruford. He hadn’t settled into a new progressive band after Crimson went defunct; Genesis would pay him £500 a week to fill out the tour. Bruford considered Collins a “soul mate,” but found Genesis a bit too rote. “My nature is to play a piece differently every night,” he explained, “even though there are only so many ways you can play ‘Supper’s Ready’ on a drum kit without the song unraveling. . . . In the first break between songs, I saw Phil go up front with a piece of paper in his hand, his hand shaking, so nervous,” Rutherford recalled. “But it worked great.”27

  GAUGING SUCCESS, or predicting a breakout, was an inexact science. Peter Hammill reconstituted Van der Graaf Generator in 1975, promising a revision of the sound. “Previously we were very much an overdubbing band, which at the time wasn’t something that people did all that much,” Hammill told Melody Maker. “The great problem with the whole psychedelia era was that the wall of sound was being produced but totally without control. There wasn’t, in fact, the degree of musicianship behind it which would make it valid.”28

  The new band had the full support of Charisma, which released a series of comeback albums and paid for ambitious tours. In 1976 the band put out two melodic albums: Still Life and the ironically titled World Record. An American tour, outfitted with a full road crew and light show, simply could not make back its cost. The crowds diminished as the band returned for shows in England. At the final gig of the tour, in Germany, no one missed the joke of a bill that allied VdGG with the band Farewell. The result was that “Farewell Van Der Graaf Generator” appeared on all of the badges. “It was demoralizing for all of us,” said bass player Pete Donovan. “I left halfway through.”29

  A similar drama afflicted Daevid Allen’s Gong, but the ageless pixie of the progressives went along with it. In 1975 he parted with the radically transformed group. Steve Hillage, a proudly unevolved hippie who fascinated the music press, became the creative force in the group. “There had been a punk revolution in the ranks of Gong,” Allen said. “After I left Gong in ’75, I grew quickly tired of the clean hair, white clothes, and glistening instruments of the prog rock coterie and fell into bed with the UK punk revolution, which was extremely raw, dangerously violent, and as wild as a cyclonic updraft. Maybe I was lifted up into the land of transcendental punkadelics.”30

  Once again, Allen found himself outside of a group he’d created, happily building from the spare parts. He teamed up with the musicians of Here & Now, old associates of Gong, for a project that would be released as Floating Anarchy 1977 by Planet Gong. Punkadelica was born; extraterrestrial bleeping and Allen poetry were brought into the zeitgeist by reliable, thudding riffs. A single, “Opium for the People,” fit more naturally in the moment than most of what Allen’s peers had done.

  “Curiously, the UK press kept publicizing Gong as the most likely band to be assassinated by the kill-the-hippy extremists while I was running with the assassins and misbehaving in their ranks,” said Allen. “Seven or eight of us would rampage through London in a battered Bedford van and conduct lightning graffiti raids on everything we could get away with. We toured the UK for free in an outrageously antique bus with a coal stove at its rear. It had a top speed of about 50 mph and would black out the motorway behind us with great clouds of smoke from the stove. Barely a day would pass when we were not stopped by local police.”31

  Allen proved that there was a way out of the progressive fog. Promptly thereafter, he “got pneumonia and staggered back to Spain.”32

  Allen’s old bandmate Kevin Ayers was dislocated too—but even less sure of how to respond. In 1978 he released Rainbow Takeaway, a collection of fractured pop songs that sold less than ever. It took work not to notice how bored he had become by performance. “I kind of numbed out on that,” Ayers admitted to an interviewer in 2007. “I kept working, but obviously it wasn’t working. I mean, another generation had just clocked in, you know?” Ayers continued, “The best of punk rock is great. I was just rather out of context.”33

  ROBERT FRIPP’S NEAR-YEAR at Sherborne removed him from the music industry, but not from music. “Some people had brought guitars and I played,” he confessed to one interviewer. “There was a concert about once a month. I played at three of those concerts.”34 Peter Gabriel and his family dropped in for a few visits.

  Before entering the house, Fripp had gotten to know a Philadelphia musician named Daryl Hall, who had started spending more time in England. The two of them kept in touch; Hall was convinced that Fripp was communicating with no one else in the outside world. This was during a period that Fripp would admit was “both physically painful and spiritually terrifying.” In a 1978 interview, he would count three fellow students who had left the school for the bosom of mental asylums, and he estimated that it took a full year to relocate to a place in society. Sherborne filled its residents with “the kind of cold that freezes the soul,” said Fripp.35

  Fripp escaped. Gabriel talked him into playing on his first post-Genesis solo album. The guitarist arrived in Toronto in July 1976, suddenly working under Alice Cooper’s producer Bob Ezrin, who had assembled a crew of people he knew and people recommended by Gabriel. Larry Fast, a synthesizer designer who had helped Rick Wakeman build his Moog and had imported Genesis albums into American markets, arrived on Gabriel’s recommendation. Steve Hunter, an axman on Cooper’s albums and Lou Reed’s harder-edged work, arrived to fill out the guitar sound. “Bob hedged his bets,” said Fast. “He had Steve Hunter sitting next to Fripp, and Steve was given ‘Solsbury Hill.’ He knew Tony Levin as a bass player, so I think he knew very well what to expect there.”36

  Levin had been playing with experimental bands for a long time. Years earlier, he’d missed a shot at joining John McLaughlin’s fusionist Mahavishnu Orchestra when he was out and his in-laws took the call. “I was given the message that I’d been called about a job with Murray Vishnu and his Orchestra,” Levin remembered. “I didn’t take the job.”37

  Ezrin brought Levin into the studio. His new bassist produced a new instrument, which he’d been sold on by the inventor himself—Emmett Chapman’s “Chapman Stick.” Levin, theoretically, could use the girthy ten-string to play a family of notes that other instruments had to collaborate to imitate. “Bob took one look and insisted I put it away immediately,” said Levin.38

  Fripp went on the road with Gabriel. “Robert is my favourite guitarist,” Gabriel told an interviewer, “but there’s only a few places where he puts his own style in as opposed to just decorating as a session player. He was more against going on the road as Robert Fripp than actually going on the road.” The solution: He did not go out on the road as “Robert Fripp.” In billings, Gabriel’s guitarist was “Dusty Roads.” On stage, he was often concealed from view, paid tribute only when Gabriel was announcing his band at the end of the set. But one night, a roadie sidled up to Gabriel with a new instruction. He could go ahead; he could introduce his guitarist as Robert Fripp. “It’s whether the white star or the black hole is more attractive,” explained Gabriel to
an interviewer.39

  The tour went on without Dusty, and Fripp stayed in New York. “It was magic,” Fripp told New Hi-Fi Sound.40 “I had a flat on the Bowery; I’d walk out and Richard Lloyd of Television would generally be staggering by, whatever time it was. There was this incredible openness.”41

  Fripp was at home in July when the phone rang. Brian Eno was calling. “He said, ‘Hang on, I’m here with David Bowie. I’ll pass you over,’ ” Fripp would recall, in a story told many times. “David Bowie says to me, ‘Do you think you can play some hairy rock-and-roll guitar?’ I said, ‘Well, I haven’t played guitar for a while. I’m not sure, but if you’re prepared to take the risk, so am I.’ Shortly afterwards, a first-class ticket arrived, on Lufthansa, to Germany.”42

  He landed and headed to the studio for three short days of recording, possessed of a mission, wholly unsure of what to play. “When I did that album I was completely out of my brain,” said Fripp. “I went in to listen to what they’d been doing and they said, ‘Well you might as well plug in.’ ‘I suppose I might,’ I said. And the very first thing they did was put up ‘Beauty And The Beast.’ And I played straight over it.”43

  The note that came out of Fripp’s guitar was unclassifiable, bent and distorted, not unlike the noise from a vocoder but with no voice. Eno and Bowie’s chugging, piano-driven song was suddenly dressed up with metallic bends and whinnies. As the intro faded, Fripp played something that sounded like water falling through tin. Fripp had achieved a similar effect on “The Heavenly Music Corporation,” but in this case it was hooked to a melody. “This is the way I did the rest of the album,” Fripp told Melody Maker in 1979. “They’d put up a track and I’d play. I wouldn’t bother rehearsing it. I’d just play.”44

  That collaboration worked best on the album’s title track, a ballad about lovers by the Berlin Wall that Bowie sang as producer Tony Visconti moved the microphone further and further away. Fripp played three completely divergent takes. One took him up the fretboard, staying there, letting a note sustain. Another was sheer, shredded feedback.

  “Fripp had a technique in those days where he measured the distance between the guitar and the speaker where each note would feed back,” Visconti explained. “For instance, an ‘A’ would feed back maybe at about four feet from the speaker, whereas a ‘G’ would feed back maybe three and a half feet from it. He had a strip that they would place on the floor, and when he was playing the note ‘F’ sharp he would stand on the strip’s ‘F’ sharp point and ‘F’ sharp would feed back better. He really worked this out to a fine science, and we were playing this at a terrific level in the studio, too. It was very, very loud, and all the while he was playing these notes—that beautiful overhead line—Eno was turning the dials and creating a new envelope and just playing with the filter bank.”45

  None of the experimentation was cut. “I casually played the three guitar takes together and it had a jaw-dropping effect on all of us,” said Visconti.46

  Not long after, Fripp was on his first-class plane back to New York. Just days later, he was in the studio again, writing and producing music with Daryl Hall, who he’d known since before the end of King Crimson. “I would stay at his house, and he used to stay at my house, and all that,” said Hall. “We were really good friends.”47

  Hall’s career had taken off since the Crimson days, with music that sounded nothing like Fripp’s. In 1976, his band Hall & Oates had gone to the top ten with “Sara Smile.” One year later, and just months before collaborating with Fripp, they’d scored another hit with “Rich Girl.” Both were uncomplicated, melodic slices of white Philly soul.

  The music that Hall would record with Fripp started like that, then careened on the power of Fripp’s sustained notes. The lyrics they came up with were more searching, and rich with irony. “Something in 4/4 Time,” the second track on Hall’s Sacred Songs, was a joke at the very idea of pop song structure, a lecture to an unwilling musician that “ya gotta have something that always rhymes,” if there was any hope of making a career. At the second chorus, Fripp’s guitar buzzed in with a sequence of floating notes.

  On other tracks, Fripp and Hall bent the ambient guitar sound into something new, something warm, living outside the structure of a pop song. “The Farther Away I Am” contained just three sounds: Hall’s voice, an electric piano, and Fripp’s guitars. “Is it just a cloud passing under?” sang Hall, as one clean note from the guitar drifted into another sustained note—this one defined by feedback.

  Hall knew that he and Fripp had discovered something new about their music. “Hall is the first singer I’ve met who can sing anything at all the way I ask him,” Fripp told one interviewer. Hall repaid the compliment, without the edge. “When he plays,” Hall told one interviewer of Fripp, “it sounds like the universe crying.”48

  It did not sound like Hall & Oates, certainly, and that was not what RCA expected from a signed artist. Hearing no singles, the label shelved the album. Hall said nothing about it. In 1978, the two men collaborated on more songs for an album of Fripp’s own. RCA had Hall’s vocals stripped from those songs—a breakneck rocker called “You Burn Me Up I’m a Cigarette” and another ambient soul ballad, “North Star.”

  Still, Hall said nothing. Fripp was not so reserved. “Daryl is a remarkable singer and his solo album is fantastic,” Fripp told Jean-Gilles Blum in an interview. “It is too bad RCA is limiting the scope of his career. As for Hall and Oates, they are a very professional group. They limit their format and possibilities on purpose, as part of a commercial compromise they accept.”49

  “Robert was being a girl,” Hall said decades later. “He got very burned by this all. We had a very close relationship, and my manager at the time, Tommy Mottola, came into it, and Robert got really hurt by it. I mean, when you get into a relationship or a collaboration with a musician, it’s almost like a romantic relationship. And that’s the best way I could put it. You get into somebody’s heart. And Robert I think had visions that he was going to steal me away from John.”50

  While Sacred Songs gathered dust, Fripp was being heard again, and recording new music on two continents. Bowie’s “Heroes,” the song, did not chart, but it made it onto FM rotation. “The title track is easily the best thing Bowie has put on plastic in three years,” wrote a critic for Crawdaddy!, crediting its pull to “Eno’s spine-tingling synthi-guitar.” (Close enough.)51

  In November 1977, Fripp was back in the studio, in Amsterdam, taking over for Bob Ezrin as the producer of Peter Gabriel’s second album. Most of the pivotal musicians had stayed on: Tony Levin was back on bass, and Larry Fast had returned to the keyboards. But where Ezrin had built vast worlds of sound, Fripp demanded that the band draw in. First takes, with their tiny flaws, were kept. “Robert was very keen to get everything fresh,” Gabriel explained. “Robert did not take on the role of a military commander taking his troops into musical battle, as Bob [Ezrin] did. But he was steely, in a quiet firm way, in defending his approach from any challenges from the musicians and even from the artist.”52

  EMERSON, LAKE & PALMER had finished their Brain Salad Surgery “Someone Get Me a Ladder” tour on October 24, 1974, with a benefit in Central Park. That month, they released the entirety of a show from Anaheim, California, as a triple LP, with the breath-exhausting title Welcome Back, My Friends, to the Show That Never Ends—Ladies and Gentlemen. The three musicians retreated to their homes in England. And for the next two and a half years, they released almost no music at all.

  This was not the original plan. In November 1974, Circus’s Jim O’Connor reported that ELP had commenced work on solo albums. “Right now Keith and Carl are both about fifty percent finished with theirs,” Manticore’s Mario Medious told O’Connor. “Greg’s written his whole album, but so far he’s only recorded one track.”53

  The process took much longer than all that. It was not enough anymore to write a mere album. Emerson wanted to compose a “once-and-for-all statement to shut up the critics,” a hist
ory of piano music in one suite. “I wrote a series of piano variations inspired by Brahms’s ‘Waltz No. 6 in C,’ wanting to create the huge tenth interval leaps after the great man’s fashion,” Emerson would recall. “I then wanted to create a gigue. I wanted rhapsodic, fugal development sonata form, if there was such a thing. I wanted Schonberg’s 12-tone scale! The more I wanted, the more the notes poured out of the piano.”54

  Emerson put that on paper. “Allegro Giojoso,” the first movement, began with a chaotic chord, and with strings playing sixteenth notes that seemed to run aimlessly up a scale. The theme was there, exposed just moments later. A battle raged for nine minutes, between Emerson’s pastoral, Aaron Copland–flavored melodies, and the banging glissandos and ostinatos that grew out of rock. The second movement, “Andante Molto Cantabile,” was pure melody, and pure peace.

  In April 1975, with the concerto not quite done, Emerson and his family went on vacation. When they returned, “loaded down with bottles” of French champagne, the pianist got a call from a neighbor. His home, Stone Hill, was engulfed by flames. “What is it you’re looking for, exactly?” asked a fireman as Emerson approached. “Tapes in the dressing room on the first floor,” said Emerson. “That doesn’t exist anymore,” said the fireman.55

  The Emerson family had no choice but to find another home. Once ensconced, Emerson wrote the third and final movement of his concerto. “The final movement became, ah . . . more—fuck you. Aggressive,” Emerson would tell an interviewer. There was nothing pastoral about “Toccata con Fuoco”—literally, “with fire.” Emerson attacked the low notes of the piano, punctuating it with orchestral stings, like flames licking the stage.56

  Toward the end of 1975, Emerson went into the studio to record the concerto. But there was no sign of a solo album. Palmer and Lake were just as wrapped up in experimentation. It was with Lake that Emerson started using cocaine. “I suddenly went from being a loner, lost in creative dreams, to some manic expressive that finally got his point across verbally, vertically and unhorizontally while others seemed to listen upright for the first time,” Emerson recalled in his memoirs. “If cocaine did anything at all, at that time, it was to drag me out of my shell.”57