The Show That Never Ends

by David Weigel

  WHILE WILSON WAS RECORDING to his four-track, a group of American musicians was taking a far more traditional route to the mainstream. In 1985, three kids from Long Island moved into the dorms at the Berklee College of Music in Boston. John Petrucci and John Myung bunked in room 817; Mike Portnoy was two floors below, in room 608. Petrucci and Myung spotted Portnoy on the second or third week of school, playing drums in a practice room. “We looked through the glass window,” Petrucci remembered. He “had a Rush shirt or something on . . . and we were like, ‘we’ve gotta hook up with that guy.’ ”13

  They bonded immediately—castaways with ears for ambitious British rock, one of them waking every day to sign up for a practice room, six hours a night, every weekday. Myung played bass, Petrucci played guitar, and all three men shared Long Island roots and an education in metal. “We were the only band playing really loud, heavy stuff,” said Petrucci. “We were really into, like I said before, Rush, Iron Maiden, and stuff like that. At the same time, we were listening to fusion and jazz and stuff like that, so when we got together at Berklee, even before the stuff that John and I would write, it always had a hard rock edge to it, but it was influenced by all this more progressive music. We were also big Yes fans.”14

  Portnoy on drums, Petrucci on guitar, and Myung on bass became a band whose name took inspiration from a Boston appearance by Rush during the Power Windows tour. The friends camped out overnight for tickets, and when day broke, they played Rush through their boom box—“Bastille Day,” the sort of song Rush had drifted away from writing. “We were like, oh, they’re so majestic,” Petrucci said. “Their music is so majestic. Somebody said, ‘That’s it!’ ‘Majesty’—that would be a great name.”15

  The trio recruited two Long Island friends to fill the band out: Kevin Moore on keyboards and Chris Collins on vocals. Majesty’s sound was well formed by the time it recorded a 1986 demo tape. This was heavy metal music, but with keyboards more resonant in the mix than in anything comparable. Much was owed to Rush, but Petrucci’s shredding was sometimes twice as fast as the work of Alex Lifeson.

  Lyrically, the band stayed within the lines drawn by progressive rock and metal, even if the results could be hard to parse. “A Vision,” an eleven-minute epic that showcased everyone’s talents, linked together idea poems like “time to set emotions straight” and “this space is wasting a dream.” There was mood, if not yet meaning.

  And soon there was no Berklee. Petrucci, Myung, and Portnoy left school to focus full-time on Majesty, swapping out singers, tightening what they had. Their efforts paid off in 1988, when the demo made it to Mechanic, a division of MCA Records where the idea of a progressive revival clicked. “I have always been a big fan of the likes of ELP, Genesis, Yes, King Crimson, and Pink Floyd,” said Mechanic’s Jim Pitulski to an interviewer. “I was really blown away that there was this young, new band that was playing this kind of music again.”16

  Majesty went into the studio, with Terry Date—a metal producer who agreed to work at roughly one-third the normal cost, for just $30,000—behind the glass. As they finished, and after the paint had dried on cover art of a terrified man being branded with the band’s logo, the band learned of a Las Vegas act that had trademarked the name. Portnoy and his bandmates cast around for a new name, hitting dry well after dry well. They almost went with “Glasser,” after their attorney, until Collins triumphantly announced that name to a New York crowd. “There was just this dead silence in the room, with absolutely no applause,” said Portnoy.17

  It was Portnoy’s father, Howard, who bailed out the group. In November 1988 he caught a movie at a California cinema called the Dream Theater. That was the name that the first album, When Dream and Day Unite, was released under, its cover art showing a man getting an especially untimely Majesty tattoo.

  The album did not sell, despite flattering reviews. Here was a band, wrote Derek Oliver in Kerrang!, “who appear to be anxious to re-experience the years 1972 to 1978, the golden age of progressive rock music.” Oliver described playing the tape again and again, searching for brilliant players to compare the new band with. “Here is musical dexterity I have not heard since the glory jazz rock days or Dixie Dreggs or, as a more accurate description early Kansas.”18

  Still, the flop meant that the band had to wriggle out of a contract. It parted ways with singer Charlie Dominici and found James LaBrie, a Canadian metal singer with a high range. Dream Theater would try again, whether or not people understood what the band was doing.

  PROGRESSIVE ROCK, which had not seemed to survive the 1980s, had a curious half-life. Steve Wilson and Dream Theater came from the generations that weren’t supposed to like this music. Home recording, with all of the tricks that had taken progressive musicians years to develop, became steadily cheaper. Metal groups harked back to the heaviest of progressive music for inspiration.

  Most of the progressive acts, the ones that had lasted, adjusted awkwardly to changing tastes. Genesis released one album and went on one tour with We Can’t Dance, a slab of pure pop. Jethro Tull never broke up, and in 1987 the band earned a real comeback with the pop-smoothed Crest of a Knave album. To the band’s surprise, the album was nominated for a heavy metal Grammy. To the world’s surprise, Tull won—a shock that shamed the National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences into changing its standards for the prize. In 1992, when Metallica finally won the prize that the press believed it had been denied, the band’s drummer and leader opened his speech with a Tull dig. “We gotta thank Jethro Tull for not putting out an album this year, right?” said Lars Ulrich.19

  The new Yes fractured after just five years; Jon Anderson had been bored by its second album, Big Generator, and moved on. In 1989, Yes reassembled without the band name—largely because Chris Squire was not involved. Anderson, Bruford, Wakeman, and Howe formed a unit of that name, and tapped Tony Levin as a bass player. “In my world, everyone would have worked on ABWH and come up with fresh material,” said Bruford. “However, Yes, as ever, is guided financially. Most of its musical movements now are motivated by sheer lack of money.”20

  Through the machinations of agents and the compliance of band members, the components of Yes were smashed together into one unwieldy unit. The Trevor Rabin–era band was back, augmented by Bruford, Wakeman, and Howe. The album and tour, with minimal inspiration, were called Union. In a witticism he never tired of, Wakeman said, “I call it the Onion album, because every time I hear it, it brings tears to my eyes.”21 When Peter Banks showed up for a show, he couldn’t even talk his way into the dressing room. “The strange thing is that the Union tour was quite fun once it started,” said Rabin. “It was just the album. In fact, I have never listened to it all the way through. I couldn’t bring myself to do it. Who was in overall charge of it? Accountants, mostly.”22

  Successors to Yes were hard to spot. Quebec’s Voivod began life as a speed metal band. That changed on its third album, 1987’s Killing Technology. The music was still dominated mainly by fast tempos, but Voivod at a fast tempo was an entirely different animal from other high-velocity thrash metal of the period. The band favored a swinging, jazzy meter. Guitarist Denis “Piggy” D’Amour’s minor and diminished guitar chords also set him apart. He used the entire instrument, handing off the low, chugging rhythm duties to bassist Jean-Yves “Blacky” Thériault. Like Yes, one of the band’s inspirations, Voivod pumped the bass high in the mix and let it carry melodies as strongly as the guitar.

  Voivod’s 1988 track “Experiment” continued the evolution. It began as metal; at four minutes, it shifted into a viciously swinging, waltz-time riff over a repeating diminished figure. From there the songs all flowed one into the next and stayed in dark, minor-key territory, jumping erratically from one odd-time riff to the next, the pleasure coming from the erratic flow.

  By 1989’s Nothing face, Voivod was recording with a major label. The title track jumped from a swaying, midtempo riff to up-tempo funk and back before a 7/4 section that jerked back abruptly
, and impossibly, into a staccato shuffle time section. If the influences were lost on anyone, the band covered Pink Floyd’s “Astronomy Domine.” The result: the first Voivod album to crack the Billboard charts. They didn’t get there again. Part of the problem was also that the band’s next, more melodic album was released in 1991, just as Nirvana’s Nevermind was breaking.

  Nirvana, actually, had plenty of time for King Crimson; Kurt Cobain claimed that Red was one of his favorite albums. But for a while, “progressive” meant revivalism, with no innovation.

  Spock’s Beard was founded by brothers Neal and Alan Morse, with a name hailing from the legendary mirror universe episode of Star Trek. “Spock’s Beard was sort of a phrase that we’d say to each other—my brother and I—when something weird would happen. We’d say, ‘Wow, that’s like “Spock’s Beard,”’ meaning, ‘that only happens in a parallel universe, right?’ ” said Neal Morse. “I put Spock’s Beard on the list sort of as a joke. Everybody seemed to like it the best, and so we picked that one, and here we are 20-however-many-years later.”23

  Spock’s Beard self-financed and released their debut, The Light, in 1995. Composed of four tracks, three of them epic-length, it opens with the title track, which remained in the set list for as long as they played.

  Sweden’s Änglagård was just as faithful. Formed in 1991, wedded to the bygone era’s flute and mellotron sounds, as well as the virtuoso drumming of Mattias Olsson, the band was together only long enough to make two albums. Yet 1992’s Hybris and 1994’s Epilog stood out for their unapologetic prog. “We decided very early on that we wanted to be a prog rock band,” Olsson said years later. “Not a prog band with leanings toward pop or fusion or anything, just straightup Scandinavian progrock band. I think it helped having a very naïve and open-minded approach to it but a[t] the same time being very focused. Sounds like a contradiction but it worked for us.”24

  Hybris consisted of exactly four songs; the shortest was eight minutes long. Epilog, its fatalistically titled follow-up, was completely instrumental. Consisting of three extended tracks and three throwaway, transitional pieces, it offered a uniquely Scandinavian form of musical despair. One live album later, Änglagård was spent. “No, we were all pretty fed up with the whole thing,” said Olsson. “I think we felt that it would have been strange [with] someone from the outside. Our own Swedish Trevor Rabin perhaps. A very scary thought indeed.”25

  ROBERT FRIPP, as ever, found a sideways path to the new trend. Shortly after the four-man King Crimson ended, he collaborated with Andy Summers of the similarly defunct Police for two albums of abstract, interlocking guitar music, with no vocals. In 1984, Summers and Fripp were talking with Musician magazine, which had so loyally followed experimental music, when Fripp dropped an announcement: “I’m off to clean latrines in West Virginia!” Fripp said cheerfully.26

  He was announcing what would become “Guitar Craft,” a seminar in Charles Town for a few dozen players each year. Fripp modified the lifestyle that had been pounded into him during his 1970s sabbatical, bringing musicians together to eat, play, and find a new way of living. “Within Guitar Craft is the first time I’ve been able to live in a sane world,” he told an interviewer after the project’s first few years.27

  One of the first Guitar Craft attendees was a music student from Texas who could not quite believe his luck. Trey Gunn had written a sort of “dream list” of the musicians who’d inspired him—people like David Bowie, people like Robert Fripp. “When I was in college studying music, I eventually became kind of a punk rocker,” recalled Gunn. “Everyone was anti-know-what-you’re-doing. When I was finishing up, I thought, ‘This is stupid. I’m working with good people, but none of the people here do what is awesome. What the hell? Why shouldn’t it be like the good old days?’ ”28

  Gunn arrived in Charles Town to a simple guitar, and to exercises like forming around a table and being instructed to eat soup without using hands or even sitting next to the bowl. “We bowed down and hoped to taste it,” said Gunn. “You have to be really smart to think up tests like that. We were really doing practical practices for how to hold the body, practical practices for disciplines of the mind—and disciplines of the heart. It wasn’t just that first week; it took years. You came to realize that regular music was just dabbling.”29

  It was difficult to tell who was in Robert Fripp’s good graces, and who was not. Gunn figured out that he was. He played bass and stick on the albums Fripp produced with his wife, Toyah Willcox. Gunn was tapped again in 1992 when Fripp collaborated with David Sylvian, the romantic art rocker from the defunct group Japan. Pat Mastelotto, a founding member of the metal-pop one-hitter Mr. Mister, was, to his own surprise, brought on as drummer. “He writes wonderful lyrics, he has a gorgeous voice, and the sounds he makes from his keyboard are stunning,” Fripp said of Sylvian. “And then you move on to the third point: I like being with him.”30

  The pieces of King Crimson had spent a decade scattering. Adrian Belew had found a distinct voice with the Bears and with his own music; he’d even had a hit single, 1989’s “Oh Daddy,” in which his real-life daughter, Audie, asked him for attention and Belew obliged. Bill Bruford had teamed up with the floating Patrick Moraz and then delved deeply, seemingly for good, into jazz. Belew had joined Peter Gabriel for his mid-1980s career reinvention as a socially conscious megastar.

  But Fripp wanted to talk to them. “In the beginning I assumed we’d be continuing musically where we left off in 1984 as well,” said Bruford. “We were going to return to a sound more from the ’70s, more to do with Red—a thick, intelligent Metal kind of sound.”31 Instead, Fripp wanted to expand the band’s ambition and sound by adding a bassist and a drummer—creating what he called a “double trio.” Trey Gunn became the second bassist. “He’ll say something like ‘I’ve had this vision of a double trio, I don’t particularly want this and I don’t know whether it’s a good idea or not but that’s what we’re going to do.’ And musicians quite like a plan,” said Bruford of Fripp. “Men like to have a kind of hierarchy.”

  In less than ten years, Gunn had gone from a fan of Fripp’s music to a collaborator in King Crimson. “You couldn’t be, at my age, thirty-five-ish—you couldn’t be in a more uncool genre,” he said. “It was awful. I was always trying to say, we’re doing this cool thing. All the other guys were all older, and they’d been in it when it was a cool thing. They didn’t know or care. It was challenging. Then we kind of pushed through this barrier, kind of like the world caught up to us.”32

  But the group was aware of that. The spiny music they wrote and played did not sound much like the past King Crimsons. “We didn’t want to be a bunch of old guys who got together to try and re-create the past or cash in on it—not that the band was ever that popular anyway,” said Belew. “I’ve always seen King Crimson as more influential than affluent. In fact, it was several months before we even played a note of old Crimson songs.”33

  “We’ve been seeing 18-year-old guys backstage who’ve borrowed In the Court of the Crimson King from their fathers and think we’re just as hip as anything else around,” said Bruford. “They don’t seem to mind that we’re forty-five years old.”34

  The new music was released in an EP, then an album called Thrak, named for the placeholder title of the band’s improvisations. After the tour, Fripp was tasked with approving and promoting a compilation of the old King Crimson’s work. For the first time in decades, the band that had made In the Court of the Crimson King was in one room, at a New York hotel, talking to reporters. The Giles brothers, Peter Sinfield, Ian McDonald, and Greg Lake were together; they could not figure out why, since Fripp largely did interviews without them.

  “Mike, Ian, and myself wait outside for one hour, and when Robert’s finished he leaves the building,” said Lake. “Bearing in mind we’d gone all that way to support his record on his fucking record company, I felt that was really out of order.”

  Fripp had no interest in collaborating with Lake.
He did float an idea of a modified reunion tour, playing “the 1969–1974 repertoire,” with Wetton on vocals. It was smothered by mutual disinterest. “I really don’t like the idea of re-forming because it would seem like it’s for the money,” said Michael Giles, according to Ian McDonald. “I hate it when you see things like Fleetwood Mac and The Eagles.”35

  There never would be a cash-grab reunion of the first King Crimson. What came instead was a purposeful band schism, as Fripp divided the double trio into two of his beloved mobile units—“fraKctals”—who would work on experimental “ProjeKcts.” The “double trio” would never come back together. Having gone one final round with Fripp, Bruford left to focus fully on Earthworks, his jazz project. Tony Levin left to tour the world with Seal. King Crimson re-formed in 2000 as a four-piece, with a brittle metal sound and a long-delayed fourth chapter of “Larks’ Tongues in Aspic.”

  In 2001, the new unit got a challenging offer. Tool, a metal group that had never been shy about its progressive influences, asked King Crimson to open on its world tour. “It was like a revolution, practically, when I heard this record,” said Tool’s towering drummer Danny Carey of King Crimson’s Discipline, in an interview. “There were just so many new textures that I hadn’t heard. . . . The guitars are like playing in 5 over it, and the drums are like in 15, so it like creates this cycle that only meets up every, you know, third bar for the guitars.”36

  It was a tribute, and also a demotion. King Crimson, in this iteration, was comfortable with smaller venues; Tool was playing arenas. But the band went along. “They had a better dressing room,” said Gunn. “Maynard [James Keenan] had an amazing espresso machine with porn stars on it. They were total sweethearts about it all.”37 One night, the million-selling metal band decided to pay tribute to Fripp’s band by pulling a switch. King Crimson played “Red,” and at one moment Gunn heard applause and a slight change in the drum sound. He looked back to see Danny Carey sitting in on drums—a metal player, with no natural connection to the progressive rock movement, putting his hands on the torch.