The Show That Never Ends

by David Weigel

  DREAM THEATER HAPPILY shrugged off the skeptics of its progressive approach. Images and Words had a painted cover, because they wanted to be like Yes or Pink Floyd. A reviewer for Raw said the band would “do for prog rock what Nirvana have done for smelly cardigans.”38

  Elektra’s strategy had worked for Aerosmith, which spent the late ’80s rising from a haze of cocaine dust to become a singles band. But the label could not turn Dream Theater into a singles band. Instead, an unencumbered band delved even further into experimentation, adding keyboard player Jordan Rudess to thicken the sound. “I was a very serious young protégé from the age of nine, going to Juilliard. I knew nothing about rock music,” said Rudess. “That all changed because a friend of mine in high school brought over Emerson, Lake and Palmer’s Tarkus record and played it for me, and I couldn’t stop listening to it. I thought it was incredible.”39

  “Metropolis—Part I: The Miracle and the Sleeper,” the fifth song on Images and Words, stretched to nearly ten minutes. Yet it was never intended as part one of anything. “When we released Part 1, we only sort of tagged the ‘Part 1’ just like a joke, just trying to be pompous,” Portnoy said in 2000.40

  The song enjoyed a lengthy half-life. (Metropolis Pt. 2: Scenes from a Memory was released in 1999, and musically it set the stage for what would become the band’s signature sound.) “Metropolis—Part I” began with a repeating, three-note figure played on a synthesizer, then a crash of guitars playing eighth notes. For a short while, the song was based around a standard tempo, a standard time signature, and a standard guitar rhythm. When the verse transitioned into the bridge, the group threw in an extra beat every other measure. For the verses, it was back to 4/4. Four minutes into the song, the time signature switched to 13/8. Ninety seconds later, the band was in double time, moving like Motörhead, and soloing over the bars. The time changed to 7/4, for more solos, then ended in 4/4, with repetitions of the opening theme.

  Images and Words was unashamedly progressive—and it found an audience. The first track on the album, the slightly more accessible “Pull Me Under,” was released as a single, complete with low-budget video padded with live footage. It made the metal charts. “I always used to tell them that the songs could be three songs instead of one,” said Steve Stone, one of the band’s promoters. “I sat back and went, ‘you bastards!’ They broke it down to a three- or four-minute mentality and look what happened.”41 The breakout—finally.

  For the next album, the label, Elektra, was clear: it wanted singles. When they began work on their fourth album, Falling into Infinity, Elektra urged the band to craft another single from its tracks. They were led to Desmond Child, a pop rock songwriter with little time for progressive music, but a record of turning hair-metal bands into chart darlings. “It really bothered me that Desmond was going to rewrite one of our songs with only one member,” said Mike Portnoy. “But it’s not like we had any options, because if we fought it or said no, the whole machine would have been turned off.”42

  The band toyed around with epic songs, splitting them into pieces, and the result was Awake. There was no “Pull Me Under”—nothing to threaten the charts. Dream Theater had jumped out of the niche once; it wouldn’t happen again. Derek Shulman, citing his own experience with Gentle Giant, advised the group not to change its sound even if urged to, even if groups like Rush and Kansas had gotten pop hits by doing so.

  “On our last couple of records, we decided to try and do what they did, and that was the biggest mistake on a creative, business, and fan-appreciation level that we made,” said Shulman. “I could recount from those days and say to this band—who played an interesting but not radio-friendly music—not to sell out.”43

  Dream Theater kept plugging. “It was several years before we finally shook that kind of freak hit and were able to finally convince the label to let us be who we are and stop trying to chase the success of ‘Pull Me Under,’ ” Portnoy told the New York Times. “We were just interested in a long-term career. A lot of bands that chase their big hits with more and more follow-ups end up dying as soon as the trend does, and we never wanted to be that. We wanted to be a band that had a slow-building foundation and built our success on constant touring and on albums as opposed to singles.”44

  In 2004, Dream Theater got its own version of the call-up: Yes, which had just released an original album of its music accompanied by an orchestra, wanted Dream Theater to open for them. “They’re still young and seem to have the same dedication that Yes did all the way through the 70s,” Steve Howe told Raw. “There just isn’t enough of that kind of progressive music around.”45

  By the late 1990s, most of the innovation in progressive rock was in the metal genre. New York’s Coheed and Cambria emerged in 1995, with a cohesive, multialbum concept running through its music, courtesy of songwriter Claudio Sanchez. The concept was exemplified in 2003’s In Keeping Secrets of Silent Earth: 3. “We were still kind of fresh,” said Sanchez. “We didn’t have that professional sort of rock band attitude, and this was the first time we actually got to be conceptual and go into a studio that’s got great equipment and really try to hone [sic] in on a sound. Second Stage [the band’s first album: The Second Stage Turbine Blade] was very much done in a bedroom, whereas [Silent Earth] had the production and the concept in mind.”46 The title track was eight minutes long, but the centerpiece was a three-song suite called “The Camper Velourium.”

  “I always thought of the band . . . as a progressive rock band,” Sanchez recalled. “The songs are kind of long; there are a lot of things that go in the songs, like a lot of parts. I mean, I don’t necessarily dislike the term emo or any name given to a particular style of rock. I just feel that rock music is rock music and the emotion has always been there since the days of traditional blues. But it doesn’t really bother me that it’s the name given. I’ve noticed that some bands take it to heart and dislike names or labels, but I don’t really care, I’ve always thought of the band as a progressive rock band.”47

  The Mars Volta discovered the same audience, all on its own. Founded by guitarist-producer Omar Rodríguez-López and Cedric Bixler-Zavala, the group, like Dream Theater, harked back to progressive heroes. It booked Storm Thorgerson to design its covers, and gabbed happily about its ambition of writing progressive epics. “We choose to take the ‘prog’ label literally,” Rodríguez-López told the revivalist magazine Mojo in 2004. “For us, ‘progressive’ means moving forwards, not sounding like our previous bands or our old records. When you think of it in those terms, it’s a positive association.”48

  Bixler-Zavala was even more adamant. “If, musically, you get in a spot where the sheets are warm and the pillows are comfy, I think it’s important to sleep on the floor every once in a while,” he said. “When I was fourteen, I didn’t want to hear anything but fast punk music. Older friends would make fun of me; ‘Oh, you’re a punk, huh?’ I wish I could’ve had the knowledge back then to say, I’m just fourteen, let me have my fun with this!”49

  Sweden’s Opeth, like Voivod, began as a death metal band. They were already showing signs of impatience with the genre by the time they released their sophomore album, 1996’s Morningrise, and guitarist-vocalist-songwriter Mikael Åkerfeldt had consistently sung the praises of the prog genre. Critics took notice as early as 1999, with the album Still Life. It opened with “The Moor,” a midtempo shuffle with minor-key riffing and vocals alternating between death metal growls and melodic singing, and a running concept about a demon-possessed woman named Melinda. That song attracted the attention of Steven Wilson, who agreed to produce the band’s follow-up album, Blackwater Park. Opeth was “taking a style which is really contemporary, like death metal which is totally now . . . and combining it with more progressive elements to create something new—that, for me, is what progressive music should be about,” Wilson said. “And I think that the album is a true, true progressive album.”50

  “I don’t see the point of playing in a band and going just one
way when you can do everything,” Åkerfeldt said. “It would be impossible for us to play just death metal; that is our roots, but we are now a mishmash of everything, and not purists to any form of music. It’s impossible for us to do that, and quite frankly I would think of it as boring to be in a band that plays just metal music. We’re not afraid to experiment, or to be caught with our pants down, so to speak. That’s what keeps us going.”51

  THE 1990S WERE ROUGHER for most of the first-wave progressive bands. Genesis had become one of the biggest bands on the planet just as its singer surpassed it, and just as Mike Rutherford found solo success of his own. In 1991, the band produced one last album, a shimmering and ironic collection of pop songs called We Can’t Dance.

  The next year, Peter Gabriel returned with Us, which found a place between the pop breakthroughs of the 1980s and the world music he had drunk in to write the soundtrack to Martin Scorsese’s Last Temptation of Christ. A generation of fans had discovered Gabriel with no living memory of Rael or the Giant Hogweed.

  Yes, which had become more fractious with every shuffling of the lineup, did not adjust so easily. The Union lineup fractured again with the end of the torturous tour. For the rest of the decade, a new version of Yes was built around Chris Squire every few years. But there was never any question that Yes would keep playing, or that a fan could count on some version of the band coming to town.

  It was different for Emerson, Lake & Palmer. In 1991, when they announced that they would play again for the first time in thirteen years, it was an event, even though—once again—the players had been pushed together by a hungry label. The reunited ELP avoided the blunders of Emerson, Lake & Powell. Its US tour began in Philadelphia, the mecca where every progressive act could find a crowd, and went on to venues small enough to sell out. Emerson’s classic Moog was restored, to complete the picture of a resurrected band.

  But the new-old ELP had nothing to say. There was little merit in the comeback album Black Moon, or in the new tracks recorded for the box set that every resurrected band seemed destined to make. Lake had thickened since the days of photo shoots in karategis; at the same time, his voice had thinned. And there was a greater problem with Emerson. From the start of the tour, he was rubbing his right hand, struggling to get through shows without pain. When there was time for a checkup, Emerson got the diagnosis: progressive nerve damage, which could be operated on but not reversed.

  There would be no tour for the second reunion album. The band picked up again in 1996, touring with Jethro Tull as part of an all-nostalgia progressive package deal. Emerson’s hand was steady enough for the gigs, but he did not pretend to be healed. “Keith was having a hard time,” Ian Anderson would recall. “He said to me, ‘I can only do forty-five minutes at a stretch; otherwise my hand is so sore, and the next day I can’t play at all.’ He was suffering. Some of the nights on that tour, you could see he was in pain.”52

  As the genre changed around them, Marillion cut its own path. The band kept writing emotional pop music that Steve Hogarth had brought on board, and plugging ahead without an obvious hit. On January 27, 1997, Mark Kelly posted a message on the “Marillion Freaks” message board, apologizing that the losses incurred on the previous tour, along with their label’s dwindling financial reserves, meant that an upcoming tour would have to be tacked back. “We are not prepared to put on half a show with second rate equipment and a crap sound system,” Kelly wrote, apologetically.53

  Jeff Pelletier, just a fan on the boards, wrote up his own suggestion. “What if all the US freaks donated to a Marillion Tour the USA fund?” he asked. “I’d gladly throw $50 in the hat if that guaranteed a chance to see them.”54 He logged off and did not immediately see that his idea had been taken up by fans—dozens, then hundreds. The “tour fund” cracked $30,000, which was as much as Kelly claimed to need. It hit $60,000 before the pitch was over. By pure accident, a Marillion fan had invented crowdfunding.

  The band took up that cause, with the Internet still mostly accessed by dial-up and streaming video many years away. In 1999, it crowdfunded an album, cheekily named marillion.com, and distributed it by itself. In 2002, it hosted the first Marillion Weekend, another effectively crowdfunded endeavor—a festival where the band spent days playing albums in their entirety and hobnobbing with fans.

  IN 2002, PORCUPINE TREE went on tour with Yes—as legitimate a torch-passing event as there was. Audiences who showed up early would get to see the future of progressive rock: Steven Wilson and his band. Audiences who showed up to relive their 1970s would see Yes, performing new songs that had been written with an orchestra.

  It took no time for Wilson to realize the error. “Lava talked us into it,” said Wilson, referring to his management company. “We thought it was a bad idea, and we were proven right, because it was a terrible idea. The truth is, the fans who went to see Yes, even in 2002, were not interested in new music. They were only interested in hearing what they already knew.”55

  By the time he was being asked to let older groups hitch a wagon, Wilson was both a success in his own right and an excavator for lost or hidden progressive music. His work with Opeth was only the start of it. Porcupine Tree’s own music seemed to synthesize the entire history of the genre—accessible enough for a new listener, but deep enough to suggest that it had come from somewhere deeper. “Arriving Somewhere but Not Here,” the fifth song on the band’s 2005 album Deadwing, epitomized that over twelve minutes.

  The song started with about a minute and a half of ambient sounds, leading into a soft vocal and softer acoustic guitar, strongly flavored by Pink Floyd. The band came in; at six minutes, the band dropped out, leaving just electric guitars until the full band returned, playing a descending riff. This gave way to the heaviest riff in the song, courtesy of Opeth’s Mikael Åkerfeldt. At eight minutes, everything dropped out except for a solo electric guitar playing jazzy lines, a piano playing whole notes, and keyboard padding in the background. The full arrangement returned for another verse and chorus, then a fade-out.

  Porcupine Tree became known for immaculate music, and ready experimentation. It sounded that way because Wilson was bored with what was familiar. “Progressive metal, what bands like Opeth were doing, was inventive at the start of the twenty-first century,” said Wilson. “But then progressive metal, like everything else, became a meme. The world doesn’t need any more progressive metal bands. Unfortunately, I get more demos from progressive metal bands than from any other type.”56

  As the decade ended, Wilson was more interested in reviving the progressive rock music he’d grown up with. From his studio at home in Hempstead, not far from where he’d grown up, Wilson began remixing the classic albums—some by Yes, more by King Crimson. With the permission of the artists, he removed noodling that had not worked, chopping off a piece of King Crimson’s “Moonchild.” He lifted parts that had been buried in the twenty-four-track recordings. “There are some extraordinary ideas going on in those records,” said Wilson.” I still don’t understand how Robert put everything together. He was no help in explaining things to me. He’s not about to help you understand how the music was created. In a way, and I mean this positively, he probably doesn’t know himself.”57

  EPILOGUE

  I’m sitting in the Zoellner Arts Center in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, right in front of a middle-aged man wearing a thick beard and a T-shirt that proves he saw Genesis on their 1977 tour. He’s yelling right into my ear.

  “A Plague of Lighthouse Keepers!”

  “Refugees!”

  “Man-Erg!”

  A reunited and rejuvenated Van der Graaf Generator is just a few feet in front of us, unmoved. “Shouting out requests is futile, I assure you!” announced Peter Hammill to the crowd of a thousand-odd obsessives. “We’ve got a set list.”1

  Van der Graaf Generator is performing at the last-ever North East Art Rock Festival—NEARfest. They have slimmed down to Hugh Banton on keyboards, Guy Evans on drums, and Hammill on piano and guita
r. Their hair, respectively, is white, nonexistent, and white. They’re playing for people who knew them when that hair was shaggy and black.

  In Bethlehem, I want to see who still lives, loves, and listens to prog. Every day, a crowd files politely into an amphitheater and watches a short film projected onto a scrim above the stage. An asteroid hurtles toward Earth, picks up momentum, and crashes. The planet cracks and bleeds like a sunburn. It explodes; two new planets are born. One is a lush, green globe painted by Roger Dean, who did the covers for Yes and Asia and Atomic Rooster. The other is a beautifully detailed vision of a burning Earth, courtesy of Marillion cover artist Mark Wilkinson.

  Our programs remind us that we will never go to another NEARfest. The organizers are done, moving on. There will never again be micro–tailgating parties in the parking garage, or rooms where rare LPs and Korean reprints of albums are traded like rubies. “We know for certain,” write the organizers, “that there will always be musicians with open minds, big ears, and bigger hearts, who are not satisfied to write simple protest, love, or dance songs.”

  When I look around at the audience throughout NEARfest—imagine the demographics of a Tea Party rally, but put them in Eloy and Magma T-shirts—there is occasional boredom, occasional nodding off and walking out. These are nostalgic, brainy people. (Nobody wants to read rundowns of stereotypes, but every third person I talk to either teaches science or reads about it to distract from a computer-programming day job. Or runs a record shop.) A few of the wristband wearers sport blue T-shirts, obtained at another days-long concert series. The message, spelled out in bold white letters: