The Show That Never Ends

by David Weigel

  Progressive Rock isn’t dead yet,

  but its fans are dying off.

  So get off your couches and support the scene,

  you apathetic mother f*#kers.

  You do not hear that sentiment at a Depeche Mode show or a Phish show or a De La Soul reunion show. Their fans adapt to trends. Their music comes back into fashion, it goes out, it comes back in.

  On the first night of the festival, I follow the masses to the after-party at the Comfort Suites. The bar serves a special NEARFest Apocalypse Ale—9.8 percent alcohol, brewed “in 9/8 time.” In the ballroom: an Internet radio station streams the festival, and a local band plays a catchy, King Crimson–y batch of originals. Gary Green, the guitarist from Gentle Giant, has taken up residence near the entrance. I ask him about Kanye West’s “Power,” and a few other new songs that sample prog. What does prog have to offer them?

  “Perhaps it’s more interesting music than what’s currently about,” says Green. “It’s pretty thin out there. I’m a bit surprised by the lack of—well, of ability. Maybe they’ve got technology that can patch them through. But the ability—that I sorely miss, because I grew up on Benny Goodman and Django Reinhardt. Playing your instrument and playing it well—you know, that’s music.”2

  IT WAS EASY to pinpoint when the culture gave up on progressive rock in Jonathan Coe’s nostalgic novel The Rotters’ Club, named for a Hatfield and the North album, which captured the popular memory of prog rock when its characters formed a band called Gandalf’s Pikestaff. Their opus: “Apotheosis of the Necromancer.” Their sheet music was “covered with dwarfish runes, Gothic calligraphy, and Roger Dean–style illustrations of dragons and busty elfin maidens in various stages of provocative undress.” When the band finally began playing, they were rescued by real music—punk, obviously.

  It was the drummer who sounded the first note of rebellion. After tinkling away on his ride cymbal for what must have seemed an eternity, as part of an extended instrumental passage that was meant to evoke the idea of zillions of far-off galaxies springing into life, he suddenly announced, “Fuck this for a game of soldiers,” and started to lay down a ferocious backbeat in 4/4. Recognizing his cue, the guitarist whacked up his volume and embarked upon a riotous three-chord thrash over which the lead vocalist, an aggressive little character called Stubbs, began to improvise what the charitable might describe as a melody.

  Pop’s move away from prog didn’t happen that quickly. It was slow and tortured and involved a ton of moving parts breaking at about the same time. In the United States, where most of this music ended up being sold, progressive rock radio slowly, slowly was assimilated into the Borg of commercial networking. The popularity of prog metal, of Marillion, and of the other bands that willingly identified themselves with “prog” never quite did it.

  Progressive music would not have a short-lived comeback, like swing music or garage rock. Instead, it would receive occasional love letters from the pop world. Years after ELP had disbanded for the second time, Keith Emerson got one of them in the form of a 2002 sketch from the British comedy series Big Train. A jailed Roman warrior, played by the future identified “nerd’do well” Simon Pegg, was asked to save the empire. He looked back in his jail cell and asked for the freedom of his mate: Keith Emerson, portrayed by another comedian, with the power to repel attacks through synthesizer blasts.

  “As you can see, Keith’s fascination with the more elaborate end of prog rock has lumbered him with a vast array of keyboards,” said Pegg. “I need two hundred mules for the journey.”

  “Such a journey’s possible without roadies!” said a baffled prison guard.

  “The ELP roadies were sold into slavery in Crete!” said Pegg.3

  “I thought it was great,” Emerson laughed in an interview. “I was really quite proud actually, and I wondered, who put this together? It was almost like they knew me very, very well. ‘He doesn’t speak much.’ Well, I didn’t, back then. I was very reserved.”4

  While no new progressive act made a true mainstream crossover, by the first decade of the twenty-first century, critics and cultural spelunkers were ready to consider the music again. Rush, the second-wave band that had built a fan base when the press thought it impossible, was the one group that had never lost its niche. They seesawed between strange and ironically cool, aided by every rock musician who admitted that he, too, had been to a Rush show.

  One by one, then all at once, bands that had faded with the genre found reasons to re-form. Rick Wakeman seemed to be having the most fun, turning his stories of pregig booze and doomed marriages into two “Grumpy Old Rock Star” memoirs. In 2007, he set out on a quasi-cabaret tour—just Rick Wakeman, his piano, and unbelievable stories of excess or inspiration.

  That same year, Kevin Ayers made one of the era’s least-expected returns. He had gone dark for fifteen years, living the Mallorca life idealized in his music. “This quintessential hippie freak, it seems, has grown into the sweetest possible codger,” wrote a patronizing but pleased reviewer.5 “Like all magnificent terrestrials, no matter how rich in talent, Kevin always played very badly when drunk,” said Daevid Allen. “Somehow his extraordinarily rich voice survived in spite of everything and washed convincingly over the wreckage, making it almost sound deliberate.”6

  By 2009, the heroes of the romantic comedy I Love You, Man could credibly jam on Rush songs and conspire to gain entry into a secret Rush gig. That same year, the music magazine collective Planet Rock launched Prog magazine, to be published nine times a year. They had no trouble meeting that goal; to some surprise, they soon added an issue to the schedule. When the punk songwriter Ted Leo affirmed his love for Rush in Spin, the piece was packaged as a “confessional” because Rush were proggy, and you couldn’t endorse prog qua prog.

  “I think at like the intersection of serious virtuosity and rockiness, that’s where some of the greatest music is,” said Leo in a follow-up interview. “Some of the most famous punk bands—Wire, Ramones even—there was a certain amount of theory going into even their primitivism, you know? Even their choice to play as primitively as the Ramones or early Wire, that’s not pure amateurism. There’s a theory behind what they were doing that I think actually enhances the experience for me, so it’s not like I shy away from the intellectual or theoretical side of any of this. I mean even my own songwriting; I have done things and continue to do things that are in the twists and turns of a song that are interesting to me more because it’s like a little songwriting game.”7

  Prog bands had demoed the electronics, pioneered the found sounds and use of empty space. They’d tweaked the synthesizers and parodied the three-minute pop song. All this was the result of a “remarkable explosion of the creative impulse in popular music,” said Robert Fripp in a 2012 interview. Early, experimental progressive rock “came from these young men who didn’t know what they were doing, yet were able to do it.”8 You could say the same of the punks.

  And when the progressives were on, they wrote gooseflesh-raising music. Their follies were grander than anyone else’s follies; their strange epics, stranger and more epic. We place an awful lot of emphasis on sincerity in music, and we assume that rawer, more automatic songs are de facto more sincere than music that’s overly studied and composed. I don’t think that’s true. Art, if you trust Carl Jung’s opinion, is “constantly at work educating the spirit of the age, conjuring up the forms in which the age is most lacking.”9 That’s a perfect description of what the progressives were trying to do.

  When I talked to first-wave progressive artists, only a few expressed outright contempt for less complicated music. For most, their feelings about punk are rooted in their resentment of the way the record companies of the late 1970s left them behind. For years, said Van der Graaf’s Peter Hammill, prog artists “were given the right to experiment” by record companies. And then, not so much.10

  The rest of us were lucky that experiment happened at all. Teams of highly trained visionaries paced thems
elves against their influences and their peers to write songs they were confident no one else would think of writing. They took the music far, far away from the basics, so that some later groups of jerks could take it “back to basics” and be praised for their genius. Every new artistic movement rebels against whatever came right before it. But the progressives’ rebellion was the weirdest, and the best.

  IT WAS NOT BILLED as the final appearance of Emerson, Lake, & Palmer. Twelve years had passed since the disappointment of In the Hot Seat. There had been no talk of a new album—lesson very much learned. Emerson had briefly reunited with the Nice. Palmer had reunited with Asia. Lake had toured with a new “Greg Lake Band.” When he was asked about the band—and he was asked frequently—Emerson was more likely to criticize Lake for letting his voice go than to reminisce.

  But in 2010, finally, ELP returned. An acoustic tour of the United States had knocked off some of the dust, and on July 25 their reunion was the headline event of London’s new “High Voltage Festival.” A posse of prog rock successors, from Marillion to Pendragon to Focus, warmed up Victoria Park for ninety minutes of ELP.

  No one was satisfied. Emerson labored through his hand injuries. Lake’s voice, deepened with age, had not improved in the intervening decade. Palmer was the first member of the band to declare the show a bust. “It wasn’t to the standard that I liked and I didn’t think it sounded that good,” he said. “Unless it’s as good as what it can be, then I can’t do it. I would have carried on if it had been as good as it was. I don’t believe it was and I don’t believe it would have ever gotten back to that standard.”11

  Lake would admit that Palmer and Emerson were uncomfortable with ELP’s sound. They had performed at such a high level—they had won fans, playing at that level—that it was difficult to ask anyone to settle. “I think we owed it to the fans,” said Lake of the 2010 show. “I said, ‘Look, we might not have been as great as we were, but here it is, you get a chance to hear the band one last time.’ ”12

  Instead, ELP scattered, and the three musicians rejoined the ranks of progressive rock legends with fewer opportunities to create and more to cash in. There were always cruises and festivals and opportunities for quick tours in familiar markets. Carl Palmer formed “ELP Legacy,” a tribute to his own music, with a guitarist replacing the keyboards. In 2012, Lake began a “Songs of a Lifetime” tour, with electronic backing tracks filling in for Emerson, Palmer, and the bygone orchestra. Every night, he walked out on stage to Kanye West’s “Power.”

  Emerson was more judicious in how and when he played. In 2013, he traveled to Bowling Green, Kentucky, to conduct a piece he’d written for a never-made film, about the Civil War Battle of Glorieta Pass. In April 2014, Emerson was a guest of honor at the annual Moogfest in Asheville, North Carolina. Named for the late Robert Moog, it was a celebration of all electronic music, but the monolithic box of wires that Emerson had been so identified with was at its center. The company, given new life by the electronic music boom, was unveiling a new product based on the oldest designs: the Emerson Moog Modular System. “This synthesizer represents so much to all of us,” said Moog’s chief engineer Cyril Lace.13 Emerson was being canonized by a circuit board, and he could not have sounded prouder. Flanked by his own machine, and by the nearly identical new system, he reflected on how music was changed by it. “There are loads of prog bands, all over the world—internationally, like in Japan, Germany—you name it, all over, and all of them aspire to have this instrument,” he said.14

  On July 10, 2015, Emerson played in England for the first time since the ELP reunion. As part of that country’s MoogFest, Emerson and the BBC Concert Orchestra took over the Barbican. The set list mingled ELP with Emerson’s solo work, but it ended with him playing conductor again. His long hair falling over his suit, Emerson conducted “Glorieta Pass.”

  Eight months later, on March 11, 2016, Keith Emerson was dead. The news tumbled out as cruelly as it could. Emerson’s social media sites posted a matter-of-fact statement, then a tribute from Carl Palmer. Within a day, reporters confirmed that the Los Angeles coroner was investigating a suicide. Emerson had died of a shotgun wound to the head. The report, when the coroner was finished, listed three maladies:

  Arteriosclerotic cardiovascular disease

  Valvular heart disease

  Depression—chronic alcohol

  Both versions of the news—the death itself, and the suicide—rattled the rock world’s diaspora. Greg Lake, who had always hoped for one more reunion, told Britain’s Express newspaper that his friend had been battling the black dog since at least the making of Works. “It’s a very difficult thing to actually describe what depression is,” mused Lake. “We all know what it looks like, people’s moods become very black. But it’s more complicated than that. It changes someone’s personality. Also, Keith got into substance abuse, which made it worse and the whole thing just spiralled. He lived, in the end, this very lonely existence of someone who was deeply troubled. He loved music—that was his main purpose in life. But the music he made after ELP never bore fruit in the same way as it did in the early days.”15

  But Emerson had not been alone. With his girlfriend, Mari Kawaguchi, he had been preparing for, and dreading, a trip to Japan. The hand pain had never receded. Emerson dreaded what might come if he fulfilled the dates, then failed his own standards. “He read all the criticism online and was a sensitive soul,” Kawaguchi told a British tabloid. “Last year he played concerts and people posted mean comments such as, ‘I wish he would stop playing.’ He was tormented with worry that he wouldn’t be good enough. He was planning to retire after Japan.”16

  There were tributes immediately—little ones, leading up to a concert in Los Angeles at the end of May. The El Rey, a theater that packed in a little less than eight hundred people, was taken over. One by one, Emerson’s friends and admirers filled the bill, and Michelle Moog-Koussa, the daughter of the synthesizer’s creator, read a tribute of her own: “Keith took this daunting, sometimes delicate, and highly expressive new technology that was originally designed to sit on a table at some studio, and he boldly brought it to the masses.” He traveled the world with it.17

  Neither Palmer nor Lake appeared at the concert. The musicians who did stretched the show to three full hours, including a complete performance of “Tarkus.” As midnight approached, Eddie Jobson got behind the big box of drums and wires for one final tribute to what Emerson had built. The song was “Lucky Man.”

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  One summer day in 2012, with the last normal presidential campaign heading into a slow period, I sat across from Slate’s David Plotz and Josh Levin and pitched them on my “fresca.” Named for (but legally unrelated to) the fruity low-calorie beverage, the fresca was a yearly Slate staffer challenge. Whatever we normally covered—politics, in my case—the mission was to report and write for a month about something else.

  I started talking about progressive rock, the music I’d wanted to write about since I was a teenager. To my surprise, and to my great reward, they listened. “Prog Spring,” a title I wish I could grab the credit for, was a hit, and Howard Yoon saw a book in it. So did Matt Weiland, whose excitement for the project made me fret about delivering something that could earn it.

  If I did, Matt’s wonderful patience and sharp eye deserve the thanks. He chased me through three jobs, more delays than I want to admit, typically begged for by me from some hotel room in Iowa or New Hampshire or Florida. (America couldn’t have had a normal election in 2016, could it? With a normal, boring candidate? I digress.)

  There was plenty of hand-holding on the way to finishing this book, and I am grateful to Stephanie Hiebert for painstaking copyedits, Noah Shannon for research that made me question reality (in a good way), and Fay Torresyap for navigating the wild and expensive world of music photo licensing.

  Thank you to Dan Kois for making something great out of the original Slate series. Thanks, too, to Alexandra Gutierrez, who read thr
ough the chapter I worried most about, and Jeb Lund, who pored over the first proof.

  Plenty of musicians, managers, and producers gave me their time to talk through their stories. I’m especially grateful to Ian Anderson, Jon Anderson, Steve Hackett, Adrian Belew, Alan White, Carl Palmer, Steven Wilson, Todd Rundgren, David Hitchcock, Steve Howe, Trey Gunn, Eddie Jobson, Davy O’List, Ian McDonald, Roger Dean, Peter Hammill, the Roches, the organizers of NearFest, and the Cruise to the Edge team. And I am glad beyond the telling to have spoken to Chris Squire, Daevid Allen, John Wetton, Greg Lake, and Keith Emerson before they passed away.

  Some wonderful, diligent, and thoughtful music historians tread this territory before I did. Everyone who worked for Sounds, NME, ZigZag, Creem, and the rest of the magazines that covered prog in real time helped me live through their typewriters. Sid Smith, Edward Macan, Dan Bukszpan, Paul Stump, and Nick Awde did the same.

  Jack Shafer talked me through the project and loaned me libraries worth of material. Richard Morton Jack let me spend several messy days in his paper-stuffed study, where I found some of my favorite stuff. Barney Hoskyns and everyone else at Rock’s Back Pages provides a heroic service for a low, low price—$30 per month for access to a curated mega-archive of sources—and were kind enough to let me rifle through the stacks. Thank you to the taxpayers of the UK and USA, too, for indirectly helping the British Library and Library of Congress stock such great archives.

  The progressive rock fan community is as smart as any subculture you’ll find. I am forever indebted to Mark Prindle and the whole Music Babble community, first for giving me my first crack at writing for an audience, and second for years of tape-trading and positive reinforcement. Singing along to “Tarkus” feels more natural when your friends are singing along.

  ILLUSTRATIONS