by Will Romano
“I was in the music business at the time, and my very first recognition of acid rock—we didn’t call it progressive rock then—was, of all people, the Beach Boys and the song ‘Good Vibrations’ [released as a single and not included on Pet Sounds],” says Phillip Rauls, former Atlantic Records and Regional Promotional Manager. “They used an instrument called the theremin, and it was an electronic instrument and you could run your hand between this electronic signal and make the pitch go up and down. They used it in sci-fi and horror movies—the black-and-white B movies. That sent so many musicians back to the studio to create this music on acid.”
“The whole ethos of rock ’n’ roll in the early days was about pretty girls, cars, and having fun,” Eric Woolfson, one half of the Alan Parsons Project, said in 2009. “The Beach Boys were the classic example of a band moving from fun surf music to phenomenally progressive stuff.”
While the Beach Boys and Beatles were deadlocked in creative competition (which would result in the Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper’s—one of the pillars of progressive rock), others were gaining by leaps and bounds, topping their previous outputs. The Yardbirds, perhaps known as much for their guitarists (i.e., Eric Clapton, Jimmy Page, Jeff Beck) as their music, branched out into experimental blues-rock after their early days as a Chicago blues—styled British band that had taken up the Stones’ residency at the Crawdaddy Club, owned by industry big wheel Giorgio Gomelsky.
“They started off as this English R&B band, basically,” keyboardist/organist Brian Auger told the author in 2007. “Then they kind of branched out into different things, like, ‘Shapes of Things’ and ‘For Your Love,’ which was the biggie.”
Songs like “For Your Love” (featuring bongos and harpsichord), written by future 10cc guitarist/vocalist Graham Gouldman (he also penned the hit “Heart Full of Soul,” one of the earliest known appearances of the sitar in rock music, followed, of course, the Beatles’ “Norwegian Wood [This Bird Has Flown]” and the Rolling Stones’ “Paint It Black”), “Shapes of Things,” and “Over Under Sideways Down” were atmospheric guitar workouts.
“We started playing twelve-bar blues and then we made it a bit more interesting. Probably the main person was [bassist] Paul Samwell-Smith, and I don’t know where he got the idea for all of the buildups,” says drummer Jim McCarty, one of the founding members of the Yardbirds—a partial reference to Charlie Parker—as well as a member of the later progressive bands Renaissance and Illusion. “We were always concentrating on making music very exciting. We would play a song, then drop it all down, and then build it up with this big crescendo on the bass and drums. When we got Jeff [Beck] in the band, he had all of these weird and wonderful sounds. He wasn’ t a straight blues guitar player. It was all about getting an atmosphere going that was very exciting.”
Beck would, of course, continue to explore throughout the 1960s and 1970s with the Jimmy Page-penned “Beck’s Bolero”—a melding of Maurice Ravel’s “Boléro, ballet for orchestra” and the mid-1970s fusion sounds found on such Beck albums as Blow by Blow and Wired.
FRANK ZAPPA, PROCOL HARUM, AND THE BEATLES
“Early Soft Machine, Kevin Ayers, a band called the Wilde Flowers, with Robert Wyatt singing,” said Yes/Genesis/King Crimson drummer Bill Bruford. “These bands were doing something different. I was young, but it was the first time I had heard anybody singing in 5/4. Or singing in unusual phrasing or unusual length of meter. Until then, pop songs were ‘dum de dum dum de deedly dum de dum.’ But Robert Wyatt used all kinds of different phrasings and unusual bar lengths and unusual chord sequences. This being in the mid-1960s. And that would be about the first time anybody smelled that something weird was happening. The Beatles had a couple songs in 7/4. And there were some strange intimations in the Beatles material in ’64, ’65, ’66.”
Procol Harum, 1971. Left to right: bassist Alan Cartwright, multi-instrumentalist Chris Copping, drummer Barrie Wilson, guitar Dave Ball; lyricist Keith Reid, and keyboardist Gary Brooker. (Courtesy of A&M Records and Chrysalis)
In 1966, Frank Zappa and Mothers of Invention broke from the underground with the release of the double album Freak Out!—a tour de force rock album dripping with orchestral flourishes, Dixieland jazz, satire, “trivial pop” (by Zappa’s own description), blues-based guitar solos, studio craft (the massive echo effects in “Who Are the Brain Police?”), incisive political criticism, sexual double entendre, barbershop harmonies, the sick buzzing of the African mouth instrument (the kazoo), animal/jungle and avant-garde noises, R&B vocal/’50s doo-wop (one of Zappa’s favorite forms of music), multitracked madness (making full use of the stereo image), and strange vocal inflections and orgiastic yelping (among other things).
Songs such as “Who Are the Brain Police?,” “I Ain’t Got No Heart,” “How Could I Be Such a Fool,” “Wowie Zowie,” “Help, I’m a Rock,” “The Return of the Son of Monster Magnet,” and “It Can’t Happen Here” mix and subdivide musical genres, sometimes from one second to the next. “The Return of the Son of Monster Magnet”—what Zappa jokingly referred to as a two-movement ballet—in particular is a blue-haired society’s worst nightmare coming to life. (Supposedly, the song was the result of letting hippies run rampant in the studio and recording whatever came into their minds. The result is a “bright, snappy number.”)
Given that the song—and the album—ends with whacked-out chipmunk voices, one has to wonder if the entire fifteen-track package were not some elaborate practical joke on the listener. (One also has to wonder just how much the Beatles were listening to Freak Out! in the months before they composed the music for the studio masterpiece Sgt. Pepper’s, which itself closes with equally and seemingly nonsensical vocals, apart from boasting other similar sonic characteristics (e.g., the use of a kazoo in “Lovely Rita” as Zappa had used it in “Hungry Freaks, Daddy”).
“The funny thing about Freak Out! is Frank did what he thought people wanted,” says Paul Buff, a highly influential inventor/engineer during Zappa’s formative years as a professional musician in the early 1960s. “He just did it in a very renegade fashion.”
Moving into 1967, we see that four records were crucial to the early development of progressive rock: the Moody Blues’ Days of Future Passed; Pink Floyd’s debut, The Piper at the Gates of Dawn; the Beatles’ recognized classic Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band; and the single “A Whiter Shade of Pale” by Procol Harum, which was followed by an eponymous full-length release.
The Beatles had explored baroque pop with the use of ensemble strings in “Eleanor Rigby” and “Yesterday,” while less than two years later, Procol Harum included elements of Bach’s Suite No. 3 in D Major their number-one U.K. hit, “A Whiter Shade of Pale.” Procol Harum’s combination of classically inspired organ and piano lines and Robin Trower’s burning blues guitar work made for an unusual, amalgamated sound.
Frank Zappa, pictured here in 1968, transcended music-industry labels.
Cucumonga (1963)
Freak Out! (1966)
Absolutely Free (1967)
We’re Only In It For the Money (1968)
Hot Rats (1969)
The Grand Wazoo (1972)
“I was interested in some of the far more serious music of Bach, B Minor Mass and things like that,” explains Procol organ player Matthew Fisher. “I was never that stuck on James Brown or Bobby Bland, you know? It was within the two that there was nevertheless a large area of overlap in our musical tastes.”
Fisher describes how his musical equipment was a pivotal ingredient in making the song a classic: “All of those glissandos I play on the Hammond M-100 organ, they were just all done with one finger or one thumb,” says Fisher. “If you want to do a glissando, you could do one on an M-100 just using one finger; your fingernail, even. You can’t do that on the B-3. You’d break your fingers. The keys are that much heavier. The sound of the M-100, compared to the Hammond B-3, is murky. The M-100 just sounds much more like it’s in a dungeon or something. It doesn’t hav
e the clarity and force that the B-3 has, and using that powerful of a tool might have been something I’d have been uncomfortable with in those days.”
Months before “A Whiter Shade of Pale” shot to number one in Britain (and number five in the U.S.), the Beatles had resigned from roadwork in the summer of ’66 (much like Brian Wilson)—their tour ending, appropriately enough, in the hippie utopia of San Francisco—and turned Abbey Road Studios into their very own musical sandbox and produced some of their most experimental and groundbreaking music.
“Penny Lane” and “Strawberry Fields Forever,” the first sides the band released since regrouping after taking a break from one another and (generally just) being the Beatles, seem innocent enough on the surface. But dig a bit deeper, and you’ll soon find creepiness and a darkness that envelop the tracks. Admittedly, the lyrical content of songs such as “Maxwell’s Silver Hammer” and
“Eleanor Rigby” are disturbing (if not just plain sad), but they aren’t damaging psychologically.
“Strawberry Fields Forever” opens with the dreamy, wispy, soft puffing of flutes created by the Mellotron—a keyboard/gadget/monstrosity /invention, employing the same technology as the earlier Chamberlin keyboard, that, through the activation of prerecorded tape reels and a series of pulleys and pinch rollers, via the pressing of keys produces sounds of strings and other acoustic instruments, usually for a duration of roughly seven or eight seconds.
The limited functionality of the instrument gave rise to the development of a hand technique that former Moody Blues keyboardist Mike Pinder, a pioneer of the Mellotron, called an arpeggiated style of chording-a rolling of the fingers to avoid unwanted sonic gaps. Furthermore, the ’Tron also gave birth to a slew of lesser known instruments created by independent vendors who tried to improve on the design and affordability of the machine. Among them were Dave Biro, whose Birotron worked on eight-track tapes (Biro built the first one while listening to Yes’s Tales from Topographic Oceans), and Ken Freeman, who created the String Symphonizer.
Though notoriously and frustratingly unpredictable—it was a delicate piece of equipment to start with, and fluctuations in voltage caused major problems with tuning, which was embarrassingly apparent on the road (supposedly Yes keyboardist Rick Wakeman was so incensed with the instrument’s inability to stay in tune, he set one on fire)—the Mellotron was meant to beef up the sound of a rock band and turn the group into a symphonic unit of some sort.
“I remember hearing Sgt. Pepper’s for the first time, and it is such a cliché, but when I was at college, a student in every room had the album on and was playing a different track,” says 10cc’s Kevin Godley. “It actually made me uncomfortable because the noises were unfamiliar. But after two days’ exposure, it clicked in a mighty way. ‘Fuck. This is it. Gimme a piece of this.’ It was so much more significant than anything. They broke the rules because they could. They dared. And who dares wins.”
“If the Beatles had never crossed that line, which they did in 1967, progressive music may never have happened,” Wetton told the author in 1995. “The Beatles moved into the experimental, classical, world music [arena], and that was what gave us progressive music. Unless you have an alternative [perspective of history], that is my view of things. That’s the way my life happened, anyway.”
“I remember when we first heard Sgt- Pepper’s,” says Styx’s original vocalist/keyboardist, Dennis DeYoung. “It was summer. Hot. That’s what I remember. Nobody in the neighborhood [Chicago] had air-conditioning; it was 1967. I was with
Overnight Sensation (1973)
Apostrophe (’) (1974)
Roxy & Elsewhere (1974)
Tom Nardin, who was in the band at that time, at the Panozzo brothers’ [former Styx rhythm section] house, and we ran out to get the record, because the Panozzos’ parents had one of those Zenith console stereos in their living room. We sat there and it was hot and we listened to it over and over. It changed everything. It changed everything.”
THE BAND YOU’VE KNOWN FOR ALL THESE YEARS
Rock itself can be interpreted as a progressive idea—something that lives on the cutting edge of society and art, which is constantly being redefined. Ironically, and quite paradoxically, “progressive rock,” the classic era of the late 1960s through the mid- and late 1970s, introduces not only the explosive and exploratory sounds of technology (from early electronic rhythmic devices, thanks to high-profile drummers such as Carl Palmer on Emeron, Lake and Palmer’s Brain Salad Surgery and Graeme Edge on the Moody Blues’ 1971 record Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, to the obvious advances in keyboard technology) but traditional music forms (classical and European folk) and (often) a pastiche compositional style and artificial constructs (concept albums), which suggests postmodernism.
This may be why progressive rock has given writers and musicologists fits for over four decades. The terminology for, the artwork chosen to represent, and the very nature of the music seem inherently contradictory—a combination of opposites. For instance, how do we categorize the Nice’s “Five Bridges Suite” and “Pathetique Symphony No. 6 3rd Movement”? Or, for that matter, something like Yes’s Tales from Topographic Oceans, Pink Floyd’s The Dark Side of the Moon, Rick Wakeman’s The Six Wives of Henry VIII, and Genesis’s The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway? What about Rush’s Romantic literature-inspired tone poem “Xanadu”? What do we make of music that’s composed as pastiche that combines the traditional and modern, the universal and the contrived?
“It’s an ironic consequence of Sgt. Pepper’s success that an album of such hugely disparate themes and emotions, niftily shoehorned into a pseudo live performance by the inclusion of a bracketing title song and some sound effects, should have led to a rock trend—the concept album,” says Justin Currie of Scotland’s Beatlesesque pop-rock band Del Amitri. “Well before Pepper, pop musicians had been maximizing the emotional impact of sequencing and gap timings on LPs, not least the Beatles themselves from A Hard Day’s Night onward. Sgt. Pepper’s was the apotheosis of pop’s ambition to be complex, subtle, and in essence ‘symphonic.’”1
It’s no surprise that the Beatles spent months completing Sgt. Pepper’s and, some reports claim, burned through upward of a hundred thousand dollars to complete the record’s production process. With George Martin at the helm, no idea was too outrageous. One of the most outstanding examples of studio trickery—among tapes being sped up and slowed for songs like “When I’m Sixty-Four” and “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds”—may not have required much money, but an awful lot of time and energy. It involved a cutting, shuffling, reshuffling, and splicing together of various taped organ, harmonium (played by George Martin, as he had done for “The Word” on Rubber Soul), and bass harmonica performances (which recall the wheezing and whirling effects of a calliope) to create the sonic vertigo of the fairgrounds variety for backing tracks heard in “Being for the Benefit of Mr. Kite!”
“The Beatles made it more acceptable for music to expand into other areas, like fairgrounds music,” says Curved Air vocalist Sonja Kristina.
The impact of Sgt. Pepper’s spread far and wide (the record shot to number one in the U.S. and the U.K., and has spent more than two hundred weeks on the British charts, when you include chart reentries), but not everyone got the philosophical joke. Richard Goldstein, music critic for the New York Times, slammed the record for its unreality, singling out the song “She’s Leaving Home” as an “immense put-on” (and the writer didn’t mean this philosophically, either).
A Hard Day’s Night (1964)
Revolver (1965)
Revolver (1966)
Magical Mystery Tour (1967)
Abbey Road (1969)
(Opposite) Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band (1967)
“The obsession with production, coupled with a surprising shoddiness in composition, permeates the entire album,” Goldstein wrote on June 18, 1967. Time has proven Mr. Goldstein wrong, one thinks, but this critique, and others like it (some that said the
Beatles destroyed rock ’n’ roll), kicked off the music press’s long “love affair” with progressive rock.
The impact of Sgt. Pepper’s was far greater than perhaps Goldstein—or anyone else (perhaps even the Beatles)—could have seen. “There were some good things and bad things that Sgt. Pepper’s opened the door for,” says Les Fradkin, who was a session musician in London in the late 1960s and completed many a track at Apple Studios. “The good thing is that it proved to the record industry that an album format, or something resembling a concept album format, had commercial viability, and that the studio had a sound unto itself. The bad part is that people who did not have the level of genius of the Beatles went ahead and attempted to ape Sgt. Pepper’s and failed to match it. Sgt. Pepper’s did something in America that was interesting: It destroyed the garage band sound. Before that you had your? & the Mysterians and your “Little Bit O’ Soul” by the Music Explosion.... All of those bands could function. Sgt. Pepper’s destroyed the chance of average kids on the block to make a record like that. Traffic’s ‘Paper Sun’ and the Rolling Stones followed.”