Mountains Come Out of the Sky

by Will Romano

  “I stormed out of the studio. Hackett came running out after me, and I really have to extend my thanks to the guy, because he said, ‘I know what you’re going through. I’ve been there. Don’t quit. Hang in there. We will make this thing really great live. You’re going to fuck up your career and you’re going to blow a great opportunity. You have just got to trust me to stay with it.’ I cooled off and I didn’t quit. Geoff is a sweet guy but he is not a producer.”

  “I personally think the record was mixed too brightly and not compressed enough, but I shouldn’t be widging about things that are old issues,” Hackett told the author. “I always felt ‘When the Heart Rules the Mind’ sounded better on FM radio because it came across with a certain amount of compression that aided the mix . . . and so it brought the power of the band alive, to my mind.”

  “The GTR record, well . . . I was slightly less happy with the overall sound [compared] to the first Asia album,” Howe told the author in 2005.

  “The record was a failure on three levels: Musically it didn’t make the mark it should have; production-wise the sound of the record is horrible and it does not translate because it is bathed in so much reverb that you can’t even hear half the shit that is going on; and thirdly and most importantly, I think Geoff Downes was overwhelmed by Steve Howe,” Mover adds. “When you’re producer of a band, with individuals on five individual levels, you’ve got to be the king. You have to have everybody looking at you. Not you siding with Steve Howe because you had this little thing. That wasn’t fair to Steve Hackett.”

  The record was released, and by July 1986, GTR had gone gold in the U.S. After “When the Heart Rules the Mind” charted it was followed by “The Hunter” (written by Downes), also a Hot 100 single. Despite the success, nothing could save the doomed supergroup; the subsequent tour broke the band’s back.

  “Hackett and Howe traveled separately on the road,” Mover says. “They stayed on separate floors in the hotels we stayed in. They each had their own tour managers. It cost us a fucking fortune and me, Phil, and Max [Bacon, vocalist] had to pay part of it. And they never spoke to one another. The only time they got within thirty feet of one another was onstage. It was a drag, because in the beginning it was fun. The two of them are great guys. I was angry with each one of them for not letting a good thing happen.”

  Eventually Hackett, who had convinced Mover not to quit, did just that, leaving Howe at the helm. “After the tour of ’86, which ended in September, we got together at Steve Howe’s farm house in Devon, England, to start working on the new record,” Mover says. “Hackett didn’t show. But we started material. The material was great. We did three songs the first week we were out there. The music was in the progressive vein.... I was really happy with the direction.”

  Mover eventually left the band, having accepted an invite to join soon-to-be guitar god Joe Satriani. GTR attempted to record a second studio album sans Mover and Hackett, but the record failed to gain label support and the project collapsed.

  “There was a lot of politics going down between management and the record company, and the next thing we knew, GTR had folded,” says Mover’s replacement, drummer Nigel Glockler (Saxon, Asia).

  “The combination of progressive and pop was an area that couldn’t be sustained for very long,” Hackett said. “Those are very different sensibilities.”

  ELP AND 3

  “Of all the people I’ve worked with,” says Robert Berry, “the only guy I was afraid of was Keith Emerson, because I saw him as this rocket scientist, [a] crazy keyboardist [who] wasn’t going to be easy to talk to. Like a nutty professor that I wouldn’t be able to get an honest conversation [from]. It turned out to be totally different than that. A couple glasses of wine, he likes to tell jokes, he’s funny, down-to-earth. Not the nutty professor at all. I lucked out with Carl Palmer and Keith both because they treated me with a lot of respect. Immediately, they let me be on their level—we were a three-piece band with three voting members.... They are just fantastic musicians and top of the heap when it comes to musicians in the rock world.”

  The appearance of 3 capitalized on Emerson’s return to the spotlight with Emerson Lake and Powell in 1986, whose debut record was a Top 40 hit on both sides of the Atlantic. (The song “Touch and Go” reached number two on the Billboard Mainstream Rock chart.)

  Drummer Cozy Powell’s hard-hitting percussive attack in recordings by Rainbow, Robert Plant, Jeff Beck and others made him a shoo-in to replace Carl Palmer, who was busy with Asia. Powell suggested the band tackle “Mars, the Bringer of War” from Gustav Holst’s The Planets—something Emerson, for some reason, had fought to avoid—and the newfangled lineup had recorded “ELP”’s greatest material since the mid-1970s.

  “Upon hearing that, I called them up and wished them best of luck, and let them use the ELP logo,” Palmer told the author in 2005. “They had to play the material I had cowritten for ELP, and the record company was promoting the back catalog. From a financial point of view, I could gain half the ball of wax, if not the complete ball. I was never quite sure why they didn’t wait for me; I think it was a big mistake.... I look at the positive aspect of it.”

  Apparently, and intriguingly, Simon Phillips (yet another drummer with a last name that begins with the letter P) was contacted. “They knew of my playing and the records I’d done,” says Philips. “I was doing sessions from 1974 onward. I don’t remember when I first met Keith. I was contacted by management for what would have been Emerson Lake and Phillips. We talked more about the business end of everything, and I was not knocked out about how that was going. I was very busy at that time because I was working with Mike Oldfield.”

  If there were any hard feelings on anyone’s part, they obviously had melted away: Philips eventually hooked up with Emerson in a shortlived touring band called the Best (“Terrible name,” says Phillips), featuring Joe Walsh, the Who’s John Entwistle, and Jeff “Skunk” Baxter, and Palmer rejoined the keyboard wizard when they formed the band 3 with Robert Berry.

  Much of 3’s debut record, . . . To the Power of Three, was catchy, commercial rock with some progressive flair, what allmusic.com calls “alternative pop” (e.g., “Chains,” “Lover to Lover,” “Runaway,” “Talkin’ Bout,” “On My Way Home,” written in dedication to Tony Stratton-Smith). “The real die-hard progressive fans were down on 3—the types that would rather sit down next to a coffee table with headphones and listen to the music,” Berry says. “3 was trying to be accessible the way Rush was—write accessible music, get people educated, get some radio play, keep people liking it ... There’s an art to that.”

  The standout track, the seven-minute “Desde La Vida,” is a gutsy move by the trio, featuring a fusion of electronic and acoustic drumming. “Palmer had a digital drum sampler made by a German company, Dynacord, at that time,” Berry says. “I was already trying to bridge the gap between what I thought was going to happen in music, and I believe Mr.

  Abacab (1981)

  Genesis (1983)

  Invisible Touch (1986)

  We Can’t Dance (1991)

  The Way We Walk: Volume Two, the longs (1993)

  Calling All Stations (1997)

  Seconds Out (1977)

  Mister and some other bands were out there too. I said to Carl, “If we can not only meld your electronic and acoustic set but meld the drum machine with your playing, it would have a really tight groove. I think we would fit into the modern sound.”’

  When 3 took their show on the road, they decided to tour small clubs throughout America and play ELP and Nice favorites such as “Hoedown,” “Fanfare for the Common Man,” “America,” and “Rondo” along with material from the band’s debut. They even made a stop at Atlantic Records’ fortieth anniversary party at Madison Square Garden, an appearance that went well, despite the Aaron Copland debacle mentioned earlier.

  “Carl and Keith wanted something new,” Berry says. “They wanted to play clubs and be real close to the fans. Keith told me
on the bus that this is one of the most fun times touring. With ELP, he told me, ‘We would be fighting.’ As 3, the three of us just got along great.”

  It was a parry until the unthinkable happened—the record label pulled support in order to get 3 off the road and back into the studio. “Geffen said, ‘Okay, we’re shutting the tour down now, so you can start recording the next album,’” Berry says. “‘Talking’ Bout’ was number nine, and we were a new band, with a new fan base. I said, ‘Wait, if we have another hit song, which was going to be ‘Lover to Lover,’ if it was only to hit the Top 100, are you saying that’s a bad thing? And, anyway, we haven’t toured Japan, where we are huge....’ They said, ‘Next album!’ Keith said, ‘You know what? I cannot forge a new path for myself away from ELP without support from the record company.’ ... It was our first album, and if it wasn’t for the record company—what they did—we would have made a second album. That second album would have been a more middle ground like Asia—a combination of mainstream and progressive material. Emerson didn’t want to go through that assembly-line production kind of thing. So he was basically done with it. Someone like Keith Emerson only comes around once in a lifetime. But you can’t record epic albums, make little money doing it, and remain a band.”

  (Pete Cronin/Getty Images)

  MARILLION

  Doin’ It in “Style”

  IN THE 1980S, A NEW BREED OF ROCK, DUBBED NEO-PROG, helped to resuscitate a fading and once greatly revered sound. Though bands of the neo-prog subgenre initially relied heavily on formulaic musical devices and compositional approaches pioneered by classic bands of the late 1960s and early 1970s (e.g., synth solos, expansive multisectioned compositions), they represented a vibrant, virulent strain of experimental music that codified progressive rock into a style that successfully incorporated such unlikely musical elements as funk, hard rock, and even punk.

  While 1970s behemoths were tarred as “pretentious and boring” for their self-important indulgence of classical (or faux-classical) musical flourishes and ornamentation, the ’80s bands, while less visionary and groundbreaking than their predecessors, rightly picked up on the more immediate hard rock and techno dance vibes of their contemporaries to carve out their own niche in the prog rock universe.

  Case in point: Marillion. Originally dubbed Silmarillion (a reference to the J.R.R. Tolkien novel of the same title) by founding member and drummer Mike “Mick” Pointer, Marillion emerged from the post-punk music scene in Britain at a time when progressive bands such as Yes, Emerson Lake and Palmer, Genesis, and Gentle Giant had either died an unceremonious death or drastically changed their M.O. to become virtually unrecognizable to longtime fans.

  Marillion existed as a bridge between punk and classic progressive rock, even to the point of the band being dubbed “the New Genesis.” The band’s lead vocalist, a certain Derek William Dick (aka Fish), was instrumental in leading the charge: His towering, raging stage presence (he spit bars like a lunatic poet) complemented the band’s driving tempos and its sometimes rough-around-the-edges sonic assault, which boasted a sensibility that bordered on the new wave. (The singer even pulls a Johnny Rotten by referring to himself as the Antichrist in the autobiographical song and the band’s first single, “Market Square Heroes.”) A lot of music fans hadn’t seen a band perform in the progressive rock musical vein with quite the same intensity. It was an unusual combination, but it seemed to thrill a small but growing number of fans (later called “Freaks,” after a B side to a single released in 1985).

  Fish: no “sausage-machine” songwriting. (Courtesy of Ami Barwell)

  “We had come up just as the punk and new wave movement was starting to run out of steam,” says Marillion guitarist Steve Rothery. “What we were doing was kind of, in some respects, a throwback, but it was also influenced by the energy of punk and new wave.... It was a nice hybrid, you know? It was the kind of music I believed in and I wanted to play. From the early days we recorded at a studio [in Hertford] of [a] band [called] the Enid, and they were symphonic rock, if I could use that term, and exactly [at] the other end of the spectrum from where we were coming.”

  “When I met up with the Marillion guys, everybody came from a certain background, musically,” says Fish (a nickname he picked up because he, much like Yes’s Chris Squire, spent a lot of time in the bath). “I mean, Pointer was into Rush and . . . Neil Peart, Steve was into the Genesis/Hackett/Camel thing, and . . . the one name that was prevalent was Genesis. Well, Genesis and Floyd. I think having a guitarist like Steve Rothery, we were always on the kind of Genesis line. Steve and I, more than anybody else, kind of guided it in the early days. When Mark Kelly came on, he brought the kind of Yes synth stuff. But the energy from punk was there. And we weren’t the only ones: You had bands like Simple Minds. Jim Kerr and Charlie Burchill were huge Genesis fans, but they embraced more of the punk ethic in the early days.”

  “I grew up in a little fishing town near Whitby in North Yorkshire, England, and one of the big things there was an annual folk festival,” adds Rothery, who joined Silmarillion in 1979. “So I kind of absorbed some of that, I suppose, in my musical identity. A lot of what I do comes more from a traditional English folk background than blues or jazz or classical, for example. At the same time, I kind of loved Pink Floyd, Camel, King Crimson, Yes, Genesis, many of those early ’70s bands, because I found them incredibly fresh and exciting. When I discovered [them] in the mid-1970s, all of my friends went into punk rock, basically. They were rebelling by doing punk rock and I was rebelling by not getting into prog rock [laughs]. I think that is kind of where my development started, really.”

  Adding to the strange nature of the band, Fish used theatrical props and elaborate costumes to dramatize his stage performances of such songs as “Grendel” and “Forgotten Sons” (for which he’d wear ancient armor and army fatigues and/or a helmet, respectively) and applied multicolored greasepaint to his face. (Fish explained that when he was young he was a shy, chubby boy, and rather than be ridiculed as such, he turned into the class clown. Fittingly, when this harlequin grew up, he wore a greasepaint mask and, quite literally, on occasion a jester’s cape, to steel his stage resolve so he could brave the crowds. Fish’s use of war paint was as much a defense mechanism as homage to Peter Gabriel/Alice Cooper theatrics.

  “I think the thing that appealed to me about progressive rock was that it wasn’t in bed with fashion,” says Fish. “Even though I wore a kind of mask, I knew that you didn’t have to dress up in outrageous things to be prog rock.”

  Marillion began in earnest in the early 1980s, after the band dumped the “Sil” from its name and took onboard its flamboyant lead singer. Fish remembers the long and winding road leading up to his joining Marillion: “I was eighteen; I did what I wanted to do,” recalls Fish, a self-proclaimed college dropout who’s “never been good with authority.

  “When most of my friends were getting into [fixing] cars and knew the differences between various carburetors . . . and fog lights, I was getting into music,” Fish continues. “I was reading music magazines and buying albums.. . . But I needed a line of work. I was an axe man, and I don’t mean guitar. A friend of my father suggested forestry, so I got into it.... But it didn’t feel right. I was wearing the wrong shoes. I did other various jobs, and by 1980 I was singing in a band called Blewitt, that played in the Scottish Borders. We were doing covers of Average White Band, Steely Dan, Ry Cooder, Little Feat, and stuff like that. It was a whole different type of music [from Marillion]. It was good experience for me because I had never sung before. I really wanted to write progressive rock, yet the band didn’t have a keyboard player. Plus the guys were doing it more as a hobby. . . . I wanted something more than just playing pubs.”

  Fish bounced around from job to job, band to band, and auditioned for a band in the south of England, but “that didn’t work,” Fish says. “They were British heavy metal, and they didn’t think my voice was loud enough. I got pissed off by that and I came ba
ck and joined a band in Retford in mid-England, which featured my friend bassist Diz Minnitt. But that came to nothing. We wound up attempting to start another band, this time up in Cambridge. Couldn’t do it up there either. So, I went back to the Scottish Borders.”

  Fish and Diz were planning to buy a cottage and open a recording/rehearsal studio, but neither of these dreams materialized. “Then we found an advert in a music magazine, I believe Musicians Only, from a band looking for bassist/vocalist,” says Fish. “When we called Marillion, we basically bullshitted each other on the phone. They said they played all of these gigs and had T-shirts and merchandise or some bullshit and we said we knew Robert Plant. No one was being honest. They had only done four or five gigs or so. But we got the audition and I remember singing lines around the music I was given—[the] music was instrumental and very Camel-oriented. My first impression was that the guitar player was incredible.”