Maybe I'm a Leo*

The current re-acceptance/re-evaluation of the currency of progressive rock (or Prog) as a genre worthy of our renewed attention seems to have reached some kind of critical mass in the last couple of years. Magazines devoted to the subject; award ceremonies; endless deluxe reissues**; approval from indie bands who should know better; young bands with sixth form poetry names and Hipgnosis rip-off album covers; even Caribbean cruises, ferrchrissakes... I leave it to you to decide as to whether this is a good thing, but it cannot be denied that for anyone with more than a passing knowledge of the whitest popular music of the last fifty years there have been some fucking hilarious reminders of why, way back in its heyday, it came to be regarded as something of a joke.

One of the undeniable joys of life is watching This Is Spinal Tap, but I worry that a generation introduced to its pleasures these days may think that the antics of the Tap are some kind of extreme cartoon comedy version of the life of a band on the road in the '70s, and may not realise how close to reality the events depicted are. Rob Reiner's 'rockumentary' succeeded so well on its first release because just about everything that happens to the band is ridiculously close to the preposterous self-importance with which the music business took itself all those decades ago. This affectionate (and it is as affectionate as much as it is thorough) document is drawn from so many actual events that it's impossible to list them here, but as one example I draw your attention to this ELP documentary: The Manticore Special - a 1973 TV documentary which features several segments which Reiner et al HAD to have seen when preparing Spinal Tap. Carl Palmer's petulance regarding the quality of his hotel pillows is quite obviously the template for Nigel Tufnel's dressing room pre-show tantrum regarding the food on the rider. You're just waiting for him to say 'I've got this, and I don't want this'.



Anyway: this is digression. The reason I bring all this up is because I came across another splendid reminder of the high seriousness with which bands marketed themselves in the mid-'70s (just prior to the commercial reckoning/come-uppance that could only result from such hubris).

Another recent release in the seeming production line recontextualising of music from the era: Steven Wilson's remix of Yes' 1975 album, Relayer, is announced via the band's official website on a page that contains the tour programme that supported the promotion of the album. And it makes for superbly funny reading.

The tour programme begins with a reasonable biography of the band up until that point: from their beginnings as a post-psych bunch of ambitious chancers raised on Beatlesque consciousness-expansion and Simon and Garfunkel (a duo who seem to have been airbrushed from history with regards to their monumental influence on all popular music at the close of the '60s) to their then-zenith as stadium-stuffers.

It's at this point that the chuckles begin. A member-by-member bio consisting of a questionnaire-style series of answers to things such as 'musical influences', 'instruments played' etc. all seem fairly straight forward (and it's worth remembering that this was the standard format for most bands' tour programmes at the time - I have a very similar one somewhere in which Be Bop Deluxe answer very similar questions). But closer inspection reveals the level of contradiction and sheer nonsense that surrounded what was mainly a bunch of superannuated, self-taught 'musicians' (apart from Patrick Moraz: it seems that it was always the keyboards which demanded a more rigorous educational standard. No wonder they're always the snooty ones).

Starting with 'Maestro' Jon Anderson (as Bill Bruford once referred to him), we see a fairly unpretentious set of facts. A Scorpio from Accrington, this northern soul regards his influences as 'anything good and moving.' Fair enough, but then take a look at his 'Most influential LP's' (the apostrophe is theirs) - it's the usual bunch: Beatles; Simon and Garfunkel, Mahavishnu Orchestra (Relayer, of course, being the most jazz rock of all the band's albums) etc. until right at the end there's a nod to the obligatory classical stuff. To whit: '... and any of Sibelius, Stravinsky, Mozart, Ilhan Mimaroglu'

Woah... hold on there, Ilhan Mimaroglu?!?  Turkish avant garde electronica? Well, he was a house producer for Atlantic records at the time...

To continue; guitarist, Steve Howe, is also self-taught (and an Aries), his songwriting influences are 'personal experiences'. Deep stuff. But as I say, it's the details which draw you in. One of his favourite 'songwriters' is John Dowland (1563-1626) (note the need to include the DATES), after which he lists not only Verdi's Four Seasons as his favourite album, but notes the CATALOGUE NUMBER. 

Chris Squire, appropriately for someone nicknamed 'The Fish' is a Pisces, and to be fair doesn't seem to be too up himself (which is possibly ironic as he's the most upper middle class of the lot). Meanwhile Gemini drummer, Alan White is doing ok until you find out that his 'Songwriting inspiration' is 'The World' and his 'Most influential LP' 'The big disc in the sky.' Good grief...

As if the astrological guff (which, of course, reappear in Spinal Tap in the form of David St Hubbins' girlfriend, Janine) and sense of self-importance conveyed here weren't enough, we then (after a run-down of the stage crew) get treated to an 'essay' by friend of the band, Donald Lemkuhl entitled (and I wish I was making this up): When life speaks, its voice is music. Listen.

Lemkuhl was also a pal of the band's in-house designer at the time, Roger Dean (who along with his brother Martyn, designed the stage sets for this tour and which gets parodied, again in Spinal Tap, as the 'pods' in which bassist, Derek Smalls, gets trapped). He specialised in this kind of airy-fairy cosmic-speak, writing not only the the introduction to Dean's own first book, Views, but also 'composing' the poem which appeared on Relayer's cover as well as on the promotional advert. Another fine example of those far-off moments when ambition outstripped self-awareness. 

Lemkuhl's prose in the tour program featured here features gems such as:

'It is the voice life in you. All music is your music. All music creates you and re-creates you. And you create music. Through music, you are creator and created in One.'

Later he concludes: 'You are more than human when you let the music become you. Listen. You are in tune with space. You become the music when the music plays.

So, listen. The air is full of music. You hear the music, now, for you are the music. And the music is you.'

Thanks, Donald. No really, thanks.

So, kids, your parents or elderly relatives may at some point insist that you watch Spinal Tap, and you may come away wondering why such a silly film is in any way important. 

Remember: it's not a comedy, it's a LESSON. We can only avoid this kind of thing by learning our history.

Don't say I didn't warn you...

*I'm a Virgo btw

**At some point I may get around to writing a serious piece on why I decry these endless 5.1/Blu-ray blah blah remixes. In short: I see no point in essentially reinventing (and radically re-imagining) their basic structure of works which, for their time, were noted as 'state of the art' productions - meaning that anyone discovering them for the first time now will hear something which really bears no relation to the original music as exoperienced by the audience back then. It seems a bit like reading a Dicken novel in 2014, re-written by J K Rowling.

Nous Sommes Du Soleil: Drowning in the Topographic Ocean

About six months ago I wrote an introduction to what was going to be a book on Yes' greatest folly (if you discount anything they did after about 1978): Tales From Topographic Oceans: an album that to this day divides most of western civilization. The introduction was part of a pitch for the prestigious 33 1/3 series on notable albums.

The idiots rejected the proposal for what would undoubtedly have been a keystone of any cultural history of the second half of the 20th century (maybe). But being the caring and sharing sort, I thought I'd reversion the piece for public consumption. So here's my initial thoughts on Tales... Enjoy!

Tales From Topographic Oceans: An introduction


‘I know when I started I would have been happy to sound like the Beatles or Joe Tex or whoever. You want to sound like most bands, you want to sound like their records and that's how you learn your chops.’ - Jon Anderson

1973 was a turning point; not only in the history and development of what was known as ‘progressive rock’, but in popular music in its entirety. This was a world where glam was already fading fast, 60s veterans were either in disarray, dead or becoming bloated with their own legendary status and disco and punk lurked around the corner. It was a world where some mythical ideal of ability seemed to have replaced the normal value system of teen thrills, danceability or as an accompaniment to love’s first fumblings. In short, prog was briefly KING.

This was (thankfully) not to last. From its first stirrings in the loftier ideals of late psychedelic groups such as Procol Harum and The Moody Blues, to the knotty and often impenetrable work of its main proponents, this was always a sub set of popular music that had its card marked. And Tales From Topographic Oceans is remarkable, not for its content or artistic value, but as a representative of the point where hubris outstripped ability, and ridicule was waiting in the wings.

The story of Tales From Topographic Oceans is the story of how the ideals of the young northern author of the quote above became so unrecognisably warped as to give us a double album with a mere four songs, each one clocking up a concentration-sapping 20 plus minutes.

Like their equally serious peers and contemporaries, Yes were a band with easily identifiable roots in the beat boom, in love with the Beatles, Motown and the 5th Dimension. Their earlier works had displayed a snappier dynamic, albeit one increasingly stretched and complicated until, with their previous opus (and they would have loved to think of it as such), Close To The Edge, they’d reduced the ‘album’ form to three songs. One a whole side’s worth. The next step HAD to be bigger, weightier and ‘difficult’. Tales… delivered this in spades.

I can merely attempt to contextualise Tales… within the zeitgeist from which it sprang as well as the worldview of a wide-eyed 13-year old who unwrapped a copy of this album on Christmas day of that year. Yes, I was a fan at an early and important stage of my musical life. My heroes (as odd as it may seem now) were both Yes AND David Bowie. And I spent a good deal of that afternoon (and weeks to come) musing over a piece of music based on the writings of an Eastern yogi.

Let’s examine that last statement. Should the inexperienced reader doubt size of the band’s ambition it’s always useful to refer to the very sleeve notes by Jon Anderson which possibly did most to sink the project before it had time to flourish in the eyes of a public waiting for the next revelation:

‘We were in Tokyo on tour, and I had a few minutes to myself in the hotel room before the evening's concert. Leafing through Paramhansa Yoganada's "Autiobiography Of A Yogi" I got caught up in the lengthy footnote on page 83. It described the four part shastric scriptures which cover all aspects of religion and social life as well as fields like medicine and music, art and architecture.’

So, no pressure there, then: Just a work that addresses ‘all aspects of religion and social life as well as fields like medicine and music, art and architecture’.

To be clear about this, Yes were, by no means, the first to try such things. Other bands had attempted to raise their game in this way many times before. The Moody Blues had made an orchestral album about an entire day (Days Of Future Passed) while side two of Procol Harum’s Shine On Brightly had contained a suite about life, death and reincarnation ('In Held ‘Twas In I'). And in the hipper corners of the contemporary music press the whole idea of ‘progressive rock’ and the concept album was already seen as somewhat passé. No real new ground was being broken here, but by the close of 1973, with the UK heading into recession this was perhaps not the time to be rolling out such high-minded stuff.

Tales… not only tipped the genre into ridicule but also simultaneously proved to ardent believers that their path towards greater dexterity, trickier (and longer) arrangements and weightier subject matters than young love was the true path. This may seem wrong-headed today, and the album may have turned away the hipper cognoscenti, but it still backed a hugely successful world tour and sold in healthy quantities.

The first question with Yes’ Tales… should not be why? But how? How did a record so weighed down by its own self-importance reach the shelves?

And as to whether it’s any good? Frankly that, dear reader, is entirely up to you. It’s safe to say that, for me, Tales… is both musically fascinating and wonderfully, fabulously silly. By its own creators’ admission (notably Rick Wakeman and Chris Squire, who were far less involved in its genesis than Jon Anderson and guitarist Steve Howe), Tales… is a step too far. It’s too lacking in the democratic methods of composition that the band had previously employed (which ironically had driven out former drummer Bill Bruford; exasperated by the painstakingly slow process of recording) and has, in several major sections, a tendency to wander and procrastinate: almost another candidate for George Martin’s famous observation about the Beatles' White Album: it would have made a great single album.

But there’s far more to be extrapolated from this record. Tales… becomes a perfect starting point for unwrapping the whole wonderfully silly and simultaneously majestic story of ‘rock’. The Tales… do indeed tell a tale. To fully understand the very existence of such a thing is to understand a cultural knot so dense and indigestible that it’s become a byword for the worst excesses of the time: not drugs, not groupies but SHOWING OFF.

To modern ears (and eyes… ouch, those clothes) prog has become synonymous with egotism and a wilful desire to drive away musical tourists. Snobbism in 12’’ form. Only to a minority does the term still hold artistic credibility, making it one more ghettoised genre with its own uniform and codes of conduct. But another look at that quote above gives a lie to that fallacy. In 1973 prog wasn’t elitist, it was actually thought of as a bold way of ‘developing’ our musical evolution. And these bands sold out wherever they played.

Everything about Tales… can teach us about how the business of making music worked at that point in time, from the choice of studio and the amount of time spent working on the album’s creation to the design of the sleeve and the famously elaborate supporting tour’s stage design (both by prog’s in-house designer of choice, Roger Dean): it is at once terrible and still makes one breezily nostalgic for more innocent times.

In short: there’s an argument that any study of Tales… will tell you all you need to know not only about the state of popular music in 1973 but also how, a mere four years later, that landscape had changed so drastically. Yes, King Crimson, Genesis: all of these bands still had something to give, despite the oft-repeated slur of being branded dinosaurs by their younger siblings. But for anyone who still wonders where it all went wrong (and, more importantly, why if you mention progressive rock people have a tendency to snigger at you), the year 1973 holds the key.