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The prehistory of progressive rock: Generosity and synthesis

Above all, rock music is two things: it is synthetic, and it is generous. Taken together, these elements ensure that, at least in some significant sense, there always has been a progressive trend in rock music. One can only hope that the ongoing corporate commodification of everything will not lead to a day when the possibility of a progressive trend no longer exists. This more ominous thought properly belongs to the final chapter of this investigation, however: here, let’s focus on a much happier subject, the way that rock music became the first truly global music of immense possibility.

My aim in this chapter is to present a somewhat potted history of rock music—or, at least, a series of reflections upon that history—from the standpoint of progressive rock. Admittedly, this is something of a perverse project in that we will be pretending that progressive rock was the destination of rock music from its origins. The reality is otherwise, of course: rock music is a very big tree, with many diverse branches. (It is significant, though, how often the branches—or at least twigs here and there—intertwine. This can be seen most graphically in Pete Frame’s rock family trees.) I’m not of the opinion that progressive rock, or even what I would more broadly call “experimental rock,” is the only musically valid branch of the tree. An analogy might be made to Western classical music. Was it a valid creative approach for composers such as Leonard Bernstein or Benjamin Britten to write works more in the mainstream of the classical style, when avant-garde composers such as John Cage or Elliot Carter were working far outside of the classical forms? Closer to home, was it valid for artists more in the mainstream of rock music to continue to create songs grounded in blues progressions when the Beatles, and especially Sergeant Pepper’s, had opened up fundamentally new territory?

This is perhaps a weird way to broach the subject of musical avant-gardes, since the legitimacy of radical innovators is what has most often been called into question—even more so in rock music than in jazz and classical music. It seems that the prevalent point of view has been that rock is not supposed to become avant-garde. My standard response to this now well-established dogma is, “Blame it on the Beatles.” But what I hope to show here is that, in fact, the roots of progressive rock are intertwined with the roots of rock music more generally.

When I claim that “generosity” is one of the fundamental elements of rock music, one of the things I mean is this: “rock music” is an exceedingly large category, under which many, many kinds of music can flourish. However, we might identify two kinds of rock music that do not always get along so well. The first might be called the “real rock ’n’ roll” camp, which is mainly defined by statements about what is not (or what ain’t) “real” rock ’n’ roll. There is also the camp of simply rock ’n’ roll, which is more able to define itself by what it likes as opposed to what it is willing to excommunicate—the point being that “rock music” is now the broader category, which includes rock ’n’ roll. The “real rock ’n’ roll” camp is dismissive of anything that departs from basic blues-chord structure or beat, so I sometimes call this camp the “blues orthodoxy.”¹ The music that especially departs from this orthodoxy is, of course, progressive rock.

Generosity in rock music also refers not only to the breadth of the form, but also its tendency to be ever open, ever growing, and ever willing to engage in experiments with redefinition. The irony is that, especially as regards the critical establishment around rock music, blues orthodoxy has been the dominant trend since the late seventies, even while this trend is, demonstrably, the least generous. Or, at least, it seems that the blues orthodoxy has come down heaviest on progressive rock, because the latter has taken rock music where it is presumably not supposed to go.

Perhaps rock music tends to be generous in whatever present it finds itself because it was synthetic in its origins. Rock music represents a flowing together of diverse music cultures: most especially musics of the African American experience, from Black church music to blues, jazz, and rhythm-and-blues, but also elements of country music, folk music, and the tradition of American popular song associated with such figures as Cole Porter and the Gershwin brothers. Arguably, rock music provided the first forum for what has more lately been called “multiculturalism.” Perhaps we would find, upon further study, that those who today warn us of the dangers of the latter were yesterday those who warned us about the former. Indeed, there was never a time when the social and the musical experimentation of rock music was not intertwined, as both the music and its larger culture presented the sedate, post-war, 1950s “era of good feeling” with its first truly dangerous example of “race mixing.” Today it may be the fashion in Lubbock, Texas, to pretend as though dear, departed Buddy Holly has always been the local hero, but in his day all he heard was condemnation from the older white generation for playing “nigger music.” Meanwhile, when Buddy and the Crickets showed up to play the Apollo Theater in Harlem, they turned out to be a good deal more pale of complexion than expected.

At the same time, class and gender also asserted themselves as central issues. This new music was made, for the most part, by both Blacks and whites who were from the wrong side of the tracks. Indeed, one of the frightening things about the music, from an establishment point of view, was that it had the potential to transcend racial barriers and prejudices by showing poor whites and poor Blacks that they had a great deal in common. In the United States, of course, there is not and never has been a question of class that can be isolated in a pristine way from the legacy of slavery, anti-Black oppression, and racism.² (Similarly, in England, there is no pure question of class that can be completely separated from English imperialism, colonialism, and the ideology of “rule Britainnia.”)³ However, the fact that the kids were dancing together and digging some of the same music—what was, significantly, originally called “race music”—was a good start; could the specter of “miscegenation” be far behind?

Here, too, the question of gender—and the more recently named question of “sexuality”—is already intertwined with race and class. Even as the cultural, political, and economic establishments hoped for a “well-ordered” and “smoothly functioning” society, where ideology had come to an end and the appropriate roles and behaviors for well-adjusted individuals at all levels of the social hierarchy seemed rock solid, there began a kind of groundswell on the cultural front, a rebellion against the little boxes all made of ticky-tacky.

What brought these diverse musical and cultural elements together and allowed them to congeal into something called “rock music”? Arguably, the musical streams that flowed into the music could not have given rise to a new musical form without one key element: electricity. Rock music is the first music to be entirely formed in the age of electricity. It is also, therefore, the first music to emerge in the time of the maturing of the mass media—and to some extent as an expression of mass media. This is perhaps what most of all links rock music with other artistic genres that are not even possible without mass media, especially film and video. Indeed, in recent years it seems that rock music—and “popular music” (a term that will require further interrogation) more generally—has been increasingly absorbed into the Hollywood/Los Angeles entertainment machine, with the movie business at the heart of this complex.

Therefore the question has to be asked: Does the corporate serpent wend its way over all forms of rock music, including progressive rock? Taking the “nontechnological” elements that went into rock music, there is a solid core of rebellion. But make these elements dependent upon electricity (and advanced technology more generally), and it appears that there is always a ready recipe for cooptation. In the case of the industry-promoted “rebels,” such as Madonna, Bruce Springsteen, or Prince (or some of the younger generation, for example the “angry” or “bitter” music of an Alanis Morrisette), antiestablishment postures cannot help but be somewhat contrived, even while certain social conventions seem to be contravened. For sure, the “rebellious” aspect of certain rock superstars is simply posture. Yet, I am not convinced that this is entirely the case with any of the first three artists—or “artists formerly known as”—whom I named; there I think the motives are more of a mixed bag, that there are some honest motivations mixed in with an attempt to negotiate a very difficult cultural and economic arena. The point remains, however, that there is something problematic about saying that some rock music has “sold out” or “gone commercial,” when the connection with commercial imperatives is so built into the emergence and development of the very form.

Without being reductivistic or deterministic about it, there remains a great deal to be said for the claim that every form of culture bears a significant relationship to the social formation in which it arises, and to the mode of production that is at the heart of any given formation. Rock music could not have existed in the time before advanced industrial economy and global social relations. These relations are unequal and for the most part predatory, even though they are also part of a single, global, competitive mode of production—the stage of capitalism that Lenin called imperialism. One hundred or more years into this development, we now have systems of media that are productive of consciousness on a level unimagined in previous centuries. It might be said that imperialism plus MTV/CNN/etc. equals “postmodern capitalism.” Rock music, then, is the form of music that has arisen in this time and against this background.

Furthermore, and to reiterate, rock music is unthinkable without electric amplification, electronic sound modification, and advanced recording technology. The electric guitar (and perhaps in a lesser, though also related, way, the electric bass guitar) is at the center of rock music. “Acoustic” sounds in rock music play the role of “relief” or dynamic contrast, and, for the most part, are not really acoustic anyway (as anyone who has watched an edition of “MTV Unplugged” can see). Theodore Gracyk, in Rhythm and Noise: An Aesthetics of Rock, goes so far as to argue that rock music is so thoroughly mediated by technology that, in fact, its technology is its art. In his book on English progressive rock, Edward Macan identifies sampling technology as one of the innovations that led to the downfall of progressive rock—if a person can, by pushing a button (or a single key on a keyboard), activate a sample and thereby play a passage that even the most brilliant virtuoso could not play, this would seem to make a rather large dent in the attractions of virtuoso rock music (see p. 191). I’m pretty sure that Gracyk has little use for progressive rock anyway, so Macan’s argument would, from Gracyk’s perspective, provide a fitting capstone to his overall argument—that, with rock music, technology is what it’s really all about.

But let’s back up a minute. Gracyk’s arguments concerning the way that technology, especially recording technology, affects rock music, right down to its very “ontology” (as he puts it), are insightful, but wouldn’t this argument have to have as its destination a music that is mainly produced with, as Beck Hansen says, “two turntables and a microphone”? In thinking about this, perhaps I am starting to have some sympathy for the “real rock ’n’ roll” types who, among other things, are skeptical of progressive rock for its displacement of the electric guitar from center stage (an issue that I will return to). One doesn’t have to be a Luddite or to think there is no room in rock music for some of the new technical innovations, such as sampling or MIDI (or, earlier, electronic keyboards and synthesizers), to think that there’s a problem when the music, increasingly, is no longer being played by people whom you would ordinarily call “musicians” (though talented technicians they may be).⁴ Perhaps I am simply expressing a prejudice of the pre-postmodern sensibility however. As Fredric Jameson argues, the thing that allowed for the cult of the “modern artist” (the great genius who could aspire to be the “world’s greatest painter”—“a Picasso” or some such) was the charm of the fact that, in an age of mass production, the artist practiced an older, perhaps even outmoded, craft (see Postmodernism, pp. 305–311).

This is not simply a prejudice, however; it is a considered worry concerning what might happen when, even in the realm of music, people become “mere appendages of the machine” (as Marx put it). In terms of rock music’s deal with the technological devil, however, one might say, “in for a dime, in for a dollar.” When it comes to understanding society and culture in the large, there is a great deal to be said for a structural approach:⁵ social structures (which include, as Freud demonstrated, structures of the mind) shape what people, whatever their intentions, will be able to do. Social structures set the terms for human intentions and achievements. (This is not to imply that these terms are set univocally or through an absolute determinism.) The originators of rock music—at least, the musicians, as opposed to the technicians and the record company people—brought a sense of rebellion on many levels. But perhaps the commercial and technological terms of global, imperialist, and even postmodern capitalism meant that, despite this intention, what they would create instead was just a new form of distraction, always already coopted by the entertainment industry. After all, these new rock musicians already had at least a few toes in this door (and some jumped in with both feet).

In recent years, it has become especially easy to reach the same conclusions concerning “popular” music that Theodor Adorno reached in the immediate postwar period, namely that this kind of music is simply a product of an emerging “culture industry,” a product designed to distract people from the real conditions of life in global capitalist society. This is music as palliative, salve, drug, distraction, and mere amusement. To the extent that there seems to be a “rebellious element” in this music, it may be that it is no more than what Paul Piccone, extending Adorno’s analysis, called “false negativity.” Piccone’s argument is that the culture industry, as well as the larger capitalist society of which it is a part, actually needs some elements that appear to be rebellious or not simply affirmative of the status quo, for two reasons. First, there has to be some form of entertainment for those who have some inkling that something might be wrong with the way things are. The idea is to channel this feeling into a purely existential realm—such as listening to your records by yourself or with a few similarly alienated friends, thereby, at most, only becoming part of a “taste public” that never gets beyond the minimal social consciousness of there being a few others out there who like some of the same things. Second, the system itself needs to allow some creativity at the margins, in order to regenerate itself—given that it mainly depends on dull, administrative apparatuses (whether these be bureaucracies of the state or corporations) composed of “well-adjusted” individuals who are not supposed to think in any critical or creative way. The system itself needs a new idea from time to time, so it allows a little “free” or “wild” space, though this is carefully controlled and also carefully channeled.

We should note that, for Adorno, most Western classical music is in the same fix—it also tends to be “affirmative,” in the sense of affirming the way things already are. But rock music, especially, is so rigged in advance to be affirmative in this way that Adorno does not see any way out. Now, in Adorno’s scheme, there are only two kinds of music, really: Western classical music, which is compromised most of the time, and “popular music,” which seems fundamentally compromised. There is by now, as the reader might imagine, a great deal of literature dissecting Adorno’s views on this subject.⁶ My aim here, however, is not to rehearse every one of these issues, but instead to show that the possibility of rock music being something truly important—as opposed to simply being something like the music of our adolescence, whenever that was—does face some real difficulties. And these difficulties do not just come from Adorno, for whom there are at least three shortcomings in his approach to the questions that are relevant here.

First, Adorno undoubtedly was simply too “European,” too steeped in the idea of “high culture,” to have appreciated any music outside of the Western classical canon. In other words, he had a human failing and prejudice here; part of his reaction to jazz, blues, and rock music was merely visceral, and it is unfortunate that he elevated this reaction to the level of a system.

Second, the category of “popular” music is too sweeping, especially when it comes to the role played by the culture industry. Here is where there remains a fundamental difference between the Hollywood film industry, which is at the core of the culture industry, and the making of music: to be a part of the former, one has to move in very big money circles and through a system of “connections” (this is just the tip of the iceberg); to make music, on the other hand, it is still possible to “find yourself an electric guitar, and take some time, and learn how to play.” Undoubtedly, at the “star performer” level, the interconnections between music and the Hollywood core become more concentrated, and this has certainly been driven even further in recent years by the formation of massive entertainment conglomerates and distribution networks. Still, despite the fact that the distinction cannot be made hard and fast, and despite the way that monopoly capital in the entertainment industry continues to erode the distinction, we might all the same make a distinction between “mass culture” and “popular culture.” “Mass culture” has its point of origin and initiation in the culture industry itself—the Hollywood film would be the prime example. “Popular culture” at least begins somewhere closer to the streets—-rap and hip-hop would be examples, but so would early rock and roll. (More on this in a moment.)

Third, and relatedly, Adorno seemingly had blinders on when it came to actual outbreaks of protest and rebellion, and he didn’t see the possibility of experimental music linking up with a real assault on the existing system. Therefore, the idea of a “popular avant-garde” would never have occurred to him.

Again, most of these arguments (and many more) have been made by others—but not this last argument. Allow me to reconnect with my opening claim, from the introduction to this book: this brief, shining moment, where there was the possibility, completely unprecedented, of a “popular avant-garde,” simply came and went so quickly, and with so many forces arrayed against it, that we simply have not taken stock of its significance to this day.

There is an interesting dynamic that shapes this failure to see this particular possibility. I agree with Adorno that there are many factors that make it very, very unlikely that expressions of rock music will transcend what seem to be basic limitations and compromises. In fairness to Adorno, and against some of his interpreters, he never argues that this transcendence is simply impossible. But there is a larger historical issue. Every kind of music emerges and develops against the background of a larger history, society, and culture, and every music stands in some relation (“affirmative,” “negative,” or, more likely, some very complex mixture of these attitudes) to these things. With the development of capitalism into imperialist and postmodern forms, however, the argument might be made that the “background” assumes an especially resilient character, and that those genres of art (for example, rock music) that are especially tied in with the economic and technological structures of this very background face tremendous and unprecedented difficulties when it comes to inspiring critical consciousness. When I said, earlier, that in more recent years it has become even easier to agree with Adorno, I assume the reader knows the sort of thing I have in mind: the contemporary prevalence of rock artists and “music” that, from the veritable get-go, are thoroughly shaped by commercial imperatives, where the making of music is fundamentally a corporate process, where there are no real musical decisions but instead business decisions, and where the planned outcome is marketable and interchangeable product.

Anyone who cares about the possibility of important music has already thought and worried about this state of things endlessly, so I won’t go a great deal further into the issue here. What I want to highlight, instead, is the fact that the mainstream of rock music “criticism” is complicit in this affair by its disavowal of the episode of progressive rock. So, by way of reconnecting with the more specifically musical developments in rock music, I want to argue that, whereas it is admittedly a one-sided approach to the history of rock music to understand it as precursor to progressive rock, the cancellation of the period of progressive rock is also an assault on the idea of rock music having any greater significance than as simply entertainment for adolescents (or preadolescents or those remembering adolescence). In other words, progressive rock presents a challenge, but this is a challenge implicit in the history of rock music up through the late sixties. In order to show the possibilities that progressive rock music (or any other rock music during or after the time of progressive rock) might have for either a radical negativity or a radically utopian stance, it is necessary to show that the form (rock music) has always carried within it the seeds of these capacities and that these seeds have not been snuffed out by the overwhelming force of the culture industry and postmodern capitalism.

At the origins of rock music we find a minimal adherence to song form, distilled through a lot of energy, banging, and noise. Rock music has roots in folk and country music, but especially in rhythm and blues. This latter itself has roots in jazz, gospel, blues, the tradition of American popular song that we associate with such greats as Cole Porter, the Gershwin brothers, and Tin Pan Alley, and, of course, more generally in that untotalizable wellspring known as the African American Experience. It is not inappropriate to see a single individual, namely Ray Charles, as the “midwife” of rock and roll. Charles especially forms a link between jazz and rock, in the form of rhythm and blues. When one thinks of his piano style, both energetic and yet tightly controlled, then one also sees the influence of honky-tonk and boogie-woogie music in the process by which a new synthesis emerged. (Of the progressive musicians, Keith Emerson is almost alone in occasionally putting this style in the forefront of the mix.) Another tendril reaches out to ragtime music. Another key transitional figure was Louis Jordan, singer and alto saxophonist whose use of horns along with a raw, rocking sound formed a transition between swing-era big-band music and rock.

What’s most interesting, then, is the way that this complex set of ingredients led to, at first, what seemed to be a rather simple style. Put this way, however, perhaps we should acknowledge that early rock was not as simple and straightforward as it first appeared to be. My own preference, in terms of the early rockers, is for a well-known triumvirate, namely Chuck Berry (b. 1926), Little Richard (b. 1932), and Jerry Lee Lewis (b. 1939). It boggles the mind to think that Chuck Berry, the oldest of the three, is now over seventy years old! This triumvirate represents an interesting mix: two black, one white—specifically “white trash”; one from the industrial north (well, St. Louis at any rate), the other two from the Deep South. At least two of them had serious church backgrounds, and have spent parts of their lives on fire with religion. All three have had skirmishes with the law, on and off. All three represent the synthesis of simplicity and complexity, on musical as well as more general social or cultural levels, that made for early rock. Indeed, and not to run this word into the ground, what gives their music such power is the way that it distills complex musical and social experience into a very direct and raw form.

The best music of each is entirely expressible with just three instruments: either piano or electric guitar, and a rhythm section of bass and drums. And perhaps another key moment occurred when the piano was displaced from center stage by the electric guitar—“Move over rover, let Jimi take over!” Although it is difficult to displace talents with the intensity of Little Richard or Jerry Lee Lewis (“they don’t call me ‘the killer’ for nothin’”), in a sense the transition from piano to electric guitar is emblematic of a larger cultural shift. With the electric guitar at its core, rock music consolidated itself as just as much African as European, but also just as much American as African (I can’t help but recall that Lenin saw “American electrification” as one of the elements of the future society). The synthesis that emerged is part of what country-rocker Webb Wilder insightfully called “Afro-Celtic” culture. The formulation needs both expansion and narrowing. On the one hand, what Wilder is after is the synthesis of the storytelling traditions and tunefulness of the British Isles (England, Ireland, Scotland, Wales) with the story-telling traditions and rhythms of African and African American peoples. On the other hand, the influence of the Isles has been rewoven and distilled by its transplantation to a particular swath of the American South, namely Appalachia. So, perhaps we should speak of both rock music and many other distinctively American contributions to culture as having its basis in “Afro-Appalachian” culture. It turns out that what emerged from this cultural cauldron has been remarkably and improbably generous and synthetic—out of this mixture has emerged the first true “world music.”

In rock music from Chuck Berry to now, from roots rock to world music, the bass and drums have provided an anchor. In much rock music, this occurs in a somewhat formulaic way: the bass is there to “lay down the bottom,” while the drums are there to “keep the beat.” Perhaps another way of coming at this is that rock music begins as dance music. “If its got a backbeat you can’t lose it”; but what if it doesn’t have a backbeat? Not to get too far ahead of ourselves, we can still take this moment to mark out three distinct differences between rock and roll and progressive rock; setting these differences out will help us see the developments that unfolded between the fifties and the late sixties. First, in progressive rock, the bass and drums are often not playing the traditional roles. In particular, progressive rock is generally not “dance music,” and the “rhythm section” is often just as much in the forefront as any of the other instruments. Second, the electric guitar is no longer at the center of things; it continues to play an important role (except, of course, in those bands that do not use the instrument), but this is in a situation of relative parity with keyboards, wind instruments, violins, and what have you—including the occasional sackbut or crumhorn (Gryphon) or space whisper (Gong)—as well as acoustic steel-string and classical guitars. Third, there is a shifting of the cultural balance back toward Europe, as well as an expansion outwards toward Asia and (to a lesser extent until more recent years) Latin America. At any rate, it can certainly be argued that progressive rock is less “Black” than most of the rest of rock music (with the possible exception of heavy metal).

Whether this necessarily makes it more “white,” however, is a question I will leave for further exploration. What I will insist on, regardless of the answer to this question, is that the development of rock music up through progressive rock, and not merely around it, is what gives us the rich possibilities of rock music today. (Leave aside, for the moment, the commercial and technological forces that presently stand in the way of these possibilities.) In the fifties, composer and educator Gunther Schuller (president for many years of the New England Conservatory of Music) theorized the possibility of “Third Stream” music, which he saw as emanating especially from a synthesis of European classical music and jazz. In some sense, this Third Stream was already fully present in works such as George Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue, Scott Joplin’s opera Treemonisha, and Duke Ellington’s various “suites” and other large-scale, symphonic works (e.g., Black, Brown, and Beige from the 1943 Carnegie Hall Concert). As full-blown synthesis, however, I would argue that we do not see the real emergence of the Third Stream until the development of progressive rock—because it was at this point that rock emerged as the first true “world music.” And this is why, in more recent years, we have seen the development of the genre that is called by this name.

Indeed, if Third Stream music represents the synthesis of European harmony and counterpoint with non-Western rhythms, timbres, and tonalities, then perhaps experimental and progressive rock brings us to the “fourth stream” by incorporating the electric and electronic timbres and recording possibilities of the post-WWII period.

What might be the essence of, shall we say, “protoprogressive rock,” that is, the trend that led to the emergence of progressive rock in the late sixties? I would identify two elements in particular.

First, there is a continuation, or perhaps a continual restatement, of what might be considered to be the “underground” element in rock music. This might be contrasted to the “pop” element, even if both aspects are sometimes found in one and the same song. A very good example of this combination is Little Richard’s brilliant “Tutti-Frutti” (1956). Obviously there is a pop side to this song, which was isolated to sickeningly sweet perfection in Pat Boone’s lily-white version. In a “pop” world, our ears become accustomed to hearing only this bleached and starched aspect of the song, even when we are listening to Little Richard. Turn your head a little bit, however, and this song becomes quite weird and even a little scary. As with many of Little Richard’s creations (and indeed his whole persona),⁷ “Tutti-Frutti” drips with both the charismatic Black church (especially as a Southern institution) and a raw, polymorphous eroticism. My thinking on this question, incidentally, is rather at odds with Professor James F. Harris’s in Philosophy at 33 1/3 rpm. Harris uses “Tutti-Frutti,” and in particular the memorable “word,” “Awopbopaloobopalopbamboom,” as examples of a period in rock music when, “[f]or the most part, the lyrics were irrelevant.”

These memorable lines are memorable just because they are so completely insignificant. The lyrics are, at best, superficial and shallow, and, at worst, silly and meaningless. It is the beat which is important, and you can substitute almost any words or sounds for the original lyrics without losing very much. (pp. 3–4)

Harris is interested in the “themes of classic rock music,” as he puts it, mainly from the sixties. His notion of a “theme” has exclusively to do with the lyrics, whereas I am more interested in understanding the intermotivations of sounds and lyrics. With its manic religious eroticism, “Tutti-Frutti” may push the envelope of meaning, of “sense,” but this “nonsense” is hardly insignificant.

The most important thing is that Little Richard has chosen to speak a “secret language” here. In order to get a glimmer of the significance of this language, we have to place “Tutti-Frutti” in at least three overlapping contexts: those of race, sexuality, and spirituality. I will not presume, here, to give an ordering to the relative importance of each of these contexts; however, in each case there is something like a language of resistance at work. It perhaps goes without saying that a Black person who finds him- or herself in the midst of an “American century” where everything the least bit weird is suspect⁸ and where the attack on rock music is openly conducted as an attack on “race-mixing” (and where the specter of miscegenation is continually invoked), might be interested in speaking a language that is both unknown to the dominant white culture and in fact quite unsettling to it.⁹ Indeed, everything that still unsettles defenders of the King’s English (never mind for the moment that most of these defenders would be hard put to speak it themselves), that is, attackers of the various forms of Black English, is present in “Tutti-Frutti”—and not just in its “words,” but in its raucous tone and manic beat. In like fashion, the song conjures images of unchained, polymorphous sexuality. There is a fluid, to say nothing of completely queer, set of identities at work here, the sort of thing that drives those with a fascist and racist cast of mind completely nuts—this is what Judith Butler calls “gender trouble.” The “authoritarian personality” (as Adorno put it) demands stability of identity (and, if your identity is not stable, you’d better at least pretend that it is). The worst danger is that of “mongrelization,” the contaminating element that disrupts racial and sexual “hygiene” (the Nazi term). The suspicion is that “Tutti-Frutti” is rubbing mongrelization right in the faces of those who fear identity disruption—and getting some of the youngsters, white and Black, to dance along with it.

Perhaps it goes without saying that there is also a playful rebelliousness to lyrics that, to the extent that they can be recontextualized into “standard English,” seem to be saying that it is “all righty” (“all-a-rootie”) to be “all fruity.”

Finally, in a paradoxical twist, there is the obvious connection of “Tutti-Frutti” with the charismatic practice of glossolalia, also known as speaking in tongues. Although it would be stretching things a bit to see “Tutti-Frutti” as “sacred” music, it’s not entirely “secular” either—this is, in fact, another way in which the song trangresses boundaries that some would prefer to remain fixed. Especially with the signature “awopbopaloobopalopbamboom” (which is perhaps the antidote to “supercalifragilisticexpialadocious”—or is it the other way around?), there is clearly the sense of something “coming through” from some “other side,” something welling up from unknown depths.

The genius of the song is that all three of these secret languages are inextricably intertwined—and the underground code that is thereby generated is, I would argue, a thread that stretches from the early days of rock and roll to the time of progressive rock. “Tutti-Frutti” is not in the least superficial or shallow, but is instead an invitation to an intense engagement with love (and sex) and mortality. Certainly it is a feast for Freudian analysis and analysis in the terms of contemporary cultural theory—and the fact that the song is also fun to listen and dance to does not negate its significance in the least.

Perhaps, too, out of this complex intertwining, one can map two basic possibilities for rock music, one more “sensual” (or outright sexual), the other more “spiritual.” But even in the case where progressive rock (especially at its most “undanceable”—though I would argue that the critics who focus primarily on danceability simply lack imagination, as both critics and dancers) seems to go almost entirely in the latter direction, as perhaps most outstandingly in the music of Yes, there always remains the element of eros—of the embrace.

Little wonder that this underground, threatening movement has always been countered, at every step, with a “normalizing” movement—the queer Little Richard countered by Pat Boone and the famous (p)Elvis that ultimately shook itself into the U.S. Army and then Las Vegas.

The other key element of the protoprogressive trend—also connected to an underground sensibility as well as countered by “pop” normalizations—was the idea that the music should “go somewhere.” In other words, even in the beginnings of rock music, or before the beginning with Ray Charles and Louis Jordan, there was the idea that this music, which already transgressed boundaries of race, gender, and class, should also reflect new possibilities in its form.

Again the triumvirate of Chuck Berry, Little Richard, and Jerry Lee Lewis is important, but I especially want to highlight the innovations of Mr. Bo Diddley (Ellas McDaniel, b. 1928). Of the early synthesists of rock, Diddley was, in my view, the most visionary. This is true even when, as was often the case, his music was harmonically simple. Famously, Jerry Lee Lewis said of Diddley, “[i]f he ever gets outta the chord of E he might get dangerous.”¹⁰ (The context makes it clear that Lewis said this affectionately.) For that matter, Diddley is even better known for his chugging, “shave and a haircut” rhythm (think of the song, “Bo Diddley,” or “Who Do You Love?” or “Not Fade Away”). Obviously, the lines that one initially expects to extrapolate from Bo Diddley’s music seem to lead more directly to hip-hop than to progressive rock—just as Little Richard’s music and performance approach leads more directly to Prince or Michael Jackson. However, and this is important, both Little Richard and Bo Diddley influence this more recent music by way of the psychedelic blues that were an integral part of the milieu—especially in England—out of which progressive rock developed in the late sixties.

In any case, it is certainly true that Diddley built his innovations on the terra firma of roots rock—but, on top of these roots, Diddley had all sorts of interesting things going on, and the roots themselves seemed to run deeper, toward Africa via the Deep South (specifically, McComb, Mississippi) and New Orleans. If Jerry Lee Lewis and Little Richard came out of Southern charismatic churches where the religion is intensely physical, Diddley seemed to connect with something else, something, there as well, hidden in the charismatic Christianity of warmer climes (that Southern thing again)—something in the vicinity of the old religions of the Earth, something “pagan,” animistic, akin to voodoo, and haunting.

It is worth noting that the intertwining of Christianity and the old nature religions will also be found in progressive rock. Perhaps the most important examples are Yes’s Close to the Edge and Tales from Topographic Oceans (e.g., “a dew drop can exalt us like the music of the sun”).¹¹ Admittedly, the intertwining found in this music is probably rooted in more specifically European and British Isles forms of hermeticism, but the link of affinity still has significance. At the very least, it is a question of a “force” that “comes through” (spoken to again quite recently in Yes’s “That, That Is,” as well as in Robert Fripp’s notion that King Crimson forms when there is King Crimson music to be played). I think that every musician who hopes to “go somewhere” with the music understands this subterranean welling-up.

In Diddley’s case, the welling up is also a redemptive force, as his seemingly simple one-note or one-chord meditations also call to mind the field hollers of slaves and poor sharecroppers. Listening to Diddley’s music in preparation for this all-too-brief discussion of it, I was also struck by an interesting parallel. An omnipresent force in this music is the maraca playing of Jerome Green. The maraca is an instrument that goes back to Africa—it is basically a gourd filled with dried seeds or beans. There is something basically unpredictable in the use of maracas, something like a quantum effect at work—regardless of how much rhythmic sense the maraca player has, there’s a limit to how much control can be effected over the falling of those seeds. Not to head too far into the territory of theoretical physics, the point is that the maracas fit well into Diddley’s music because they represent the essence of that music—simplicity and steadiness combined with complexity and unpredictability. A parallel I am thinking of concerns the way that the great African (Nigerian) musician Fela Kuti always has the afuche (a gourd covered with strings of beads, which the player moves by hand over the surface of the gourd) at the center of his music. Fela has a rather large group (twelve or more instrumentalists, seven or eight singers, and seven or eight dancers), but the afuche is always in the front of the stage, in some sense leading the band—or perhaps serving as its soul. In either case—Diddley’s maracas or Fela’s afuche—there is an idea at work, and it is both simple and deep.

Incidentally, the maracas and the afuche are among those “simple” percussion instruments, like the tambourine, that everyone assumes they could easily play—but it ain’t necessarily so.

Diddley also expanded the sonic range on top, with the use of violin and often very angular guitar (visually represented by Diddley’s famous rectangular-shaped instruments, which also evoke another part of the Southern culture of poor people, namely the cigar-box fiddle).

It should be mentioned, too, that Diddley was probably the only early rocker to feature women instrumentalists in his groups (the best known of whom was a guitarist called “The Duchess”).

The underground and innovative (“going somewhere”) aspects of early rock music gave rise to a trend that was both developmental—“progressive”—and outside of the mainstream. Despite claims, from Theodore Gracyk and others (see, e.g., Gracyk, pp. 180–85, on the question of “selling out”), that most of rock music’s “rebelliousness” is just a pose for selling records, certainly there is a sense in which the more developmental and underground aspects of rock music (perhaps even quite apart from what specific musicians thought they were doing) were set against the mainstream. The interesting rock music, whether from the fifties, or the time of progressive rock, or today, is set against pop formulas and pop sensibilities. In some of the early rock music, such as that of Little Richard or Bo Diddley, there is an expansiveness that is both sonic and social. It is quite possible to trace the lines of development, from the early and middle fifties, to the late sixties, that led to quantum leaps in the sophistication of rock music.

Many groups and musicians played important roles in this developmental process, but none more than the Beach Boys and the Beatles. A slogan that I will appeal to more than once in the course of this book is the following: “If you don’t like progressive rock, blame it on the Beatles.” I only mention the one group in my slogan for sake of brevity and for shock value (hardly anyone wants not to like the Beatles), but the same blame could be laid at the foot of the Beach Boys. Consider the “danceability” question. I admit, for what it’s worth, that the issue of what happens to a music that is based in dance (or is originally meant to be primarily music for dancing to) when it is no longer danceable is a valid question. But, the fact is, the same reasons why much progressive rock is difficult to dance to apply just as much to “Good Vibrations” and “A Day in the Life” (where’s that backbeat?!).

On top of the firm foundation laid by Ray Charles, Chuck Berry, Little Richard, Jerry Lee Lewis, and Bo Diddley, the Beach Boys and the Beatles brought expansions in harmony, instrumentation (and therefore timbre), duration, rhythm, and the use of recording technology. Of these elements, the first and the last were the most important in clearing a pathway toward the development of progressive rock. Although this is an oversimplification, it might be said that progressive rock grew out of the combination of African rhythms and European harmonies that passed through the southeastern United States and then went out to the world as rock and roll. (This is the “Afro-Celtic” idea again, which has lately made a reappearance by way of hip-hop.) Certainly, by the time we reach the turning point represented by the Beach Boys’ Pet Sounds (1966) and the Beatles’ Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts’ Club Band (1967), it seems that Bo Diddley, Little Richard, Mississippi, New Orleans, and Africa are a long way away. Then again, when we trace the evolution of, say, Peter Gabriel, from Genesis to Secret World, it seems that things have come full circle—or perhaps “full spiral” would be a more apt description. (In the video of the Secret World concert, Gabriel closes with what to my mind is a fantastic song, “In Your Eyes.” As the song and concert come to the finale, most of the large group of musicians is dancing around the edge of the circular stage, a wonderful—and utopian—image of this spiral.)

Framed once again in these terms, the line that leads from the originators, through the Beach Boys and Beatles, and ultimately to progressive rock, is clear. Look somewhere in the middle of this line, to King Crimson’s Larks’ Tongues in Aspic or the third part of Yes’s Tales from Topographic Oceans (“The Ancient: Giants Under the Sun”) or the Mahavishnu Orchestra’s Inner Mounting Flame, and you find a solid core of adventurous rhythms, very much traceable to African music, and innovative harmonies, building on the tradition of nineteenth- and twentieth-century European classical music. A music historian might say, “So what? Isn’t this combination already in place with Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring?” Admittedly, there is a large component of Stravinsky in much of progressive rock—along with smaller doses of Debussy, Bartók, Sibelius, Orff, Messiaen, Cage, Stockhausen (and, though rarely, Schönberg and Webern)—but where the African European combination appears in Stravinsky as exoticism and dramatic juxtaposition (and even as colonialism and exploitation), in progressive rock there is an integration into a new kind of music. The Peter Gabriel example is apt, because the works by King Crimson, Yes, and the Mahavishnu Orchestra mentioned just now are already full-blown examples of “world music.”

This generous synthesis is already well along with the Beatles’ Rubber Soul (1965). This album represents a turning point in another regard: at this moment, for rock musicians who were pursuing the underground and developmental possibilities of the music, the album rather than the song became the basic unit of artistic production.

In discussions of progressive rock, the idea of the “concept album” is mentioned frequently. If this term refers to albums that have thematic unity and development throughout, then in reality there are probably fewer concept albums than one might at first think. Pet Sounds and Sergeant Pepper’s do not qualify according to this criterion; of the major albums of progressive rock that will be discussed in chapter 4, only a relative handful can truly be considered concept albums in the thematic sense. (One example is Thick as a Brick—though, as readers undoubtedly know, it’s more than a little difficult to figure out exactly what the “concept” is in this case.) However, if instead we stretch the definition a bit, to where the album is the concept, then it is clear that progressive rock is entirely a music of concept albums—and this flows rather directly out of Rubber Soul (December 1965) and then Revolver (1966), Pet Sounds, and Sergeant Pepper’s.

Without getting too ahead of our story, we might note at this point that, in the wake of these albums, many rock musicians took up the “complete album approach.” One magnificent example is Stevie Wonder’s trilogy: Talking Book (1972), Innervisions (1973), and Songs in the Key of Life (1976). (There are a few weak moments on the last of these, but then, there are a few weak moments on the White Album, too.) Another great example is War’s All Day Music (1971). These albums might belong to their own category: call it “progressive soul”—but, since they are coming out of rock music no less than Sergeant Pepper’s, why separate them from progressive rock? I will develop this question in the next chapter, but I want to make it clear at this point that the categories I will attempt to delineate are not meant as valorizations in and of themselves. Certainly the presence of these complete albums in the early and middle seventies demonstrates a very broad progressive approach that many rock musicians were taking up—these musicians were trying to say important things, working the terms of the culture in a critical way and with an adventurous musical style.¹² What I am going to call “progressive rock” was just one segment of this larger trend—though one that has been much undervalued since its heyday. Going a bit further, it might also be argued that progressive rock was the core of this trend; I offer as “exhibit A” in this case the fact that, after the time of progressive rock, the tendency was for “albums” to once again be simply loose collections of songs.

Significantly, what this shows us is that progressive rock represented a concentration and heightening of all the trends in rock music that were set against the merely “pop” sensibility: the underground and developmental aspects, the complete album approach, generosity and synthesis. After the time of progressive rock, the dynamic that extended from the originators, through the Beatles, and to the broad progressive trend, was broken. How that happened will be explored in the final chapter of this book; for present purposes, however, the fact of this break demonstrates, in retrospect, that there really is such a thing as the prehistory of progressive rock.

Let us turn now to an altogether too-quick look at the further steps that led to the emergence of “full-blown” progressive rock. It is useful to keep in mind that everything that will be discussed in these next few pages happened in the space of about two or three years. Because there is so much to say about these years, roughly from 1966 to 1969—or from Pet Sounds and Sergeant Pepper’s to In the Court of the Crimson King—I am in fact not going to say much at all. Indeed, it pains me to even mention, with almost nothing in way of thematic development, the next set of groups whose music will simply be used as a stepping stone. The point is simply to show, in broad terms, the creative milieu that made it possible for progressive rock to become the next logical step—even if this step also represented a qualitative leap. In concluding this chapter, let us set the stage for progressive rock; some of the themes introduced here will be developed extensively in the next chapter.

Insomuch as any attempt to expunge progressive rock from music history must ultimately come to terms with the later Beatles, let us remind ourselves of the many attempts on the part of other bands to make their own Sergeant Pepper’s. Among these albums found under the long shadow of the Sergeant we find such disparate works as the Grateful Dead’s Anthem of the Sun and Simon and Garfunkel’s Bookends (both 1968)—and, for that matter, In the Court of the Crimson King (1969), on which much more will be said in the chapters to come. Let’s take a moment to consider what might be thought of as the “dark side” of Sergeant Pepper’s, namely the Rolling Stone’s brilliant Their Satanic Majesties Request. If any album is a direct response to Sergeant Pepper’s, it is this one.

Significantly, Satanic Majesties so obviously belongs to the set of “transitions to progressive rock” that many hardcore Stones fans do not like the album at all. In fact, in Rock: The Rough Guide, a publication written by fans, Peter Shapiro writes:

Brian Jones was fascinated with Moroccan music and obsessed with keeping up with the Beatles, of which there is ample evidence on “Paint It Black.” This reached its peak with The Stones’ response to Sgt. Pepper, the appalling Their Satanic Majesties Request (1967) which trawled the depths of 60s drug culture with its awful sci-fi concept and misguided space music. (p. 738)

To this, allow me to say that I like the album very much; in fact, on most days I would rather listen to it than Sergeant Pepper’s, because of the darkness of it. I’m not myself a fan of the drug culture of any period; however, one gets the sense from this reviewer that the problem isn’t so much the drugs, but instead which drugs; that is, the sort of Stones fan who dislikes progressive rock (I’d like to think that one could appreciate both for what they are) most likely prefers that Mick, Keith, and company stay with the drunk or strung-out variety of mind-altering substances rather than the sort that gets you onto Trans-Love Airways (“gets you there on time”—Donovan) or some other “sci-fi” excursion.

Now we have two further elements for consideration, psychedelia and science fiction. Both play important roles in progressive rock, each especially in their more visionary and utopian aspects. Of the many songs that could be mentioned in this connection, two from the late sixties that especially capture the visionary-psychedelic mood are “Journey to the Center of the Mind,” by Ted Nugent and the Amboy Dukes, and “Crystal Blue Persuasion,” by Tommy James and the Shondells. Shortly thereafter we hear the even dreamier works of Hendrix, Cream, and then two groups that overlap significantly with progressive rock “proper,” the Moody Blues and Pink Floyd. In Rocking the Classics, Edward Macan especially sees psychedelic music’s tendency toward time dilation and warping—i.e., playing long, trippy jams—as important in the transition to progressive rock (see pp. 18–23). All of this music came out in a very brief period, so similarities here are one part influence and one part Zeitgeist. The relationship between psychedelic and progressive rock will be explored in greater detail in the next chapter.

The Jimi Hendrix Experience and Cream also represent an interesting recapitulation of the blues roots of rock music, combined with extension, vision, and virtuosity. One argument that I will make in the next chapter is that a key element of progressive rock is virtuoso musicianship. Many of the musicians in groups such as the Beach Boys and the Beatles are underrated. However, with the arrival of Jack Bruce, Ginger Baker, Eric Clapton, Jimi Hendrix, Mitch Mitchell, John Entwistle, Jimmy Page, and others on the scene, we have entered the time of really excellent musicians who happen to play rock.

Of course, one might also say that the stage was well set at this point for everything to go completely overboard—and that progressive rock is exactly what you get when extended demonstrations of rock musicianship are ratcheted up that final notch. Well, it’s true that progressive rock, to say nothing of Clapton or Hendrix, sometimes went overboard. The other much-used term that comes up in this context is “pretentious.” My argument will be that the best works of progressive rock (or Cream or Hendrix, for that matter) justify the risks or overextensions that were required—such risks are part of music that aims to develop.

We cannot leave the realm of the late-sixties rock adventure without touching on two more bands, namely The Who and Led Zeppelin. They are another pair who reach back to the roots of rock and forward to sonic and intellectual explorations. Led Zeppelin did not form until 1968—the same year that Yes formed, as every reader of Chris Welch’s liner notes from the first Yes album is reminded—and their career is contemporaneous with the time of progressive rock. In addition to psychedelia, the group brought an interest in magic and what has come to be called “fantasy.” For our purposes they are not a progressive rock group, but instead a progressive blues-rock group that hovers at the edge of progressive rock. This distinction may seem an exercise in hair-splitting. Another way to put it is that Led Zeppelin show the ultimate difficulty in framing definitions and categories, because, as we shall see, they do meet the criteria for what I will call progressive rock. And yet, my guess is that most readers, even if they like or love Led Zeppelin’s music (I like some of it), will recognize that they are somehow quite different from groups that we would more readily associate with progressive rock. Categories can break down, but this doesn’t mean that they aren’t useful; in fact, one way that categories can be useful is when we put them to the test and see somewhat precisely what their limitations are.

The Who is one of my all-time favorite groups. They are one of the groups that I feel especially pained to pass by so quickly.¹³ As a “pure” rock singer, there’s no one better than Roger Daltrey, at least in my humble opinion. Keith Moon’s drumming was simply unbelievable—in the sense that no one could figure out what he was doing (perhaps least of all him), and yet it seemed to work in a bizarre, orchestral way. John Entwistle is one of the best bass guitar players, period, and he has influenced many other bassists, including several, such as Chris Squire, who have played an integral role in progressive rock. And now, here’s a ridiculous comment: Pete Townshend is not a great guitar player. This is the singular and somewhat silly reason that I do not consider The Who to be a part of the progressive rock trend. Townshend is, of course, a good guitar player; more important, he is a visionary and brilliant composer of extended forms that are based in a very solid foundation of rock and roll. Townshend can do more with just a few chords than just about anyone. Among those albums that set the stage for the extended works of progressive rock, we have to include Tommy (1969)—even if, for one thing, its appearance is cotemporaneous with the first progressive rock albums, and, for another, Townshend himself would most likely be unhappy to think that he contributed to the emergence of progressive rock (this is a person who once referred to “the unspeakable horror that is Led Zeppelin”). Quadrophenia (1973) went even further—indeed, Dave Marsh, who is no friend of progressive rock, compared the album to the “art rock” efforts of Genesis and King Crimson (p. 493). Among my “rock intellectual” colleagues, the great Tommy versus Quadrophenia debate rages on!

Now, for a moment, let us take what might seem a strange turn. Four of the groups mentioned in the last few pages feature excellent bass guitarists, musicians who opened new possibilities for what many people still think of, even now, as an instrument that should remain in the background. I’ve already mentioned John Entwistle, whose weaving, slithery lines started a revolution in bass playing. Jack Bruce and John Paul Jones, though more bottom-heavy in their approaches, all the same broadened the role of the instrument.

Then there is the great overlooked one: Paul McCartney. Of course McCartney has never lacked for attention as a member of the Beatles and as a singer and songwriter (nor can we say that he hasn’t been adequately compensated in the financial department!). But one thing that is easy to forget about the Beatles—and our present visual-media-saturated society (that is, with movies and television as the main carriers of the society of the spectacle) has made it no less easy—is that, at the end of the day, they were first and foremost a band, a group of people who played musical instruments and sang songs. Given that the bass guitar is often overlooked anyway, and that many people couldn’t even tell you who is playing the bass in the Beatles, perhaps it is to be expected that Paul McCartney’s contribution on the instrument hasn’t received its complete due. Listen to a song such as “Rain,” which owes everything to the subtlety and melodicism of the bass-guitar part. (This song was released in 1966 as the B-side of a single, for which the A-side was “Paperback Writer”—in between the release of Rubber Soul and that of Revolver—all of which says a great deal about the enormous flow of creativity working in the world at that time.) In his very good book, The Beatles, Allan Kozinn writes,

McCartney’s bass, placed in front of the mix, is an ingenious counterpoint that takes him all over the fretboard. Yet even when it does comparatively little, it can be the most interesting element of the performance. At the chorus, for example, while Lennon and McCartney harmonize in fourths on a melody with a slightly Middle Eastern tinge, McCartney first points up the song’s droning character by hammering on a high G (approached with a quick slide from the F natural just below it), playing it steadily on the beat for twenty successive beats. The next time the chorus comes around, though, he plays something entirely different, a slightly syncopated descending three-note pattern that almost seems to evoke the falling rain. (p. 143)

McCartney’s bass lines are subtle, thoughtful, and virtuosic; from Rubber Soul forward, every Beatles album and almost every single provides an excellent school for bass-guitar playing, with Abbey Road demonstrating a very mature style.

Again there is a Beach Boys connection. Even more ignored as a bass guitarist than McCartney is Brian Wilson. His lines are not only melodic and integral to the compositions, they are also the product of some interesting studio technology—courtesy of Phil Spector (later infamous for his overproduction of the Beatles’ Let It Be). Spector would sometimes record as many as eight different versions of a song’s bass line, using different instruments and settings on the mixing board, and then piece together the final bass part from this conglomeration. Bass players used to go nuts trying to imitate what came out on the record!

And all of this also goes back to the Motown connection, which had such a great impact on English rock groups, both before and after the appearance of the Beatles. The bass lines of James Jamerson, Carol Kaye, and others had a melodic drive that simply took the music to a new place. And this is one part of the point I am aiming toward here: the expanded role of the bass guitar brought about a transformation in the music.

As a musician, my own main instrument is the bass guitar, so the reader might suspect that I am giving special attention to a personal interest of mine. Perhaps. However, there is still an interesting point to be made here, or perhaps a few connected points. First, all of the bass players I mentioned are well known and highly regarded, and none of them does what bass players are stereotypically thought or expected to do. Second, this instrument, which is supposed to be at the back or at the bottom of the music, played a leading role in the transformation of the music I have been discussing. In other words, “Rain,” for instance, is the song that it is because of what is going on with the bass guitar. Put another way, in all of the cases I mentioned, from Motown to the Beatles to The Who, the innovations in the music can be seen in microcosm in the innovations of the bass lines. Third, the greater role for the bass in this music is symbolic of the way that, in the development of the underground and visionary trends that emerged in the late sixties, groups took a more “symphonic” approach to musical arrangement. In other words, the part for each instrument was carefully crafted as a contribution to a larger whole, and compositions emphasized the possibilities of diverse timbres. Instruments that had been “last” became, if not “first,” then at least equal players in the band. And the contrapuntal contributions of McCartney and Entwistle, especially, encouraged a new level of synergy. This synergy flowered in the playing of Chris Squire, John Wetton, Glenn Cornick, Hugh Hopper, and the other major bass guitarists of progressive rock—and the music of their bands was qualitatively enriched because of this.

As we shall see, some groups were “born” as progressive rock groups, while others grew into this. Among the major groups, Jethro Tull (f. 1967) and Yes (f. 1968) started out as perhaps not quite progressive, in the specialized sense in which I will use the term. In either case, each group began writing and playing “full-blown” progressive rock somewhere in the vicinity of their third or fourth albums: Benefit and Aqualung for Tull, The Yes Album and Fragile for Yes—in other words, around 1970–71. (Incidentally, Benefit and The Yes Album make a nice pair in my view, from their album covers to the individual songs.) Among the groups that played progressive rock from their inception are King Crimson (f. 1968) and Emerson, Lake, and Palmer (f. 1970). In both cases there was a predecessor group. King Crimson was preceeded by Giles, Giles, and Fripp, whose “cheerful insanity” (1968) is only of specialty interest today (though I still feel sorry for little Rodney thirty years later). However, Emerson, Lake, and Palmer was preceded by The Nice, and we should take a moment to mark the significance of this group for the development of progressive rock.¹⁴

Originally a foursome (the first two versions of the group included guitarists Davy O’List and Gordon Longstaff), The Nice became most interesting, in my view, with their third album, where they pared down to a keyboard-led trio. This assemblage, consisting in Keith Emerson, keyboards (mainly piano and Hammond B-3 organ), Lee Jackson on bass guitar and vocals, and Brian Davison on drums, was in many ways a streamlined paradigm for the progressive groups that formed around them. Starting with the first of the three albums recorded by this trio, The Nice (1969), Keith Emerson showed that it was possible to bring together a very large range of influences, including European classical music, jazz, ragtime, Broadway, boogie-woogie, psychedelic, and Bob Dylan. Emerson’s classical influences at that point ran from Bach to Sibelius, while his jazz chops seemed especially indebted to Oscar Peterson.

The Nice’s fourth album, Five Bridges (1970), was recorded live with a full orchestra. This was not the first major symphonic outing for a rock group—the Moody Blues had already pioneered this idea three years before, with Days of Future Passed (1967), which is certainly the superior album as well. However, as with the other sides of Sergeant Pepper’s that we hear in such albums as the Stones’ Satanic Majesties, there is something to be said for the second time something happens. In the case of The Nice, another blow was struck for an expanded range for rock music. The actual “Five Bridges Suite,” which fills side one of the original LP, moves from a more baroque classical style to, ultimately, a mini-concerto for jazz reeds and brass, featuring some of the major figures from the English scene (including Alan Skidmore, Kenny Wheeler, and Chris Pyne). Keith Emerson’s liner notes for the album capture nicely—if not altogether coherently (but that’s part of the trip!)—the experimental mood of the times:

On a journey from the almost Utopian freedom of our music to the established orthodox music school I met Joseph Eger [who conducted the Sinfonia of London in this project] who was travelling in the opposite direction.

Since that meeting we have on various occasions been catalysts in combining together the music from our different backgrounds forming sometimes a fusion, and other times a healthy conflict between the orchestra, representing possibly the establishment, and the trio, representing the non-establishment; ourselves having complete trust in a rebellious spirit and highly developed, broad minded music brain whose reformed ideas in direction have been frowned upon, almost spat upon by some so-called music critics. That being Joseph Eger, the fighter.

[The “Suite”] uses bridges as a musical symbol. I worked on building a musical bridge combining early baroque forms to more contemporary ideas. . . .

In conclusion to all this The Nice and Joseph Eger have been trying to build bridges to those musical shores which seem determined to remain apart from that which is a whole.

It was easy then and it is easy now to be cynical about this sort of thing.¹⁵ And so, a contrast opens up around Emerson’s sentiments that continues to permeate the discussion regarding progressive rock: a contrast between a visionary idealism—albeit sometimes a naive one—concerning both purely musical and social aims, and a cynicism that regards striving for “utopian freedom” and similar goals as deluded.

Incidentally, Five Bridges features an album cover by Hipgnosis, who would design many important covers in the seventies (the best known of which is Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon).

As protoprogressive rock, Keith Emerson and The Nice represented the best and the worst. At their best, The Nice could come up with compositions and performances that were both subtle and innovative. “Azrael,” the lead-off piece from The Nice, is a fine example of these qualities. At their worst, the group—and especially Emerson—resorted to bombastic histrionics, of a sort that later became associated with progressive rock in general. (I’ve seen Emerson abuse his organ a couple times with ELP, once in the seventies and once in the nineties; at the expense of sounding like a stick in the mud, I still have to say that I find the whole exercise tedious, pointless, and unamusing—even if a large segment of the average rock concert audience gets off on it.)

Finally, something ought to be said about the absence of guitar on these albums. As the reader is undoubtedly aware, most progressive rock groups have guitar players. Furthermore, it is best, in my view, to resist the overidentification of progressive rock with keyboard wizardry. (After all, one of the pillars of progressive rock, King Crimson, never featured multiple keyboard work.) Still, we might consider The Nice, in its trio form, as presenting exemplary protoprogressive rock in that the guitar is not the center or dominating force in the music. Obviously, there are many other examples of this displacement, going back to Little Richard and Jerry Lee Lewis, and coming forward to the later music of the Beatles. The key issue here is not the guitar itself, but instead what would be the dominating presence in rock music—would music come through the guitar or the guitar through the music?¹⁶ Indeed, from Rubber Soul onward, a demarcation opens up between rock music that will remain more closely tied to the blues form and to the electric guitar, and rock music that explores other possibilities. Again, my term for the insistence that only the former is “real” or “authentic” rock music is “blues orthodoxy.” To be sure, there is much music, including music from the later Beatles, that straddles this line.

Looked at this way, we might also consider that progressive rock straddles various lines as well, with one foot in the kind of rock music that rejects blues orthodoxy, and the other foot perhaps out of rock music altogether. From the perspective of blues orthodoxy, this kind of music really isn’t rock music at all. We will explore this issue further in the next chapter (and also ask why this matters in any case), but it still seems to me that the fundamental crossing of lines was accomplished by the Beatles. The Beatles made rock music with a developmental perspective; the question then becomes, Where do you draw the line, how much development is too much? But I would also like to ask, Why do we want to draw the line? What forces are at work in making us think that a line needs to be drawn?

The “forces at work” are not simply folks who want some “old time rock ’n’ roll”—instead, this is a question of social and cultural shifts. But first we will need to explore the cultural currents that actually demanded some “new time” rock music.

Rock music, up to a point, developed through qualitative leaps that were not entirely or even primarily driven by the commercial imperative to deliver salable product. Instead, the driving force was a synthesis of social and musical experimentalism.

To conclude this strange and rather tendentious romp through the history of rock music, let’s bring the connections forward one more time. Allan Kozinn discusses the way that John Lennon would often borrow a tune or a hook from some earlier song, and use it as the launching pad for his own composition.

Not that Lennon worked this way all the time. Many of his best songs are entirely without precedent or model. Still, using an earlier piece of music as either a source of ideas or as the foundation for a new work is a time-honoured practice. In the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, church composers like Guillaume Dufay and Josquin Despres routinely based their Masses on popular melodies, tunes that any listener of the time would have known. But these composers did not have copyright lawyers looking over their shoulders. Lennon knew that if he were going to use existing works as models, he had to disguise them, but occasionally he let a clue slip through. In 1969 he patterned “Come Together” after Chuck Berry’s “You Can’t Catch Me.” (p. 24)¹⁷

Progressive rock represents a qualitative development in one of the core ideas of rock music: the generous synthesis, carried forward in an open and developmental way. The key issue, at least up through the time of progressive rock, was how to make that next musical step. Kozinn’s excellent analysis demonstrates what the middle and late sixties scene was all about; as he explains, in the shaping of the Sergeant Pepper’s album as a complete, integrated work,

McCartney had a model of sorts in the Beach Boys’ Pet Sounds, the album on which Brian Wilson, the group’s principal composer, distanced the band from its surf music image. Its lyrics, for the most part, had the emotional depth that the Beatles had been working toward, and its quirkily-structured songs boasted colourful instrumentation and sound effects, to say nothing of the Beach Boys’ magnificent vocal harmonies, which rivalled the Beatles’ own. When McCartney heard the album at the time of its release in 1966, his reaction was, “how are we going to top this?”

As it turned out, Wilson later said that he was inspired to make Pet Sounds after hearing the Beatles’ Rubber Soul. But Sgt. Pepper brought this creative give-and-take to an end. Wilson’s plan was to respond with Smile, a collection of material lyrically and musically more complex than Pet Sounds, and meant to be as daring as Sgt. Pepper. But Wilson’s excessive drug use (among other personal problems) caught up with him during the sessions, which ground to a halt when he had a nervous breakdown.¹⁸ Nevertheless, for as long as it lasted, the competitive interaction between the Beatles, the Beach Boys, the Byrds, Bob Dylan, and a handful of other rock musicians unquestionably helped transform the best pop music of this time from teenage ephemera into durable art. (p. 154)

A little while—two years, but two very long years—after the hullabaloo around Sergeant Pepper’s had faded away, the Beatles released what was in fact the last album they made together as a group, Abbey Road (1969). (Let It Be was made earlier but not released until 1970.) This is a record of great maturity, and it is difficult not to look back on it and feel a certain wistfulness—for all kinds of reasons. By this time, the innocence of the summer of love had long ended—quite definitively, in the summer of 1968 in the streets of Chicago—but Abbey Road seemed really to signal a certain kind of end.

I would like to quote some lyrics here but, frankly, and keeping in mind John Lennon’s legal difficulties over “Come Together,” I would prefer not to give any money to Michael Jackson. My motives are not entirely selfish—indeed, they are a bit paternalistic, because, let’s face it, What good has more money ever done for the King of Pop? This point is actually not as extraneous as it might at first sound, because the opening to the possibility of progressive rock, as well as the closing of this time, has everything to do with questions of money, forms of property, and structures of legality.

For this brief moment, however, let us contemplate the Beatles’ final great achievement, where something came to an end, and yet where it was still the case that something was supposed to happen next. And in the same moment, let us also remember that 1969 was the year marked by the emergence of the Crimson King.