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.
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