and even revolution—and some great music was inspired by what seemed to be the retreat, at least on the ideological front, of systems of exploitation and domination, and the emergence of a new world, or, at least, a new understanding.
This music took many forms, both within rock music and beyond. Indeed, there was a general opening of genres and a letting down of barriers. To a great extent, these barriers have yet to be fully erected again in their previous form, which is one of the lasting legacies of the sixties. (When I use the term, “the sixties,” I mean this more politically and culturally than in a strict chronological sense.) This was a time of both raw and harsh music of protest, and of visionary experimentation. (In some rare cases, there was even a combination of the two, for example in the “fire music” of Archie Shepp; another interesting example, from rock music, was the Blows Against the Empire album by Paul Kantner and Jefferson Starship.) These musics of both radical negation and radical affirmation were certainly linked at the time—it was perfectly obvious to everyone that both came out of a more generally experimental social milieu. Progressive rock, to the extent that it is seen at all, is rarely seen in this context. This is not only a mistake made within the field of music history (a mistake that has been made, for example, in the Public Broadcasting System’s documentary series, Rock & Roll); even more, this is a mistake in cultural and even political history that has large cultural and political ramifications.
In its time, progressive rock represented something unique in the entire history of art: a “popular avant-garde.” For most aestheticians and social theoreticians, the very idea is oxymoronic. Supposedly, an avant-garde can only be appreciated by an elite; supposedly, this elite appreciation is part of the very definition of the concept of avant-garde. But we might take a page from Marx, and argue that “once the inner connections are grasped, theory becomes a material force.” Not to be obtuse or cute, the point is that the motive forces of society are grasped when a significant part of society is compelled to expand its understanding of these forces. Then this understanding becomes a real force in the lives of many people. As the late sixties gave way to the seventies, many people were prepared by their social experience to be open to experimental, visionary, and utopian music that was brilliantly crafted and performed.
Perhaps the key preparation for this possibility was made starting about ten years earlier, by John Coltrane. He and a number of other post-boppers expanded the frontiers of jazz; they were popular, at least among a significant and international public, and their music had to be understood against the background of both the oppression and struggle of Black people, the Civil Rights Movement, and the emergence of Black Power. (This is not to say that I advocate any kind of crude reduction of this music to particular aspects of social movements or upheavals. More on this general question in a moment.) John Coltrane, certainly one of the greatest visionary and virtuoso musicians of any time period or genre, was always pushing the limits. Indeed, as any avant-garde composer or musician must do, he placed into question the very nature and possibility of music itself—for which some critics called his music “anti-jazz” or “nihilistic.”
There came a moment, perhaps best captured by the Concert in Japan album, when Coltrane seemed to take a leap into the stratosphere, and many of his admirers had great difficulty following him. Perhaps as long as only two of the basic elements of music were stretched to the limit, or perhaps somewhat beyond the limit, and the other four elements were relatively restrained, then Coltrane was able to take many people along on the journey. (I’m taking the “basic elements” to be melody, harmony, rhythm or meter, timbre, duration, and dynamics.) But, as soon as the figure no longer seemed to have a ground, there was a sense of complete suspension and fragmentation, and fewer people were ready for it. The jazz that continued to go down this road (or up into this space), for instance that of Ornette Coleman, Cecil Taylor, or Anthony Braxton, no longer had a mass following. From this time, serious jazz increasingly became the province of intellectuals (many of them white, male, and middle class); this Black music became separated from the masses of Black people.
An instructive counterexample is provided by the late-sixties music of Miles Davis. This is the Miles who had heard Jimi Hendrix, Sly and the Family Stone, and the Byrds—and his music from this time, Bitches Brew, Jack Johnson, Miles Davis at Fillmore (where Miles and group opened for the Byrds, in fact), was a part of the general crossing of musical and social barriers of this time. Whereas the time was not entirely ripe for a popular avant-garde just a few years earlier (John Coltrane died in 1967 at the age of forty-one), by the time Miles Davis played the Fillmore East, in June 1970, dramatic changes had taken place. Not that the critics necessarily liked these changes; for instance, in The Illustrated Encyclopedia of Jazz for 1978, authors Brian Case and Stan Britt argue that, prior to Bitches Brew, “Miles cut what, from the jazz fan’s viewpoint, was to be his last album (In a Silent Way)” (p. 59). “Although labels are arbitrary, Miles Davis’ subsequent output is of little interest to the jazz record collector” (p. 59). So much the worse, then, for the “jazz record collector”—but what of those who saw that music was taking an adventurous turn along with culture and politics more generally? An account by Morgan Ames, from the liner notes to Fillmore, is instructive:
I went to see Miles at the Hollywood Bowl recently, in concert opposite The Band. At least half the audience was young rock fans. There were also jazz people of all categories—middling executives with their tolerant wives, boppers, suede-covered mods who like both rock and jazz. There was black pride, in vivid African shirts and robes. And young girls with young children. There were celebrities, particularly from the music world. Most had come to see what Miles was up to now. The night was warm and the air was laced with waiting: Miles Davis and The Band? What does that mean?
Miles opened the show. He and his group played for about 45 minutes without pause. The critics wiped him out in the paper the following morning. But the audience loved him. In amphitheaters as large as the Hollywood Bowl, a roaring ovation can sound like a polite coming-together-of-hands, unless you listen closely and look around you. I did. Hippies were on one side of us, non-descripts were behind, a black couple was on the other side. Front-to-back it was a happily received evening. People liked what Miles was about, even if they couldn’t grasp the free-form display. They felt his honest effort, his adventure, his openness, and they took him in without asking why. For Miles Davis has the hunger and the ability to entertain through exploration.
Of course, another thing that had changed in the years 1967–1970 is that, by the latter year, electricity permeated everything. Arguably, this was not the best thing for jazz in the long run, and perhaps not for anything. At the time, however, there was certainly a feeling of “electric freedom” (as in “Sound Chaser” by Yes) that crossed all boundaries and was perhaps a necessary component of a culture and politics where “the whole world’s watching.”
Throughout the short history of rock music up to that point, there had been, along with more commercial and mainstream efforts, an adventurous trend—going right back to Chuck Berry and Little Richard and, someone I’ve come to appreciate more and more in this respect, Bo Diddley. Into the 1960s we see harmonic and timbral innovation, especially on the part of the Beach Boys and the Beatles. With the latter, we see an increasing drive toward a global synthesis of music. Rock music begins to develop an avant-garde, and a subgeneration of musicians emerge who have tremendous instrumental, lyrical, and compositional skills. And millions of people are into it.
My aim in this book is to explore this very uncommon period. I hope, in the case of those of us who were around during the time of progressive rock, to recapture the feeling that what happened in music in that period was important, significant. I want to provide the philosophical, aesthetic, and social theoretical terms that would allow us to see that this period not only was significant but, indeed, still is and should be. For those of us who are new to this period (either we weren’t around then, or we didn’t pick up on what was happening at the time), I want to provide some access. We live in a time when it is very hard for anything to be significant or important, a time of an immense cultural machinery of pure distraction. Between 1968 and now, there lies an effort, which
