Table of contents 1. Prologue 3 Introduction 3 “RIO” – categorical misuse 4 A “true” progressive 4 Arnold Schonberg 7 Allan Moore 11 Bill Martin 15 2. California Outside Music Assiciation 19 The story begins 19 Coma coming out 22 Demographical setting, booking and other challenges 23 An expanding festival 23 A Beginner’s Guide 26 Outside music – avant rock 27 1980’s “Ameriprog”: creativity at the margins 29 3. The Music 33 4. Thinking Plague 37 ”Dead Silence” 37 Form and melody 37 The song ”proper” 40 Development section 42 Harmonic procedures and patterns 45 Non-functional chords and progressions 48 Polytonality: Vertical structures and linear harmony 48 Focal melodic lines and patterns 50 Musical temporality – ”the time of music” 53 Production 55 5. Motor Totemist Guild / U Totem 58 ”Ginger Tea” 62 Motives and themes 63 Harmonic patterns and procedures 67 Orchestration/instrumentation 68 Production 69 ”One Nail Draws another” and ”Ginger Tea” 70 1 6. Dave Kerman / The 5UU’s 80 Bought the farm in France… 82 Well…Not Chickenshit (to be sure…) 84 Motives and themes / harmony 85 Form 93 A precarious song foundationalism 95 Production, or: Aural alchemy - timbre as organism 99 7. Epilogue 102 Progressive rock – a definition 102 Visionary experimentalism 103 Progressive sensibility – radical affirmation and negation 104 The ”YesPistols” dialectic 105 Henry Cow: the radical predecessor 106 An astringent aesthetic 108 Rock instrumentation, -background and –history 109 Instrumental roles: shifts and expansions 109 Rock band as (chamber) orchestra – redefining instr. roles 110 Timbral exploration 111 Virtuosity: instrumental and compositional skills 114 An eclectic virtuosity 116 Technique and “anti-technique” 117 “The group’s the thing” vs. the strong personality 119 British romantic and prophetic aspects 124 Bibliography 129 Appendix 130 COMA-manifesto I 131 COMA-manifesto II 132 COMA 4th Day of Music program, front page 133 “Dead Silence” (Mike Johnson) - original score 134 “Ginger Tea” (James Grigsby) – original score 166 “Well… Not Chickenshit” (David Kerman) – transcription 186 CD track list 2 1) Prologue This thesis is dedicated to ”le noveau vague Americain” of progressive rock and avant-rock, represented first and foremost by the bands and artists that were associated with a L.A. music cooperative called COMA (the California Outside Music Association) and one group that originate from Denver, Colorado. These ensembles, namely Motor Totemist’s Guild, 5UU’s and U Totem (from the LA scene) and Thinking Plague (of Denver fame) form, through extensive interchanges of personnel and several common conceptual and musical traits, a kind of nexus, something like a pinnacle of the truly PROGRESSIVE rock music that emerged from the U.S. throughout the 80’s and 90’s and continue to do so into the 2000’s. My starting hypothesis is that the aforementioned bands and their music aspire to actively pursue and develop even further the ideals of the “classic” progressive rock of the 60’s and 70’s, represented by bands such as Yes, Genesis, Jethro Tull, Gentle Giant, Emerson, Lake & Palmer and King Crimson (just to mention six of the most famous and those most eagerly annotated in the annals of rock history), and even the most far-reaching and revolutionary ideas and visions of those bands from the 70’s that lingered on the avant-garde fringes of progressive rock and even challenged the idea of “Rock” in general. These were artists such as Henry Cow, Art Bears (both out of Great Britain), Univers Zero (Belgium), Art Zoyd (France) and Stormy Six (Italy), all part of the now notorious RIO (Rock in Opposition)- movement. In the following I will examine each of these four bands individual styles, their inherent relationships with one another and their complex, almost Freudian, affiliation with progressive rock, which involves (predominantly) empathies with, but also antipathies against, the progressive rock style. I will consider inherent similarities and crucial differences with regards to both musical and contextual issues, and my main means of achieving this initial aim will be a thorough analysis of a select composition by three of these groups, namely Thinking Plague (“Dead Silence”), U Totem (“Ginger Tea”) and the 5UU’s (“Well… Not Chickenshit”). 3 “RIO” – categorical misuse Music journalists and prog-rock fans have picked up on the link between the COMA/Denver exponents and the European revolutionaries of the 70’s mentioned above, and consequently coined the term “RIO-rock” or just “RIO” as a convenient genre label for the music that came out of and continues to emerge from the U.S. scene. This is, in my humble opinion, an all- too-coarse and, to a certain degree, even a downright fallacious categorization. The Rock in Opposition – movement had nothing to do with bands coming together trying to pursue a certain style of rock music. It was basically a kind of union of artists sharing the idea of constantly challenging the current boundaries of rock music at the time, as well as managing to play, distribute and communicate their music to their audiences outside the realms of the corporate music industry. RIO was an important means of achieving this goal, and the organization’s primary functions was to provide a kind of distribution network for the bands’ recordings, and also ease the often painstaking process of booking concerts and tours in Europe. For example: Henry Cow would arrange concerts for Univers Zero in England, and Univers Zero returned the favour by setting up small tours for Henry Cow in Belgium. That’s basically how the network was organized. The COMA movement was founded in 1983 to provide the same services for groups in a much smaller area, geographically speaking, namely Los Angeles, California. I will pursue these structural similarities to some length in a later chapter. So, while some of the Rock in Opposition-bands certainly acted as early influences on the particular American progressive scene on which I’m focusing in this thesis, their stylistic differences and approaches greatly outnumber the similarities. A “true” progressive Returning to my initial line of argument, namely that the COMA bands and their Denver counterparts being some of the first true successors to the visionary artists of the “golden age” 4 of progressive and avant-garde rock, I have several reasons to put up for this maybe overly categorical statement. I will state them briefly at this point, and then return to this topic repeatedly in following pages. First of all, the predominantly British wave of what was to be dubbed “neo-prog” bands in the early 80’s usually get the credit for resurrecting progressive rock after its demise in the late 70’s on the sacrificial altar of the Punk movement. This particular moment in the history of rock is treated to great lengths in a vast number of books, and I won’t dwell on this subject here.1 The most important aspect for me is that the neo-prog artists, represented by the genre’s ubiquitous representatives Marillion and Pendragon, along with Pallas, IQ and Jadis, just to mention a few, went to great lengths trying to recreate the sounds, the stylistic traits and the poetic (as in hermetic, visionary and utopian) imagery in the lyrics of the 70s’ progressive rock artists in general, and of 70’s progressive pillar Genesis in particular. They focused on surface features of the genre, such as its characteristic instruments (including the mellotron, Minimoog etc.), vocal stylings (especially those of Peter Gabriel), theatrics and even literal references to archetypal chord progressions, riffs and rhythmic patterns, attempting to evoke some of the great music from the past. But ultimately, they ended up providing faint echoes from a time long gone, and of a period of experimentation and bold new musical synthesises now petrified into fixed and immovable musical genre labels. The most important initial aspect of progressive rock music was missing, namely the element of progression. Taken at face value, this might seem like a hopelessly subjective, overly generalizing and even to some extents a downright authoritarian statement, but I assure that this will be further developed and elaborated later on. Central to this present study is the COMA bands’ “stylistic fusions”,2 and their synthesising of vastly different musical inspirations (in our postmodern era, it might even be fruitful to speak of collages of styles), which they integrated (and still integrates) with both advanced sound processing- and recording technology, and compositional principles and stylistic traits from the avant-garde(s) of Western classical music. Their music has in turns been labelled avant- 1 See, for instance, Martin 1997, Stump 1997, Macan 1997 and Covach 2000. 2 Moore 2001: 144, 177 5 rock, avant-prog and even “scored-rock”, due to the fact that the music often is conceived, communicated, rehearsed and performed by the means of musical notation. Avant rock often resides precisely in this very intersection between “rock” and “classical/art” music, where the work methods (notation, scores) and compositional techniques (counterpoint, extensive thematic development, advanced non-tonal and non-modal harmonic structures, serialism and twelve-tone composition) of “art” music are channelled through a “rock” medium (i.e. the “standard” instruments of a rock band: drums, bass, guitar and keyboards), and the resulting works incorporate a particular ‘rock’ sensibility. It would then seem that the textures and timbres of these bands more or less belong in the area of “popular” music, while the composing/songwriting have closer affinities to contemporary, even avant-garde, “classical” music. However, this account is considerably simplified, especially when considering that several COMA bands incorporate “orchestral” instruments side-by-side with their “electric” counterparts, not to mention the fact that the larger part of the musicians involved started their musical careers in bands that were inspired by Led Zeppelin, Jimi Hendrix and Cream as well as Yes, King Crimson, Genesis etc., and often draws heavily on these musical inspirations in the compositional process.