Brixworth and District Newsletter

Learn, laugh, live Registered Charity No 1178196 Issue 74 June 2021 PROGRESSIVE ROCK MUSIC SUPPLEMENT

Helpful hint: Once the ‘YouTube’ video appears, once you have clicked on the links below, and after skipping the adverts, you may or may not know, that you can click on the 4-cornered square icon (usually bottom right of the screen on the tool bar, along with the /volume/stop/start/pause/ icons) which will fill the whole screen. You can then use the ‘esc’ button on your keypad to come back out.

PROG ROCK (PR) started in the mid-1960s, and followed the anti-war flower-power era of free love. Probably the best- known track from that time, and most likely will be for years to come, is ‘21st Century Schizoid Man’ by KING CRIMSON. However, prior to that brilliant piece of work, the movement started with the likes of THE CRAZY WORLD OF ARTHUR BROWN and his ‘Fire’, and the 3-piece band THE NICE, fronted by keyboard player extraordinaire Keith Emerson, who later formed EMERSON, LAKE & PALMER. Greg Lake was originally with King Crimson and Carl Palmer played the drums with The Crazy World of Arthur Brown. Emerson, Lake & Palmer was the first of the super groups, preceded by British prog rock maestros YES and GENSIS, and later, many others.

As a new genre, it was never really accepted in the USA, and I wonder if that had anything to with Keith Emerson who, with The Nice, produced the electrifying track ‘America’, during the playing of which, he stabbed knives into the Hammond Organ, and set fire to the Stars & Stripes flag, a regular event at his concerts, one of which I was present at in Bath in 1968. So, that track is the first one for this PR Supplement.

The Nice – America - YouTube

By contrast, and to demonstrate how PR has become more sophisticated, the next track from 2011 by STEVEN WILSON, previously with Porcupine Tree, uses a beautiful choir of voices at the end – which is wonderful and well worth waiting for, right up to the fade out. ‘Postcard’ really is a case of “from the sublime to the ridiculous” but in reverse. In between 1968 and today, many PR bands have enhanced their sound by playing alongside full orchestras, and this can be seen in some of the following tracks.

Steven Wilson – Postcard - Bing

In the USA, two of the greatest exponents of PR have, for many decades now, been head-and-shoulders above the rest, and still command big crowds whenever they play, which I can vouch for, having seen both bands live. They are KANSAS (formed in 1972 and still going strong today), whose brilliance comes across with meaningful lyrics and towering melodies and powerful riffs, adequately displayed by their outstanding ‘Carry on Wayward Son’, and DREAM THEATER (1988-2016), featuring the amazing John Petrucci on guitar, with ‘The Dance of Eternity’.

Kansas – Carry On Wayward Son - YouTube

Dream Theater – The Dance of Eternity - YouTube

WOW. If you enjoyed that, you may like to stay on YouTube to listen to the next track which pops up automatically, unless you switch off. That next track by Dream Theater, is a 26-minute mega-track from the same concert.

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After being wowed by the phenomenal guitar playing of John Petrucci, deemed to be one of the best ‘guitar shredders’ in the world, you may want things to quieten things down a bit. Proving PR has doesn’t have to be loud and heavy, and only played by men, the next two tracks come from the more recent stock of bands playing PR here in the UK. The first is by a little-known band, PUMAROSA, with their 2017 track ‘Dragonfly’.

The second, not-so-loud piece of music is from London based PUBLIC SYMPHONY, who produced a very promising debut album back in 2006, and had it remastered in 2010. Sadly, since then have produced very little by way of new recordings. The track I have selected is ‘Fill Your Wings’, which is technically outstanding, and leaves the listener wanting to hear more.

Pumarosa – Dragonfly- YouTube

Public Symphony – Fill Your Wings - YouTube

Now we look back at a couple of the classic Prog Rock tracks from the past, starting with, undeniably the best of them from Europe, the Amsterdam quartet that is FOCUS. I have been to many of their concerts and have had the pleasure to meet all of the current members of the band, two of whom were in the original line up back in 1969. The classic ‘Sylvia’ never fails to please when played at their concerts, along with their extensive and impressive back-catalogue.

Next, we come back to these shores, with the brilliant YES, formed in 1968, while here, with this track, recorded live in concert in 2018, they have original member Rick Wakeman back on keys for the timeless ‘Owner of a Lonely Heart’.

Focus - Sylvia - Old Grey Whistle Test 1972 - YouTube

Yes – Owner of a Lonely Heart - YouTube

The penultimate master-piece is an amazing track from A Lamb Lies Down on Broadway, a Prog Rock Opera and concept album released in 1974 by the original GENESIS, before the crazy, but talented, Peter Gabriel left the band in 1975 to enjoy a solo career, leaving Phil Collins to take on the vocals.

For me, it was never the same, as Collins took the band into a more pop orientated genre, resulting in the later departure of bassist Mike Rutherford in 1985, to form Mike & The Mechanics. All of the music on the double album was written by Peter Gabriel, which is acclaimed as the best album Genesis ever produced. Unfortunately, the only recordings available on the internet, featuring Gabriel on vocals, are very poor quality. So, we have had to settle for second best, in the form of Steve Hackett, Genesis guitarist on the 1974 album, and the excellent ‘Gabriel-sound-alike’ Ray Wilson, performing to a sell-out audience at the Royal Albert Hall in 2013, of the magnificent and moody track ‘The Carpet Crawlers’. So, if this whets your appetite for more, I recommend the full double album which tells the story of Rael, a poor Puerto Rican boy from The Bronx who, as The Lamb, goes on an adventure in New York City. Rael walks down the boulevard of broken dreams in a heroin daze and, without a warning, he is hit by a truck on Broadway and goes flying through the air, his life flashing in front of his eyes. He lapses into a coma and lies in a hospital bed, hovering between life and death. As I said, IT WAS written by Peter Gabriel.

Steve Hackett (of Genesis) – The Carpet Crawlers - YouTube

The tenth and final offering this month, comes by way of the German band TANGERINE DREAM who, at the outset in 1967, were one of the new-wave of electronic music acts coming out of Europe. Others were Kraftwerk, Vangelis, and Jean Michel Jarre. Founder member of TD was Edgar Froese who was still performing up until his death in 2015. His son Jerome Froese joined the band in 1989. In 1997, I took my ten-year-old son to see them in Birmingham, the first of three of their concerts that we attended over the following decade. Back in those early days, they only featured electronic keyboards and computers, but later introduced guitar, bass-guitar, drums, and saxophone, moving nearer to the prog rock style. This is reflected in the updated track entitled ‘Stratosfear 95’ from a concert in 2015.

Tangerine Dream – Stratosfear95 - YouTube

The 2-page rock supplement will now be issued between the regular bi-monthly u3a Newsletters produced by Christine Pratt. Those bi-monthly editions continue to feature my MUSIC CORNER, with the next issue for July looking at the impact music has on television. Then, for the August rock supplement we will be highlighting some guitar greats. BC