NEARFest Apocalypse: A Sort of Travelogue

I’m not a huge prog fan. I mean, I like it, and some of my favorite bands are prog bands, but I’m not a fanatic. I don’t know the difference between post-prog and Rock in Opposition (or if there even is one). I don’t own any Magma albums. I am not consumed with envy at the sight of a Chapman Stick. You get the idea.

I do go to Prog Day, which is a local progressive rock festival based out of Chapel Hill over Labor Day weekend. I go because I do like the music, even if I’ve generally never heard of any of the bands, and because it’s a nice, relaxing couple of days out in the middle of a field where I can drink some beers and read some books and make a reasonable attempt at relaxing.

But then my friend Steve, who introduced me to Prog Day, pings me with a note about something called NEARFest, mainly because one of the headliners is going to be Van Der Graaf Generator. Now, I may be a casual prog fan, but I’m a serious VDGG fan. Never mind that they make music that sounds like an octopus having sex with a mellotron inside a cotton candy machine. Never mind that I’ve had more than one girlfriend refuse to be in the room when I played any of their stuff. Never mind the fact that they do 22 minute songs with names like “A Plague of Lighthouse Keepers”. I dig ‘em, and I find that in the midst of their dissonance and complexity and bellowed, abstruse lyrics there’s real emotional power. 

In short, it works for me.

And Steve says, “It’s the last one they’re doing. Want to go?”

I scan the rest of the band list. The other headliners are Renaissance, whom I’ve heard a few songs from, and Eloy, whom I wouldn’t know from Adam. (They later pull out over a medical issue, the issue being “one of the band members got hit by a van”. Their replacement is late-70s King Crimson spinoff U.K.) The remaining bands on the list are uniformly entirely outside my experience; I can’t tell if “Helmet of Gnats” is a band or a condition you get if you forget your Deep Woods Off. Two of the names I can’t even pronounce. 

I think about it. Think about driving up to Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, where the concert is held, to pay a pile of cash to see mostly bands I’ve never heard of and who, for all I know, do note-for-note recreations of Tarkus.  

And I think about the fact that VDGG, to this point, have played something like 2 concerts in the US in their 40 year career. That lead singer Peter Hammill suffered a heart attack a while back. That it’s been nearly a decade since my last insane road trip to see a band (Fish, Washington DC, the 9:30 Club). 

I say to Steve, “What the hell.”

###

There are ten bands playing at NEARFest. Two on Friday, including VDGG, and then four and four the next two nights. Steve and I roll into Bethlehem with maybe an hour to spare before showtime on the first act, Belgian chamber prog group Aranis, and grab dinner at the first spot we can find. It’s a locovore burger bar named Horns, and it’s amazingly good. The french fries come in trenchers bigger than a man’s head; Steve and I don’t know this when we order, and end up with something like six pounds of extra potato.

The next night, we’ll go back there for dinner with old friend and former coworker Rich Thomas, who’s relocated to the Lehigh Valley area. We warn him about the fries, and split one order between the three of us. We also find ourselves talking with Gentle Giant guitarist Gary Green about various strategies for obtaining beer in there - it’s a BYO kind of place - and the assorted eating options within walking distance of the venue.

We’ll run into Green again multiple times over the course of the weekend. He’s polite, funny, and a genuine pleasure to chat with. On Sunday night, as Steve and I are making our escape from the afterparty, we see him one last time, getting into the shuttle van that’s presumably taking him to the airport. He turns around and bids us farewell. “Be well, be safe, be gone,” he says, grinning. “Now fuck off.”

I throw him a salute. “Fucking off, sir.” 

We can hear his laughter all the way back to the car.

###

When we pull into the garage for the first time, it’s full of people tailgating. They’re tucked into corners with coolers and beach chairs and grills, and massive sound setups so they can get into the mood. It’s friendly, it’s warm, it’s not the uber-serious atmosphere I’d been warned to expect.

We park the car and get out, chatting with the folks who pulled in next to us. They’re friends of Steve, of course. Steve knows everyone, or so it seems, and even if this is his first NEARFest, he’s not a stranger.

We hear someone whooping. A tall gentleman as stalking through the garage, chanting “VAN! DER! GRAAF! VAN! DER! GRAAF!” He homes in on us. “YOU EXCITED FOR VAN DER GRAAF?” I nod. “IT’S GOING TO BE AWESOME!” He stalks off again, still whooping.

I did not know such things were possible.

###

Mark Wilkinson is at NEARFest.

He’s been their official artist for a while, talking over from the legendary Roger Dean (who is also here). Wilkinson, a tall, affable gent, did all of the Marillion album covers back in the Fish days, and I’ve collected the lot of ‘em. 12” singles, too. Loved those covers, I did. I still do.

I tell him this when I meet him in the dealers’ room, saying something very adult about how I have enjoyed his work. He thanks me, and I goob a bit and mention that I have all those old 12” singles.

“Didn’t pack them, though,” I add. “I figure they would have turned to soup in the car”. 

Mr. Wilkinson nods thoughtfully. “Probably for the best,” he agrees. I cringe a little inside, picturing the sorts of fans liable to assault him with Assassing record sleeves and silver paint pens, demanding a signature.

To cover up, I look at his book, which means I buy his book, which means he autographs it for me. 

Steve buys a print of a Wicker Man-themed Iron Maiden wraparound record sleeve. Later, he’ll pick up the book as well.

The dealer’s room, it is dangerous place to be.

###

It takes about six tries before I can actually nail the name of Il Tempio Delle Clessidre, the Italian band scheduled for Saturday afternoon. They’re an astonishing Frankenstein monster of a band; guitarist and bassist in pure rock star attire (leather and zebra-striped pants, respectively), keyboardist and vocalist Elisa Montaldo gothed up to the nines, and the grizzled lead singer, “Lupo” Galifi, wearing a military jacket, sunglasses and a beret. Their sound is pure classic prog, arpeggiated within an inch of its life, delicate keyboard runs slammed up against heavy riffs and vocals that invoke the operatic. Galifi’s best known for his work with Italian prog legends Museo Rosenbach, and the band does a take on their epic “Zarathustra”. They also do a piece about witches, “Danza Esoterica de Datura”, which is impetus for the band to don capes and masks and perform with their faces hidden.

Montaldo demurely removes her hat before putting on her mask. She plays with an elegant, exaggerated formality, even as the song’s vocals swoop and rise and fall. The rest of the band hammers at it like it’s 1986 at the Whiskey, clearly exulting in the sheer joy of rocking out.

 

###

Sunday afternoon in one of the dealers’ rooms. Gosta Berlings’ Saga has abandoned their table. All that’s left are clipboard with signup sheets for their mailing list, and a few t-shirts duct-taped to the wall. I hear someone saying, “No, they took off already. They sold everything they had. Everything except those shirts. I can take them off the wall and sell them to you, but I’m not sure I’m allowed to.”

###

Sunday night, the after-show party. The legendary NEARFest jam session is going strong at the front of the ballroom at the Comfort Suites, Mike Kenneally and the drummer from Anglagard whaling away with one of the guys from The Yellow Box (I think) on what appears to be a Jeff Beck tune. (I’m several beers in and bleary eyed at this point, and my powers of musical discernment have become limited.) Most of the crowd is milling around, standing or seated at tables, concentrating mostly on the 9.8 percent double IPA brewed specially for the occasion by the folks at the Bethlehem Beer Works. 

Two guys sit on the floor watching the stage intently. The dance floor between them and the musicians is empty. One of them shouts something. It takes a minute for me to realize what he said.

“Play some Camel!”

Only at NEARFest.

###

Every lineup has a clunker. For me, it was the Mike Kenneally Band. An hour late to start, they were technically impressive but none of their songs grabbed me. “Noodly as all crap” is how one person described them. There’s a snafu in the middle of the set, am audience participation bit where the band’s supposed to pick up on riffs provided by the punters. Kenneally’s suggested riff is half the  length of the ones the rest of the band pick up.

The math, it causes problems. 

They run long, too.

###

Helmet of Gnats are from Connecticut. The drummer is the lead guitarist’s brother-in-law; every Sunday, they “go to church, and the church is prog”. Like roughly half the bands here, they’re all instrumental; outside, after their set, I hear someone call them “post-prog”, as their music occasionally remembers it’s supposed to have massive key and time signature changes at semi-regular intervals to still qualify as prog. 

The same guy outside talks about their set, and about their latest disc, and closes with a sad note that “they’ve all got day jobs”. Not for them is the life of the itinerant musician.

Day jobs. Rehearsal on Sunday. It’s as if they’ve created their own subgenre, garage prog. They thrash away merrily, the perfect opener for the first full day of the festival. Loud, energetic, and clearly enjoying the hell out of themselves, which is about all you can ask out of the morning slot.

###

Twelfth Night was clearly at the wrong festival. Definitely the most polarizing act of the event, they walked onstage straight from the late 80s and the neo-prog revival, drummer jacket and all. Technically, they had a rough time of it - their sound tech apparently sliced himself open on something just before they went on and had to go to the hospital for a couple of dozen stitches - but really, audience and band expectations weren’t in the same ballpark on this one. The band’s arena rock-style bravado - you don’t wave a Union Jack around at a prog festival unless you mean it - ran straight into a crowd that had just gotten its collective face melted by a rampaging collective of Swedish instrumentalists amuck in 13/8 time, and first contact didn’t go well. Loreley, this was not, and the sorts of theatrics that would bring that crowd to its feet were pretty much lost in the more rarefied atmosphere in Bethlehem.

Later, I spent time chatting with various members of the band at the hotel bar. It was their first time in the US, let alone playing there, and they were largely and mainly surprised by the quality of American beer as it related to them getting stinko with astonishing speed. They’d been told about Budweiser, apparently, and instead had gotten a faceful of two-fisted microbrew culture in a pint glass. Once again, expectations got trumped by collision with local reality.

###

Later, the drummer from Twelfth Night and I got into a debate over whether Blue Oyster Cult could be considered prog, an outgrowth of the question of where the big American prog bands were. (Answer: not in Bethlehem, at least not this weekend, and then a long digression about how the American mainstream co-opts anything genre that reaches a certain level of success.) I figured BOC was prog because they sang at extended length about nosferatu and Elric, had collaborated with Michael Moorcock, and wrote long, involved, classically informed songs. My new friend countered with “But they sold a ton of records.”

###

Anglagard is a Swedish five-piece instrumental lineup, fronted by a sax/flute player. It’s been 18 years since their last album, but they’re finally about to release a new one, and between-song banter is all about how they could do a NEARfest live album after that to sort of pick up the pace between discs.

The breakout star of the show is their drummer,  Mattias Olsson, who is, I suspect while watching him, not entirely human. He assaults his kit with such fury that it looks like he’s got six arms; his riser shakes so violently I’m convinced he’s going to pound it to pieces. Then he’s up and off and playing the side of a vibraphone with what looks like a cello bow, and, well, wow.

No human being has six arms, right? Just checking.

###

Van Der Graaf Generator opens with “Scorched Earth”, which is about as gentle and soothing as you’d expect with a title like that. At the end, the crowd needs a moment to come back to itself, and then it roars. 

Hammill isn’t quite what I expect. Funny, cheerful, self-deprecating, he admonishes the audience with a grin about how not every song can be “mayhem”. It comes back at him later, when someone in the balcony bellows “More mayhem!” before they launch into “Your Time Starts Now”. He laughs.

It doesn’t maintain that perfect, transcendent level of the first song all the way through. Hammill keeps checking lyrics sheets, adding a slightly nervous quality to his performance. They play material from their recent post-reunion albums when the crowd was clearly hungering for a particular subset of the long-titled classics. But they do unveil a version of the Hammill solo piece “Flight”, a 23-minute beast that’s utterly unlike anything else I’ve heard before or since. 

For that alone, the trip was worth it.

For their encore, Hammill sets up the song with a discussion about how once they knew this was the last NEARFest, there really was only one choice for the encore. Because all things, he noted, have their time and their run, and now this one was ending. 

And so we got a live version of “Refugees”, four decades old and the closest thing to a hit VDGG ever had, and the closest thing to wistful, too. 

When the last note fades away and the last of the applause dies, Steve turns to me. He’s concerned about my work schedule, which currently calls for us to drive back all the way to Raleigh on Monday, in time for me to catch a 6 AM flight out Tuesday for work. “We can go back home now, if you want. Now that you’ve seen that.”

“No, no,” I tell him. “We can stay. We should stay.”

###

If Olsson is the breakout star of the show, Gosta Berlings Saga is the breakout band. They own the crowd from the second they bound onstage, four guys in black who create music that’s the soundtrack to all the horror novels I haven’t gotten around to writing yet. It’s off kilter, it’s hypnotic, it’s relentless. After each number, the crowd roars. Olsson comes out to join them for the end of the set and it’s eruptive, jaw-dropping.

And they do a song about 20-sided dice. I think I’ve found my tribe.

###

Outside the Zoellner Center, where the concert is being held, we run into VAN! DER! GRAAF! guy and a friend of his for the second time. The first time, they’d shown me and Steve tickets they had to a Van Der Graaf Generator gig in nearby Sellersville, one that was apparently being recorded for local PBS station WHYYY, and they were skipping out on Saturday headliner Renaissance to see it. They’re serious VDGG fans, and after some chatting about Helmet of Gnats and Gosta Berlings Saga and Anglagard, they start talking about VDGG.

They, it would seem, are the keepers of the answer to a mystery that’s been plaguing the band’s fans for years. Why did saxophonist David Jackson depart the band after the last tour? In not-at-all hushed voices, they tell us a story, and claim responsibility. Toys were involved, it would seem. Toys that one of them had made a habit of delivering. 

It’s a great story. On the surface, it’s wildly unbelievable, and that’s what makes it perfect.

And probably true.

###

Last night of the show. Last act. Last NEARFest. And the delay before the doors open for U.K. feels endless. Steve and I had bolted out of the restaurant where we were having dinner basically unserved in order not to miss it - Steve’s a huge Crimson fan, and I was driving - sandwiches in hand. As we hit the garage, we saw people still out there, hanging out, waiting. Not the last minute rush inside one would expect, really.

So we pulled up on the top floor, in a spot with a view of the old Bethlehem Steel works. Next to us, a bunch of guys were tailgating, drinking beers and arguing over Zep. Our sandwiches were overcooked and underseasoned, but the view was great and the conversation was good. And it was clear that U.K. was running a little behind.

We finished and went inside. The doors were shut, people milling around and diving in and out of the dealers’ rooms (all four of them) in search of last minute bargains. 

“Makes sense,” we decided. After all, Kenneally had run late, and U.K. is apparently notorious about controlling the parameters of their performance. We could hear the booming sounds of sound check behind closed doors; outside, everyone just circulated, and talked, and waited. Families with younger kids - and there were a few of those - debated nervously whether they should head home. Time stretched on. Steve and I fell into conversation with a couple from Winston-Salem whom he knew. Announcements came over the P.A., warning us that there would be absolutely no flash photography allowed during the show, presumably on pain of being drummed senseless by Mattias Olsson. 

Time Stretched. Bargain hunters scurried to their cars with giant stacks of swag. Dealers took piles of leftover mech from bands.  Tables shut down, one by one by one.

Finally, the doors opened. The crowd shuffled in excitedly, to the sound of more P.A. announcements. The winner of the raffle for a handcrafted Moog guitar was announced; the farewells and final thank-yous to the folks who put the show on were given amidst thunderous applause and tears. 

And then NEARFest’s founders introduce U.K. and leave the stage. The house lights go down. The stage lights fade to a lush purple. There is silence.

Someone coughs. Someone else whispers something. Someone else gives a “shhhh!”. This gets picked up, and wave of “Shhhh!” goes around the room, accompanied by hilarity. More coughing. A few catcalls. Time stretches. The “Shhhhh!” makes its way from balcony to orchestra and back again, and there’s more laughter. We hit the ten minute mark. One of the NEARFest organizers finally gets up and tells the crowd, in no uncertain terms, that they’ve waited thirty years to hear U.K., they can wait five more minutes, and to just calm the hell down already.

A minute after that, they come onstage. U.K., at this point, is Eddie Jobson and John Wetton and a couple of other guys, and the pecking order is very clear. Jobson looks like a steampunk villain, an angular clockwork man wtih smoked John Lennon glasses and a flowing white mane of  hair that makes him look uncanny under the blue lights above. Wetton looks more like the leader of a friendly village in a post-apocalyptic sci-fi cheapie; the guy who’s determined to stand and fight against the ravening bad guy hordes even though the attempt is doomed. 

But he can still bend a bass to his will, and he can still sing the walls down. Jobson’s keyboards are thunderous, and the things he does to his violin are probably illegal in seventeen states. This is the last show of their tour, an add-on date by happy accident when Eloy had to pull out of NEARFest, and the band approaches it with easy mastery. 

They mine their material, and they mine King Crimson’s. They play “Starless”. Steve is nearly quivering with excitement. I had my moment when Van Der Graaf played “Scorched Earth”; this is his.

U.K. closes out the encores with a clean, simple arrangement of “Rendezvous 6:02”, with just Wetton and Jobson onstage. The last note hangs in the air, the whispered lyric, and then the lights come up and it’s all over, for always.