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Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
David Weigel
Read between
March 11 - March 21, 2018
It emerged as a direct response to the throwaway three-minute pop song, the format everyone was trying to emulate after the Beatles perfected it.
Forty nations were represented on the cruise, a United Nations for people who loved odd time signatures.
Arty types who wanted to find meaning in music, and who—rather than searching for it in short pop songs based on American blues—found it in the quirky Britishness of prog, equal parts twee and subversive.
Rock critics and record sellers used the term to denote complex music—complicated by long instrumentals, or symphonic parts, or intricate conceptual structure. These were traits that migrated from the European orchestral tradition into prog.
Kanye West sampled the first note for 2010’s “Power.”
Humans have spent tens of thousands of years learning to perk up when they hear surprising sounds.
Roger Waters wrote it in 7/4 time (LOUD-quiet-LOUD)—ONE and TWO and one two three | ONE and TWO and one two three . . . The groove is born out of that tiny moment of suspense. Many progressive epics change time signatures from bar to bar.
Soft Machine Legacy—
Soft Machine,
“Lisztomania,”
This song would not be debuted on the BBC. No—Hall would take it to Radio London, one of the pirate stations getting past British censors by sequestering itself in a boat off the coast. The
In Saint-Tropez, the band extended a simple melody called “We Did It Again” to more than forty minutes. “It was his idea that if you find something boring—a basic Zen concept—then in the end you will find it interesting,”
In their roundabout way, the Moody Blues had produced something new: a pop song carried along by an orchestra. In
Deram was] a classical music company trying to redeem their mistake in turning down the Beatles by signing up anyone and everyone, including us,”
“Has life again destroyed life?” sang Gabriel.
there stands the beautiful lady with the fox’s head—and hence the title of the album.”56 The people crowding into Genesis shows got to see Gabriel in the exact same getup. “It was a shock, this apparition coming towards me in a fox’s head and a dress,” Banks remembered. “I thought ‘Christ!’ but carried on playing
TARKUS WAS NOT SUPPOSED to be ELP’s second public statement. The band had done something even more ambitious: it had adapted, played live, and recorded Modest Mussorgsky’s 1874 suite Pictures at an Exhibition.
Picardy third. Yes had just closed a major pop single with the sort of flourish previously and familiarly reserved for classical music. Everything about Fragile screamed, We are virtuosos.
Carlos Montoya.
When Creem magazine sent reporter John Ingham to explain Tull to American readers, he described Anderson as “Leonard Bernstein on Speed.”
The culture beseeched Anderson to be deep. He decided to have fun with that.
“This leads to another organ solo rejoicing in the fact that you can turn your back on churches and find it within yourself to be your own church.”
“Since we were there all night, she had to sort of clean around us, and would frequently be asked for her opinion on this or that, since none of us were in any fit state to decide.”
Hawkwind were finally downsizing a part of their spectacle. They were on tour in Canada, crossing the border from Windsor to Detroit, when customs nabbed Lemmy Kilmister’s supply of amphetamine sulfate. The bassist spent five days in jail, and the band bailed him out and fired him. Undeterred, Kilmister promised to create a band of his own—one he could not be junked from for something as petty as a drug bust. “They’ll be the dirtiest rock and roll band in the world,” Kilmister told Sounds. “If we moved in next door your lawn would die.”
was into jazz and rock and roll. When I heard somebody like Beck or Clapton playing they just dated what I was already doing. I was doing it before them, as simple as that.”
continental bands were even prouder. Premiata Forneria Marconi, which translated in English to “award-winning Marconi bakery,”
The song was successful in the States, despite lyrics about the American soldiers who had stayed in Italy after the war, doling out candy to the children of the conquered.
“In the past, Italy was always regarded as being the center of musical culture and now it would seem that it’s spreading out again. I honestly feel that, very shortly, America will start listening quite seriously to a lot of new European bands. I don’t think it will be restricted to Italy.”18 Throughout the decade, “progressive” music came to include ever-more-exploratory sounds from Europe. The British press embraced, and unfortunately named, the “Krautrock” movement of German bands that were more experimental and less wedded to old European song structures.
“When I wrote, the sounds came naturally with it—I didn’t intellectualize the process by saying ‘Ok, now I’m going to write some words in a particular language,’ it was really sounds that were coming at the same time as the music. And often they expressed more than if I had translated them.”
Ayn Rand, and was utterly offended that Rush had written a paean to her with 2112. When the band met with Miles, Lee and Lifeson sat gobsmacked—“bystanders”—as Peart and Miles went multiple rounds over libertarianism. “The thing for me about Ayn Rand is that her philosophy is the only one applicable to the world today—in every sense,” Peart insisted. “If you take her ideas, then take them farther in your own mind, you can find answers to pretty well everything on an individual basis. Putting the individual as the first priority, everything can be made to work in a way that it can never be made
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Cassandra story
This will break all bounds and records previously set for pretentiousness,” he deadpanned.
“I was trying to give it a street slant, and that was before punk happened,” Gabriel told one biographer. “I felt an energy in that direction, and it seemed that prancing around in fairyland was rapidly becoming obsolete.”
And the very first thing they did was put up ‘Beauty And The Beast.’ And I played straight over it.”43
None of the experimentation was cut. “I casually played the three guitar takes together and it had a jaw-dropping effect on all of us,” said Visconti.
Bowie’s “Heroes,” the song, did not chart, but it made it onto FM rotation.
“The organ presents a harmonic entity based on the augmented triad Gb-Bb-D, over drums and bass,” wrote Tamm. “Fripp’s guitar enters playing a broken Gb dominant seventh chord with added flatted third—Fripp’s beloved major/minor ambiguity. The harmony shifts systematically to Bb7 and then to D7, as it were developing the implications in the original augmented chord.”
Adrian Belew, who’d just come off a tour with David Bowie, and who before that had been part of Frank Zappa’s band. The rangy Tennessean had a clear, Lennon-esque voice, and a technique that thrived on experimentation. “One of the best things I took away musically was to take a piece of music and treat it so many different ways, from arranging and rearranging,” Belew said. “In the three months time that we did very intense rehearsals—five days a week, eight hours a day—of Frank’s music, he would often take something that we’d already learned and say, okay, now, we’re going to do it this way.
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It departed from the rest of the “No Wave” movement only because Allen said it did. “Yes Wave was a pataphysical reaction to the No Wave club,”
Fast saw the distinction when Gabriel covered “A Whiter Shade of Pale,” Procol Harum’s song from the start of the progressive era. In Gabriel’s hands, the gossamer fell away, revealing a pure rock song, something modeled after the music he’d heard in New York. “Peter was really just ripping his vocals to shreds,” Fast said. “My wrists got really tired playing all those sixteenth notes. Part of what he was doing was mocking the song; part of it was trying to understand it.”82
adding keyboard player Jordan Rudess to thicken the sound. “I was a very serious young protégé from the age of nine, going to Juilliard. I knew nothing about rock music,” said Rudess. “That all changed because a friend of mine in high school brought over Emerson, Lake and Palmer’s Tarkus record and played it for me, and I couldn’t stop listening to it. I thought it was incredible.”
Every new artistic movement rebels against whatever came right before it. But the progressives’ rebellion was the weirdest, and the best.
