My direct experience of progressive rock

I hes­it­ate to pub­licly take issue with Rob Sheffield for sev­er­al reas­ons. First off, I find him an enga­ging, sharp, funny writer. Second, I’m acquain­ted with him and we share warm kind feel­ings for each oth­er as people, I think. Thirdly, he’s one of the greatest audi­ences I’ve ever had. Whenever I run into him and we con­verse, his laughter at whatever attemp­ted wit­ti­cisms I drop is the most appre­ci­at­ive I have ever heard. Knowing Rob and his pop tastes as I do, I was­n’t sur­prised by some of the less char­it­able per­spect­ives on prog (or “pro­gress­ive”) rock that he puts for­ward in his New York Times Book Review assess­ment of the essay com­pil­a­tion Yes Is The Answer. And in point of fact said review con­firms, to my mind, some of the things I sus­pec­ted about the book when I paged through it at a prin­ted mat­ter empori­um and mused that this did not look like the prog-rock book I was look­ing for, if in fact I was look­ing for such a thing. 

As described by Sheffield (and his descrip­tion jibes with the impres­sion I had paging through it) Yes Is The Answer seems a rather silly book, and if I’m going to read a book on prog rock, I’d prefer it to be either entirely po-faced or uproari­ously funny rather than rather silly. Rob, how­ever, takes the book’s sil­li­ness as a cue to pro­pound upon the sil­li­ness of prog rock itself as far as he’s con­cerned, and to look down his nose at the social lives, par­tic­u­larly the sex lives of its enthu­si­asts. As for its makers, he chortles at the fact that Yes once stocked a record­ing stu­dio with bales of hay to evoke a prop­erly rus­tic atmo­sphere for inspir­a­tion. This IS indeed silly, but hoe much more or less silly is it than spend­ing tens of thou­sands of dol­lars on heroin and/or cocaine, as so many oth­er rock musi­cians, pro­gress­ive and oth­er­wise, have done? But he reserves most of his nyah-nyah you can­’t get laid dis­dain for con­sumers of the genre. One of the book’s essay­ists, he notes, got turned on to the music of the loosely-defined Canterbury Scene by a high-school girl­friend; “not a typ­ic­al prog story, to say the least.” In his kick­er, Sheffield states “obli­vi­on seems entirely suited to prog, which at its best func­tioned as a shel­ter from school, from sex, from the fright­en­ing adult world.” Even without pars­ing too closely, this seems a curi­ous stone to have been thrown by the author of Talking To Girls About Duran Duran. The implied demand that a more accept­able music is one that assists teens and post-teens in facing that adult world seems, frankly, unreal­ist­ic. But really, the fal­lacy of the gen­er­al­iz­a­tion stems from a not-uncommon rock crit prob­lem, that is, mis­tak­ing one’s prac­tice with that of a sociologist’s.

Sheffield’s actu­ally not even ten years young­er than me, so my ini­tial men­tal ration­al­iz­a­tion for his curi­ous con­tempt does­n’t hold, entirely. And since I nev­er even liked soci­ology, let alone believed that crit­ic­al prac­tice com­pelled me to attempt any form of it, I can only respond with anec­dot­al evid­ence that for a num­ber of my con­fed­er­ates in the late ’70s, a taste for prog not only embod­ied zero con­tra­dic­tion to an engage­ment with adult­hood, but also con­sti­tuted a palp­able asset to it.   For instance, and not to tell tales out of school, but take My Close Personal Friend Ron Goldberg™. When I arrived at William Paterson College in 1977, he had transfered to NYU but was still a legend at the col­lege paper, for his pho­to­graph­ic acu­men, his mer­ci­less sar­casm, his way with “the ladies” as some used to call them back then, and his abil­ity to recite all of the dia­logue from the 1933 King Kong. I did­n’t meet Ron until spring of 1978, at the funer­al of a mutu­al friend who COULD have gone with me to see Richard Hell at CBGB on the week­end of his death, but instead went out to Central Jersey and…well, it’s a long story…and at the funer­al I asked him about the Kong thing and he respon­ded with the exact con­tempt and mer­ci­less sar­casm that such an inquiry might war­rant when delivered at a funer­al. Ron even­tu­ally got around to for­giv­ing me this tres­pass, and we became friends, and soon I was hanging around the base­ment of his folks’ place in Clifton, which he had redone into his bach­el­or pad. He had an awe­some ste­reo of sep­ar­ate components—I had only ever had vari­ants of a Close-And-Play myself—and a huge record col­lec­tion of mostly clas­sic­al and prog. I was mildly appalled, really. King Crimson had its moments, I had to admit, hav­ing affected an appre­ci­ation of Shoenberg and Coltrane in my high school years, but des­pite my fond­ness for Eno and such I was at this point a reas­on­ably ded­ic­ated punk rock per­son. “How can you listen to Yes? I mean that vocal­ist is the worst. And those lyr­ics!” “Eventually you learn to hear through it, or past it,” Ron shrugged. “And you’re com­plain­ing about lyr­ics? What about the Ramones?” “They’re iron­ic,” I nyah-nyahed back. We were both schmucks, but he made a little more imme­di­ate sense.

The point I’m tak­ing my time get­ting to is that the component-stereo and sophisticated-musical-tastes com­bin­a­tion was a cru­cial com­pon­ent of Ron’s mys­tique in the dat­ing depart­ment. It was I, Mr. Punk Rock and Socially Conscious Lyrics and I’m Against Society Man and all that oth­er shit who had a bit of struggle. This is not to say that I came around to prog out of a desire to enhance my appeal to the oppos­ite sex. My first col­lege girl­friend, to whom I gave the flower that was my sexu­al inno­cence, was an exem­plary sub­urb­an Punk Rock Girl (her copy of The Basketball Diaries was fes­tooned with “I love you“s in the mar­gins of the pas­sages describ­ing the most debauched instances of drug abuse), and when I brought home (to my first apart­ment, which I shared with a col­lege room­mate in Paterson, New Jersey in the late ’70s, in case you’re won­der­ing where I earned my “street cred”) a copy of Art Bears’ debut album Hopes and Fears, which opens with an aus­tere cov­er of Brecht/Eisler’s “On Suicide” sung by Dagmar Krause in her direst sharp tones, she pro­nounced her con­di­tion­al approv­al on grounds that it was bra­cingly abras­ive. Which indeed it was.

The College Girlfriend, Ron, and myself, even­tu­ally star­ted exper­i­ment­ing with mak­ing our own music. Ron  was a key­board­ist, and a pretty good one I thought (he remains to my mind some­times frus­trat­ingly dubi­ous with respect to his abil­it­ies in this respect), the CG played gui­tar, and I played a little gui­tar, and bel­lowed, and had an out­size per­son­al­ity, not neces­sar­ily in that order. We had anoth­er friend, a col­lege poet, who wrote lyr­ics and also bel­lowed, or wailed; and we dicked around in vari­ous per­muta­tions try­ing to write songs. We thought that our dif­fer­ing sensibilities—Ron’s prog taste was sup­ple­men­ted by a slight Ray Manzarek jones, and a lot of his com­pos­i­tion­al inspir­a­tion was taken from the film score work of Max Steiner and Bernard Herrmann; CG was a big Stones per­son; I was “lit­er­ary” and obnoxious—might cre­ate inter­est­ing mater­i­al. We were not par­tic­u­larly cor­rect, but we per­sisted, and were very con­struct­ive in com­ing up with band names: Transparent Things (I know, I know), Plan Nine, etcet­era. Eventually CG and I broke up, and she took up with more com­pet­ent and ded­ic­ated musi­cians who later went on to stints in real bands such as The Brandos and Dramarama (look ’em up!). But Ron and I kept at it and even­tu­ally we, in the decades-later-to-be-immortal-words of Art Brut, formed a band. 

From left to right, Douglas Harvey, Ron Goldberg, Gene McCallister, your humble ser­vant, Thomas Santamassino, circa 1981. God, I hated that air con­di­tion­er, can­’t you tell? 

Whether or not we were any good (and the debate con­tin­ues to this day as we, hav­ing recon­vened largely for the pur­pose of con­tin­ued fel­low­ship, slouch toward the com­ple­tion of a professional-grade record­ing of mater­i­al we “com­posed” over thirty years ago), our unusu­al concept—to cre­ate music that mel­ded the com­plex­ity of cer­tain prog with the DIY atti­tude and dis­son­ance of punk and post-punk—was a way of enabling us to engage the world rather than retreat from it. We had to do things—write mater­i­al, rehearse it, and play it in front of people. Our par­ents wer­en’t involved in the pro­ject. Ron and some out­side friends had ren­ted a house, and that became the GHQ for band activ­it­ies, the protest of cer­tain neigh­bors and room­mates not­with­stand­ing. When drum­mer McCallister either quit or was fired (I hon­estly don’t remem­ber which…he’s a cop now, if you were won­der­ing), we had to go out and find a drum­mer, and we were blessed for a year with the best one in not just the Hoboken/North Haledon scene but in all of north­ern and cent­ral Jersey, Stanley Demeski, then also of the Phosphenes and Winter Hours (both of which bands really, really hated us) and later of the Willies, then the Feelies, then Luna, and now the Feelies again. If you’re famil­i­ar with his work, you know that Stanley nails the 4/4 like nobody’s busi­ness, but what you might not know is that, like his fel­low one-time Feelie Anton Fier, he at one point in his devel­op­ment learned every drum pat­tern on the notori­ously dif­fi­cult (and some might say secretly proggy) Trout Mask Replica by Captain Beefheart and the Magic Band. Our band had one highly ques­tion­able (and unsingable-over) tune called “Refraction,” the main sec­tion of which had a 9/5 time sig­na­ture. Once Stanley left the band, that num­ber left the repetoire. Actually, the whole band kind of fell apart; we could­n’t find an adequate let alone com­pet­ent full time replace­ment drum­mer, and the band’s front man was such a mikestand-kicking prima-donna non-singing asshole that nobody really wanted to work with him any more. Guess who?

Anyway, the ideal remained alive in our sens­ib­il­it­ies if not our music­al prac­tice. You might not remem­ber this, but the reformed King Crimson—the quar­tet with Adrian Belew, Tony Levin, Bill Bruford and Captain Fripp, and no mellotron—actually had some New Wave cred giv­en Fripp’s and Belew’s ses­sion work with Bowie, Talking Heads, Blondie, and so on. Artificial Intelligence aimed to meld Gang of Four and Pere Ubu with Henry Cow, and the dis­tances between those bands was not as huge as some might ima­gine. (The dis­tinc­tions might not be cost-effective to pop­tim­ists such as Sheffield, I allow.) Even as Ubu founder David Thomas was run­ning Seeds and Alice Cooper licks through a darkly arty iter­a­tion of Cleveland weltschmertz, he was enga­ging in cor­res­pond­ence with one-time Henry Cow drum­mer Chris Cutler, with whom Thomas later worked as a solo artist. Cutler him­self drummed in an iter­a­tion of Ubu that included its biggest com­mer­cial suc­cesses, includ­ing the college-rock quasi-hit “Waiting For Mary.” 

The point is that there was/is more to prog and its tendrils that is dreamed of in the insti­tu­tion­al philo­sophy of the New York Times these days, Jon Pareles’ pres­ence at the paper not­with­stand­ing. The sec­tari­an anti-prog bias, not to be para­noid, is I think reflec­ted in the illus­tra­tion for Rob’s review, in which Genesis-era Peter Gabriel is seen in stage makeup with mouth agape, an image meant to evoke a snick­er. I do not laugh, because I’m vaguely aware of how many column inches the New York Times devotes to Lil Wayne, who, object­ively speak­ing, does­n’t present a much more overtly “admir­able” visu­al pic­ture. Also, one need not like what Gabriel did in order to appre­ci­ate the line his the­at­ric­al mode of present­a­tion points dir­ectly to Lady Gaga. But again, this is par for the course for an insti­tu­tion that gif­ted us with the phrase “cul­tur­al veget­ables,” and at which a top review­er inter­preted an assign­ment to write on a book about video games as an occa­sion to voice his dis­like of Jethro Tull. 

Prog rock, Sheffield snarks in the final line of his notice, “is the genre that gave the phrase ‘com­fort­ably numb’ to the lan­guage.” Except The Wall (a prob­lem­at­ic record but maybe a bet­ter one than you remem­ber) is the work of an arena-rock band—that’s part of its whole sub­ject. As spacey as Pink Floyd’s music got, it nev­er approached pro­g’s level of dif­fi­culty (Dave Stewart, the Canterbury Egg/Hatfield/National Health guy as opposed to the Eurythmics guy, once observed of a Robert Wyatt con­cert he par­ti­cip­ated in that it “turned out well des­pite Nick Mason’s inab­il­ity to play in 7/4”) or popularity.