CD Review: Heliopolis, City of the Sun

Heliopolis

City of the Sun

10t Records, 10T10078 (2014)

Back in 1989, I was certain that progressive rock was dead. I had a fairly decent view of the landscape back then, as I was publishing a monthly newsletter on the genre entitled On Reflection. Though it wasn’t the reason I started the venture, one of the biggest perks was that labels and bands sent me their wares to review. Unfortunately, it was the quality of those wares that led me to believe that prog had indeed fossilized into the dinosaur remains predicted more than 10 years earlier when punk took hold. Simply put, most of the recordings were awful.

It wasn’t so much that the musicians didn’t have chops, manly of them were quite talented. The problem was that they were not progressive. They didn’t just wear their influences on their sleeves, they draped them over three-piece suits. There were bands that sounded just like Genesis, or just like Yes, or just like Emerson, Lake & Palmer. If a band had the courage to attempt to sound just like more complex outfits like Gentle Giant and King Crimson, I would give them points for effort, but they were justifiably few in number.

It got so bad that I eventually shut down the newsletter and plunged myself into the healing waters of jazz, where the musicianship was even more impressive, the idea of blatantly copying another musician or group was anathema, and the music was heartfelt and honest – with no Taurus bass pedals, no ridiculous lyrics, and no capes.

In the ensuing years, I have continued to enjoy the prog that I always liked and have been downright suspicious of any modern attempts to wave the banner. I have written features and CD reviews for Progression magazine (which, incidentally, was originally launched as a continuation of On Reflection by one of my subscribers, with my blessing and assistance) since 2010, and while no 21^st-century progressive band has joined my personal Mount Progmore, I do realize that there are artists doing interesting things with the tools and technologies now available, who have a couple more decades of influences to absorb, and who are facing an even more hostile recording industry.

So perhaps my heart has softened, perhaps I have become more sentimental and nostalgic, perhaps I have left my guard down, but I do now acknowledge that prog has a pulse left. Even so, nothing could prepare me for City of the Sun, the debut album of Los Angeles-based Heliopolis, which I have to say is freaking awesome!

At the outset, they have all the trappings of prog-chic: a cosmic name; a five-piece lineup with wailing lead vocalist and hot-shot guitarist, keyboardist, bass, and drummer; and suite-like songs in excess of 10 minutes in length. A Theremin even appears, played by Probyn Gregory of the Wondermints and Brian Wilson’s band (in the latter group it is he who plays the Theremin – actually a Tannerin – on “Good Vibrations”).

As for the music, well, it’s classic prog as well, and while influences are discernible (the opening suite, “New Frontier,” in addition to sharing a title with a Donald Fagen composition, starts off with Crimson-esque crunch and cacophony, and once the vocals appear the composition ends up sounding like it could have borne the credits of Lee, Lifeson, Peart), there are no slavish imitations of anything that came before. Rather, there is a rich diversity of moods, tempos, and arrangements, where pop overtones and reflective balladry meld smoothly with jazz fusion and hard rock. For example, the six-minute “Elegy,” dedicated to the late singer/drummer Shaun Guerin, is not in the least bit funereal, unless you’re talking about a Viking funeral. This track has energy and passion to spare.

As for the players themselves, the high tenor vocals of Scott Jones are more Steve Hogarth than Greg Lake, and his articulation and emotion make the words worth listening to. With drummer Jerry Beller, keyboardist Matt Brown, and bassist Kerry Chicoine supplying harmony vocals, the voice component of the musical mix is thoughtfully and effectively deployed throughout.

On multiple keyboards, Brown supplies a wide range of compelling sounds and textures. With a focus on evocative musical expression, he is not one to supply aimless synth washes or death-ray flares; rather, he uses interesting voicings to complement what I would call “real” playing, as on his funky/jazzy solo on “Elegy” or his spacy but substantial solo on the 14-minute closer, “Love and Inspiration.”

The “rhythm section” is typically more a topic for discussion in jazz than in prog, where in many cases the bassist and the drummer act as competing soloists rather than as collaborating cogs in a unified rhythmic system. Chicoine and Beller defy that characterization, deftly executing sudden tempo shifts and providing exactly what the complex music requires to keep from falling apart – along with ample opportunities to add exciting filigrees.

Guitarist Matier eschews the prog stereotypes of pretzel fingers and faux classical renderings, preferring to wring a mix of intensity and lyricism from his instruments, playing metal power chords one moment and soaring, melodic solos that get under your skin and drill intro your brain the next. On the short, Rundgren-esque Mr. Wishbone, Matier plays all the instruments except drums.

My personal favorite track on the album (with five tracks in all, the CD clocks in at a respectable 42:48) is the second, the nearly-nine-minute “Take a Moment.” Musical and lyrical drama and intrigue are built through an ascending vocal line, frequently shifting tempos and dynamics, and powerful solos from Brown and Matier. The lyrics includes the following lines:

Life’s but a journey

Never ending, Just unfolding

Always happening the way that it should be

Grudgingly, I have to admit that the same could apply to progressive rock, even in 2014. I guess I have Heliopolis to thank (or blame) for that.

Rebooting the Blog: Introduction/King Crimson Concert Review

Have you ever looked up the definition of a word that you already know what it means, just to see what the actual definition is? I just did that with “reboot” and the definition was “boot again.” I guess it serves me right. After all, my life philosophy is “You don’t need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows” (a line by Bob Dylan), which to me has always meant, “have faith in your own instincts and intelligence, you don’t need an authority to tell you what’s clearly obvious to you.”

So why did I bother in the first place? Because I am rebooting my blog and I thought it would be fun to do it dictionary-style. I was wrong. And I may be wrong about rebooting my blog but since most of my readers are probably people who found it by accident, it doesn’t really matter. But to me and to anyone who has actually popped by with any regularity over the last few years, it does matter, or it should.

From the get-go, my blog was intended to be one way of building what the dying publishing industry calls a “platform” – an established area of expertise one has, along with a built-in following who might be interested in purchasing one’s books. The platform I chose – perhaps more accurately, it chose me – is music. After all, my first novel, The Grave & The Gay*, was based on a 17^th-century English folk ballad, while the second one I am currently struggling mightily with was inspired by a song by jazz singer Cassandra Wilson.

Maintaining a blog is no easy deal, as I soon found out, and I have frequently written posts that have nothing to do with music. That may prove to be true as well in the future, but to help invigorate my blog and infuse it with meaning, I have decided to reboot it primarily as a concert and CD review site. I have plenty of both to get me started, but if you are reading this and you have a CD you’d like me to review, please contact me via my website – http://jasonmrubin.com – and I will tell you how to send it to me.

I should note that I have a particular interest in prog and jazz, but am a fan of rock, pop, soul, and folk, as well as ethnic/world music and anything that doesn’t fit neatly in the dying music industry’s various marketing labels. I also write CD reviews and features for Progression magazine, and reviews and articles for the Arts Fuse online magazine and Musicovation blog, so I’m not a complete dodo.

Before I launch into my first review, I want to remind/inform my readers (intentional or accidental, you both are welcome here) the meaning behind the blog’s title, Dove Nested Towers. It is a typically inventive phrase by Van Dyke Parks that is part of the lyrics to the Brian Wilson masterpiece composition “Surf’s Up.” Originally written in 1966 for the Beach Boys’ aborted Smile album, the song eventually appeared in 1971 as the title track of the band’s LP offering that year. Brian did his own version in 2004 on Brian Wilson Presents SMiLE, and five different versions appear on the 2011 Smile Sessions boxed set. It is my favorite song.

*http://www.amazon.com/Grave-Gay-Jason-M-Rubin/dp/098496309X/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1411849518&sr=8-1&keywords=the+grave+and+the+gay

Concert review: King Crimson, September 16, 2014, Boston, Massachusetts, USA

Any band still going that started out in the late '60s by now will have experienced any number of lineup changes. Typically these are due to death or the intentionally vague “musical differences” and they tend to involve a single player. King Crimson is anything but a typical band. When they have a lineup change, it usually means everyone but the guitarist has been let go. Indeed, Robert Fripp, the seated lead guitarist who dresses and appears as composed as an accountant but plays like a zombie slayer, has been the one and only constant in what has now been eight different lineups since 1969.

These lineups have included a trio, quartet, quintet, and a double trio composed of two drummers, two guitarists, and two bass/Stick players. The eighth lineup may be the oddest one yet: seven musicians, including no fewer than three drummers who are set up in the front of the stage (Gavin Harrison, Bill Rieflin, and Pat Mastelotto), with two guitarists (Fripp and Jakko Jakszyk), bassist/Stick master Tony Levin, and sax/flute guru Mel Collins comprising the second line.

One reason for the many lineup changes (the band has accommodated a total of 21 full-time musicians in its history) is that it periodically breaks up and reforms. The first hiatus was from 1974-1981. By 1974, the band had endured three lineup changes in five years. The 1981 lineup had a successful three-year stint before ceasing operations until 1993, when the double trio was introduced. Two more hiatuses take us to the present day.

With each tour, Fripp takes pains to warn fans not to arrive at the venue with expectations that anything from prior lineups will be played. Typically, some older songs are included in the set lists, but the idea of a “greatest hits” repertoire is anathema to Fripp, who regards Crimson as “a way of doing things” rather than as an ongoing jukebox.

So it was that I arrived at the Emerson Colonial Theatre in Boston to experience how King Crimson would be “doing things” after 45 years of stops and starts. In spite of Fripp’s warnings, lineup #8 did seem to suggest that a retrospective approach to song election was possible. After all, Harrison was with the band in 2008; Jakszyk performed in a Crimson alumni band and has collaborated with Fripp, Collins, and Harrison; Mastelotto and Levin have done a few stints with Crimson together and apart, and Collins goes as far back as 1970.

What transpired was beyond all my expectations and, dare I say, fantasies. It should be noted that my favorite era of King Crimson was 1973-74; that three-album span featured my favorite rock-oriented drummer, Bill Bruford, as well as bassist/vocalist John Wetton, a brilliant player who seemed ever to be in search of fame and finally found it in 1983 in the band Asia. That era was particularly well-represented, and in fact the set’s opener (“Larks’ Tongues in Aspic, Part One”) and closer (“Starless”) came from those albums, along with four other songs (“Red,”, “One More Red Nightmare,” “The Talking Drum,” and “Larks’ Tongues in Aspic, Part Two”). That, for me, was well worth the price of admission.

The rarely acknowledged Islands album from 1972 (the last of three that Collins appeared on) surprisingly offered two songs, “The Letters” and the jazz-metal instrumental workout, “Sailor’s Tale.” Collins was also proud representative of the 1970 tune “Pictures of a City,” blaring on sax with the force of a Peter Brotzmann (look him up). Collins, whom I saw on Roger Waters’ first solo tour in 1984, was one of four MVPs of this show, playing soprano, alto, tenor, and baritone sax in addition to flute.

Of the eight remaining songs, six date from after Bruford left the band, at which time I took my own hiatus from Crimson’s only-constant-is-change gyrations. As such, I was not familiar with them, though the level of musicianship was consistently amazing throughout the show. As a final encore, the band rocked through the touchstone tune, the opener on Crimson’s 1969 debut album, “21^st Century Schizoid Man,” which featured an astounding drum solo by Harrison, who was another MVP, as was Tony Levin, who played three different basses and Chapman Stick and had the unenviable responsibility of anchoring the heavy, complex playing of this seven-legged sea monster.

The final MVP I would give to Fripp himself, who says nothing on stage and yet says all there needs to be said on his guitar. It could well be said that Robert Fripp is also a way of doing things, and like the band he has carried on through thick and thin, there is no one who does it anything like he does. As for the three drummers, I feel that Harrison could have done the job himself (as, indeed, Bruford could have done, and maybe would have if he and Fripp were not currently as close as Ray and Dave Davies).

It is inevitable that this lineup will cease to exist and another hiatus will begin. But Fripp is 68 now and one has to wonder how much more of this he can take. One night was powerful enough for me; imagine being in the midst of it night after night. He has finally plumbed the depths of the King Crimson catalogue and past lineups so if there is a ninth lineup, it will be a challenge to make it a surprising one. But setting up and facing challenges is ultimately what King Crimson is all about; indeed, it is what it does best.

King Crimson Returns From the Dead – Again

-->The King is dead. Long live the King.

When the king in question is progressive rock legends King Crimson, this is not news. Practically alone among all contemporary music ensembles, King Crimson has made a habit of being active for a few years before splitting up, then reforming a few years later – typically with a radically different lineup and sonic palette. Just last week, leader, guitarist, and lone mainstay Robert Fripp announced that the group, moribund since 2008, would be “returning to active service” as of September 2014.

Predictably, the lineup (Crimson’s eighth since 1969) is new and highly unorthodox. The group’s foundation comprises no fewer than three drummers: previous members Gavin Harrison (on loan from latter-day proggers Porcupine Tree) and Pat Mastelotto, and Bill Reiflin (REM). On-again, off-again member Tony Levin (bass and Chapman Stick) is on again. Saxophonist Mel Collins, who last played with Crimson in 1974, returns, while newcomer Jakko Jakszyk (who played in a Crimson cover band as well as a trio with Fripp and Collins) joins Fripp on guitar duties.

As notable as who is in the band is who is not. Guitarist Adrian Belew, who endured through three lineup changes over the past three decades, was not asked to participate. On his Facebook page, Belew noted, “Robert informed me in an email that he was starting a 7-piece version of the band. He said I would not be right for what the band is doing.” Drummer Bill Bruford, widely considered to be Crimson’s (and the progressive rock genre’s) all-time best drummer, retired in 2009 after penning his autobiography, which details the increasingly prickly relationship he had with Fripp at the end of their 20-year association.

Fripp has often said that studio recordings are like love letters while live performances are hot dates. In a break from group history, the new incarnation of Crimson has no plans for making a studio recording (the last Crimson album of new material was released in 2003) and instead is compiling a concert tour focusing on the U.S., during which the band will perform new renditions of classic material.

Though the active-inactive-reactive pattern has long been established, Fripp’s news has shocked the progressive rock community, largely because Fripp himself announced his own retirement from performance in an interview with The Financial Times in August 2012. The original King Crimson went through three lineups from 1969-1974 before Fripp announced that the band had “ceased to exist.” It did not reappear until 1981, when Fripp and Bruford reformed with Americans Belew and Levin. That lineup made three albums in three years and broke up in 1985, only to reform in 1994 as a “double trio” with two guitarists (Fripp and Belew), two Stick players (Levin and Trey Gunn), and two drummers (Bruford and Mastelotto).

Today, with an eighth lineup after four hiatuses, King Crimson is again, in Fripp’s words in “Go! mode”. About the only conclusions one can draw from this is that there is likely in the future to be yet another hiatus with perhaps yet another lineup – that, and the fact that whatever music this new King Crimson makes, it will be highly adventurous, unusual, and heavy. In every incarnation, the band has been a musical pioneer, whether with the Mellotron in the late 60s and early 70s, group improvisation of the highest order in the mid-70s, intricate electronic interplay in the 80s, and bombastic noise in the 90s and 00s. In an era when old bands routinely reform for money rather than from inspiration, it is refreshing that a consistently noncommercial group like King Crimson feels it still has useful work to do.

Apparently Mel Brooks was right. It is good to be the King.

After 40 Years, King Crimson's Larks' Tongues in Aspic Is Still a Delicacy

One of my favorite albums of all time is one that I bought in error. One summer, I had served an apprenticeship of sorts. It was 1978, I was 15 years old, and I was working at a summer camp where I became friends with a guy named David Kaplan. He was a few years older than me and a very good guitarist, shy but also very funny. And he had exceptional taste in music: jazz, fusion, progressive rock. I expressed interest and he was happy to school me. It is thanks to him that I am a fanatic about Gentle Giant. It was through him that I first heard the music of Chick Corea. And it was because of him that I became introduced to King Crimson.

If memory serves, he only had one King Crimson album, but it was one that I liked very much. The album was called Starless and Bible Black and it had been released in 1974, back when I was listening to the Monkees, the Osmond Brothers, and the Jackson Five. What struck me most was the first song, a barnstormer called “The Great Deceiver,” which began with the startling couplet, “Health food faggot with a bartered bride/Likes to comb his hair with a dipper ride.” I found it funny but the music itself was relentlessly exciting, aggressive, and surprising. I didn’t know it at the time, but much of it was improvised and recorded live in concert, though the applause had been edited out so it appeared to be a studio-recorded album.

The musicians were Robert Fripp on guitar, John Wetton on bass and vocals, David Cross on violin, and Bill Bruford on drums. David told me that if I liked this album, then I might like the debut album by a new group called U.K., which featured both Wetton and Bruford. This would prove a pattern for me. As I became more sophisticated about music, I would be drawn to bands already defunct or decaying and ignore the music scene that existed around me currently. In 1978, I was ignorant of the emerging New Wave, except for local heroes The Cars. But I couldn’t be bothered because I had nearly a decade of prog history to catch up on.

When camp was over, I went on a shopping spree. I bought Gentle Giant’s Free Hand and U.K.’s eponymous album. Next, I went searching for the King Crimson album with the funny lyric and ferocious music. Trouble was, I couldn’t remember the name of the album or even the cover image. I could, however, for whatever reason, recall the typography (it would be a full decade before I found myself actually working for a digital font company). In one store’s rack, I scoured the King Crimson section and found what I thought was what I was looking for. I bought it, took it home, unsealed it, and put it on my turntable.

Immediately, I knew I had purchased the wrong album. Where Starless and Bible Black had opened with a bang, this one opened with a kalimba, an African thumb piano. Soft percussion builds over the first minute until a violin enters and then fades, reappearing at the three-minute mark, where soon it is joined by Fripp’s guitar. Violin dominates until about 4:30, when all hell breaks loose, and for the first time I am assured that even if I had the album wrong, at least I got the group right.

The album I purchased was Larks’ Tongues in Aspic, released 40 years ago today, on March 23, 1973. It was the first edition of the group to feature the lineup I detailed earlier, and in fact included an additional musician, percussionist Jamie Muir, who left shortly after the album was recorded to join a monastery. The lineup was responsible for the two albums already mentioned, as well as 1974’s Red (the follow-up studio release to Starless and Bible Black, which featured the much-reduced presence of violinist Cross), and a live album, USA, released in 1975 but recorded prior to Red.

For the next 46-and-a-half minutes, Larks’ Tongues in Aspic beat me into submission. It was an overwhelming experience. It began, I suppose, with the cover, a striking sun/moon image that had no words on it at all. The 13:36 opener, “Larks’ Tongues in Aspic, Part 1,” went through various sections, alternately fast and slow, incorporating at one point dialogue from a television drama. In later years, when I first heard Arvo Pärt’s “Miserere,” I likened it to this track as it repeatedly goes from hushed tones to full-throttle chaos in an instant.

The opening track is followed by a short but lovely ballad. “Book of Saturday” clocks in at just under three minutes and features guitar, bass, and violin, along with a nice vocal. It is as calming as the previous track was unnerving. Side 1 ends with “Exiles,” another vocal number; that and the three songs on Side 2 all range between just over seven and just under eight minutes long. “Exiles” is a mostly gentle song featuring the full band, a minor mellow epic that seems to suggest that the opening track was an aberration; that the tunes, short or long, are ambitious but soothing. The opening to Side 2 quickly dispels this notion.

“Easy Money,” the Side 2 opener, brings back the dark dissonance in another multi-part piece that has no trouble balancing a near-a capella opening verse with full-band, full-throttle musical mania. Bruford is a master at repelling any attempt on the listener’s part to tap their foot along with the beat. Just when it seems you have it, it changes and as much as it may initially seem that he’s hitting his snare at random intervals, you realize there’s a logic to it and that he’s in complete control at all times, sometimes making his statement with a crack of the snare and sometimes making it with utter silence. The song ends with the rather frightening sound of a laugh box.

This is followed by a mesmerizing instrumental called “The Talking Drum,” which very slowly and gradually builds from a barely audible groove to a revving turbo charge of energy that must soon be ready to release – yet it doesn’t. It stops on a dime with the metallic opening riff of the album’s closer, “Larks’ Tongues in Aspic, Part 2.” Very unlike “Part 1,” this one is a straight hard blast of immense electric power, a roiling instrumental that takes no prisoners and shows no mercy.

Thus it was that I ended up instantly loving this album that I bought in error, which only served to propel me back to a different store to find Starless and Bible Black and explore the King Crimson catalogue thoroughly, just as I began to do with the prog and fusion artists mentioned earlier and others that I and my friends were yet to discover. Forty years after Larks’ Tongues in Aspic was released, 35 after I first heard it, it remains a remarkable work that is always in power rotation on my home stereo.

Thirty Years On, King Crimson’s Discipline Retains Its Power

King Crimson, Discipline. Released September 22, 1981.

In the Jewish community, a boy comes of age at his bar mitzvah, which typically occurs at age 13. For me, that was 1976. Disco was at its height and bad fashion was the only fashion there was. But at 13, I didn’t care so much about the rather desolate cultural landscape into which I was thrust. At 15, however, I did begin to care. In just those two years, the insipid simplicity of disco was replaced by the inspired simplicity of New Wave. But simplicity was not where my head was at. I’d begun doing certain things recreationally and my brain was excited by more complex and sophisticated music.

By 1979, I was firmly a fan of “progressive rock,” most specifically the music of bands such as Gentle Giant, King Crimson, Yes, Pink Floyd, ELP, The Moody Blues, Jethro Tull, Genesis, and Rush. These bands would more or less align themselves with the credo that appeared in the liner notes of Gentle Giant’s second album, from 1971: “It is our goal to expand the frontiers of contemporary popular music at the risk of becoming very unpopular.” Applying instrumentation not typically found in rock music (such as violin, cello, and flute), technology (such as synthesizers and various new gizmos), lengthy compositions, and album-length concepts, progressive rock was never radio-friendly, though some groups like Yes, Pink Floyd, Jethro Tull, and Rush did manage to become quite popular, often through a somewhat more accessible tune edited for radio that managed to slip through the programming gatekeepers.

Unfortunately, 1979 was not a great time to enter this genre. Gentle Giant was working on its final album, continuing a recent trend of ever more commercial-sounding releases. King Crimson had disbanded in 1974. Yes lost its singer and keyboardist following a creative nadir of an album called Tormato. Pink Floyd was riding high with The Wall, but significant personnel changes were on the horizon, as they were with The Moody Blues and Jethro Tull. ELP was gone. Rush was doing well on the radio, which to some extent cut into their prog cred, and an exciting new band called U.K., comprising two ex-members of King Crimson, broke up after only two albums and two tours.

So it was that I turned my back and ears on the current music scene and instead became obsessed with the music of 1967-75. To this day, my younger colleagues consider me “the ‘70s guy.” Even when entering college in the fall of 1981, I was decidedly anti-anything that had to do with ‘80s music or fashion. There was, however, one thing that helped me bridge the gap between the past and the present: the sudden and surprising reappearance of King Crimson.

Unbeknownst to me, guitarist Robert Fripp, the group’s leader and only constant during its initial run from 1969-74, had approached drummer Bill Bruford, who had been in the last incarnation of the band, which lasted from 1972-74 (and on U.K.’s first album, as well as being the original drummer of Yes and serving short tour stints with Genesis and Gong), with the idea of doing a project together. Fripp, who had been working with the likes of David Byrne, Peter Gabriel, Brian Eno, and Daryl Hall, wanted a somewhat funkier drum sound, with less emphasis on cymbals. Bruford had just gotten a Simmons electronic drum kit. Together, they began to sketch out a sound.

Bassist Tony Levin, who had played on Fripp’s first solo album and was a mainstay of Gabriel’s band, was recruited, as was Adrian Belew, an innovative guitarist who had brought interesting sounds to Frank Zappa and the Talking Heads. These two additions were notable in that they were the first Americans to be members of King Crimson (though the band was not yet called that), and they brought with them a host of electronic goodies: Levin the Chapman Stick, and Belew an assortment of pedals and gizmos that enabled him to mimic the sounds of wild animals. Not only that, but never before had another guitarist slung his axe alongside Fripp, an acknowledged master of the instrument.

Fripp dubbed the band Discipline and they began gigging as such. Eventually, Fripp concluded that this band was, in fact, the reincarnation of King Crimson. The name was minimally more marketable (though the band had its cult following, it had been seven years since they last were heard from), but more significantly, it raised the expectations for the outfit.

From my dorm at college, I heard that a new King Crimson album – titled Discipline – was afoot and even more exciting, the band was set to play at the college that spring. I couldn’t imagine what the new Crimson would sound like. My friend Marc, back home in Newton, Massachusetts, bought the album before I did and we listened to it together for the first time over the phone. It was unlike anything we had heard before. Yes, there was a Talking Heads rhythmic influence, the production values were of its time, and it was unquestionably progressive. But the front line of Chapman Stick and the twin interweaving guitars created a unique sonic jigsaw that could only have come from something called King Crimson, even as it distinguished this edition from all previous ones.


I bought the album as soon as I could and played it often. I became very familiar with the seven cuts. But as the concert approached, I began a relationship with that album unlike anything I have ever had with any other recording.

I was a member of the student group that produced and promoted concerts on campus, and one of my responsibilities as a Publicity Department volunteer was to set up a record player on a table on the Campus Center Concourse and play the records of artists who were appearing, give out information, and answer questions. Typically, I had other volunteers I would schedule for when I had classes, but at this time for some reason I can no longer remember, extra hands were hard to come by. Therefore, I manned the turntable for long stretches over a three- or four-week period.

What this meant was that I heard Discipline in full probably four or five times a day for weeks. The first interesting aspect to that is that I never became sick of it. There always seemed to be new things to discover in it. The other thing is that I found the varying tempos and timbres of the album seemed to match perfectly the rise and fall of activity within the Campus Center. In between classes, students would rush through with a cacophonous din of conversation, shoe clacking, and the beeping rustle of retail transactions all around me. But then it would clear out and serenity would take over. Fast, slow, loud, soft, organic and electronic, Discipline had it all, and it truly became my soundtrack for that period of my life.


Ultimately, the concert came and it was a glorious experience. In the meantime, 1981 also saw Rush come out with its masterpiece album, Moving Pictures. In 1982, Asia, a supergroup comprising exp-members of Yes, King Crimson, and ELP, debuted to much commercial acclaim. Yes rocketed to the top of the pyramid in 1983 with 90125. It seemed progressive rock was back with a vengeance. But when Crimson disbanded again in 1984, the genre again appeared on the verge of extinction. Groups still plied their trade, but more often than not the music was a series of trade-offs between the echoes of the glory days and a more commercial, current sound that alienated as many old fans as it did win new converts.

But that’s as may be. The fact is, for 30 of my 48 years, King Crimson’s Discipline has been an album of unique emotional and visceral power for me, one that is by turns terrifying and tranquil, and as complete as it is complex. To Robert Fripp, Adrian Belew, Tony Levin, and Bill Bruford: Thank you.

Tales From Typographic Oceans

My first job out of college was doing public relations for a producer of computer industry trade shows. I was there for two years and got to visit Atlanta and Las Vegas multiple times, as well as San Francisco, Los Angeles, and Tampa. But I wasn’t all that interested in the computer industry and so I left in search of new opportunities. After 10 months without a job, I was ready to do just about anything. During this span of time being unemployed, I was devastated by the end of a four-year relationship and I met the woman I would eventually marry and divorce.

It was at that point (1988) that I got hired by a company called Bitstream, which was the first independent digital typefoundry. What that means is that they made digital fonts that anyone can use on any computer or printer. That seems obvious now, but back then it was a matter of a U.S. patent for an artificial intelligence-based scaling technology, while a package of four typefaces (usually the roman, italic, bold, and bold italic of a single design) sold at retail for $200.

This was when the term WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get) was in vogue; it meant that the type you saw on your screen looked very much like the type on the document you printed. Again, we take that for granted today, but back then it was pretty exciting. That capability and the democratization of type (meaning it was no longer the exclusive domain of professional printers and publishers) led to the emergence of desktop publishing.

As part of Bitstream’s marketing communications team, I had to know how to use this stuff and when I realized how easy it was to make a pretty professional-looking document I realized I could do something I’d long thought of doing: publishing my own music newsletter.

The reason I wanted to do a music newsletter is because I’ve always loved talking about music. I was sort of expert in various groups and genres, was always an avid liner note reader who could make connections between producers and studios, and loved comparing and contrasting different musicians and albums. My friends and I were all like this, and I thought it would be cool to create a vehicle that would broaden the discussion among like-minded people across the country.

At the time, I was a subscriber to a Todd Rundgren fanzine, which was well-done in terms of content (having had the cooperation of Rundgren’s management) but hard on the eyes. I wanted to do something that looked nicer and hoped that the content would work itself out. But first I had to figure out what group or genre I wanted the newsletter (personally I despise the term fanzine) to focus on. It didn’t take all that long, as I pretty much knew I wanted to talk about progressive rock, that cerebral form of music that grew out of late-‘60s psychedelia and whose heyday lasted until the backlash of mid- to late-‘70s punk and new wave.

The latter styles brought rock music back to the basics after the progressives blended classical motifs and impressionistic lyrics in a complex stew of unusual time signatures, expansive instrumentation (multiple keyboards, mellotrons and moogs, double-necked guitars, and Taurus bass pedals were standard, and flute, violin, cello, and vibraphone were in some groups’ arsenals as well), side-long songs (one album by Yes, Tales From Topographic Oceans, was a two-record set with only four songs, while Jethro Tull and Nektar both put out albums where a single composition spanned both sides of a record), and the dreaded concept album.


Being so cerebral, progressive rock was a natural for prompting musical discussion. However, I thought for a while as to whether I wanted to key on my favorite progressive group, Gentle Giant, or the prog genre as a whole. Ultimately, I decided that Giant was too obscure (this was pre-Internet and I didn’t have a way to know just how many Giant fans there are in the world). Also, Giant ended in 1980 and few of its members were particularly active so it seemed like the content well would soon run dry. So I decided to focus on progressive rock, but I named the newsletter after a Gentle Giant composition, On Reflection.

To lay out the newsletter, I used a long-defunct application called PageMaker. I learned on the job how to design a publication, prepare images for printing, and amass content. I was lucky in that former Yes members had just announced out of the blue that they would be forming a new band with the law-firm name of Anderson Bruford Wakeman Howe (Bruford had done even better work with two successive lineups of King Crimson after leaving Yes in 1972). So between that, a manifesto of what I wanted to accomplish with the newsletter, and a few album reviews, I had much of the first issue composed in fairly short order.

The next challenge was to promote it. I elected to start small with a single 1/16-page ad in Goldmine magazine, the primary publication of record collectors. From one ad I got numerous queries. I decided that I would send an issue to all respondents with an offer to subscribe. Over the next few issues, subscriptions grew and I was surprised to get subscribers from Europe and Japan. I don’t recall how many readers I had at the newsletter’s peak but it was well beyond my poor management and financial skills, and within a few short years On Reflection went belly up.

When all was said and done, On Reflection ran monthly from February 1989 to March 1992. Nineteen months later, I married a woman who despises progressive rock.

I was sad yet relieved that my venture had failed. The fact is, towards the end I was getting kind of sick of the genre, the problem being that I had been bound to focus on one style of music, listening to new recordings sent to me of neo-progressive bands who sounded just like 1973-era Genesis or Emerson, Lake & Palmer. Though I was desperate to explore jazz and ethnic music more deeply, I felt constrained by the needs and expectations of my subscribers to maintain a narrow musical focus – ironic, given the expansive scope of the genre.

Yet in many ways it was a very positive experience for me. It was my first entrepreneurial venture, it gave me a chance to write about a subject I was passionate about, I met some interesting people, and I had the opportunity to interview a few prog musicians, including the lovely Annie Haslam from Renaissance (she began the phone interview by saying she had just stepped out of the shower, and I nearly fainted), the iconoclastic Daevid Allen from Gong, and the ambitious Derek Shulman from Gentle Giant, who at the time was president of Atco Records and is still an industry executive and entrepreneur.

Today, I still enjoy progressive rock, and have even reviewed CDs for Progression magazine, which essentially is the reincarnation of On Reflection, it having risen from the ashes by a former subscriber with minor assistance from me in the beginning. However, I now have the freedom to listen to whatever I want whenever I want, so I certainly don’t miss those days spent traversing typographic oceans around the dark side of the moon, venturing close to the edge and lying down on Broadway.

Progressing again

As I discussed in an earlier post on this blog, in my late 20s I wrote and published a monthly newsletter about progressive rock. It was called On Reflection, named after a composition by my favorite progressive band, Gentle Giant. It never grew too big, or too successful, but it enabled me to write about and share my passion with people around the world, some of whom still remember me two decades later.

As review, what I refer to as progressive rock is a genre whose heyday was the late 1960s to the latter 1970s; another way to put it is that it was spawned by psychedelia and spurned by punk. The best known performers were bands such as Yes, Genesis, Pink Floyd, King Crimson, and Emerson, Lake & Palmer. Though all these bands, including Gentle Giant, were British, prog groups flourished in the United States, Japan, Italy, Sweden, France, and many other countries.

Progressive rock is hard to define because there were scant similarities between the linear bombast of a Yes or an ELP and the intricately interlocking musical puzzles of Gentle Giant, between the spacy soundscapes of Pink Floyd and the improvisatory darkness of King Crimson, between the epic sagas of Genesis and the instrumental eclecticism of Dutch proggers Focus. But just as U.S. Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart said about obscenity, "I know it when I see it," one can identify progressive rock fairly easily (as I borrow the structure of comedian Jeff Foxworthy's tiresome "You know you're a redneck if..." routine):

• If girls run screaming from the room when you play an album, chances are good that it's a prog rock album.
• If the cover art depicts a scene that could never exist in the known universe, chances are good that it's a prog rock album.
• If the shortest tune on the album is 8:57, chances are good that it's a prog rock album.
• If the guitarist plays electric and acoustic 6- and 12-string guitars, chances are good that it's a prog rock album.
• If you see the words "moog", "harpsichord", "cello", and "Taurus bass pedals", chances are good that it's a prog rock album.
• If the lyrics make more sense read backwards than forwards, chances are good that it's a prog rock album.
• If the band members are white and intensely ugly, chances are they're a prog rock band.

I could go on, but hopefully you're getting the picture.

Of course, I can say all these things because I'm one of the club, although like Groucho Marx, I'm at least a little wary about being part of a club that would have me as a member. I like to think that even I, within a crowd of fellow proggers, can look around and think "These guys are weird." And yet the music does move me.

On the other hand, a lot of other kinds of music move me as well, and because of that I got bored and burned out from doing the newsletter. I felt I always had to be in a prog mood and frankly I wasn't. I was getting more heavily into jazz, folk, and classical music and I was tired of listening to new CDs of new bands who were trying to sound like the old albums by old bands. So I stepped away from the scene, still listening to what I liked when I felt like it, but not delving any deeper into the genre.

In the meantime, as I explained in the original post, one of my subscribers, John Collinge, wanted to keep the newsletter going. He renamed it Progression, and I helped him with the first couple of issues. After a while, I lost touch with him but last year, curious to see if it was still in print, I Googled him and found that he had grown Progression into a massive quarterly magazine with glossy pages and lots of ads, photos, and interviews. It's quite impressive and a vast evolution from the original eight-page offset-printed newsletter I folded, sealed, labeled, stamped, and mailed on my own.

So I got back in touch with John and he asked me if I was interested in writing any CD reviews. I demurred, not wanting to get back in the scene. But then recently, when a friend helped me to discover that a writer today needs a platform and that mine was music, it occurred to me that I should be doing more music writing and getting my name back in music circles. A few years ago, I submitted a number of Gentle Giant CD reviews to the Gentle Giant website, where they are still posted; I might as well do the same thing and get my name in print. So I wrote him recently to say OK, I'm in. In my mail the other day were 14 progressive CDs, only one from a band I'd heard of before.

So here I go, back in the prog world with ears open and maybe a bit more objectivity than back in the day. And as I venture on, I think of the lyrics to a song by Yes with the mega-proggy title, "The Revealing Science of God":

What happened to this song we once knew so well
Signed promise for moments caught within the spell
I must have waited all my life for this moment

Past Projects I: Music newsletter

In February 1989, I published the premiere issue of On Reflection, a monthly newsletter on progressive rock, the musical phenomenon of the late 60s and 70s that dared suggest that Mussorgsky and Bartok could be as valid an influence for rock and roll as Muddy Waters and Bo Diddley. Key bands include Yes, Pink Floyd, King Crimson, Jethro Tull, Emerson, Lake & Palmer (ELP), Genesis, Gentle Giant, Renaissance, and Gong, among many others. I wrote and published the newsletter until March 1992.

There were two reasons why I started the newsletter, and two reasons why I terminated it. The first reason for starting it was that my friends and I loved to talk about the music we loved, and progressive rock was particularly rich for both conversation and argument because it was dense, impressionistic, complex, and bombastic. The second reason for starting it was that I was working for a digital type company called Bitstream that was helping to launch the desktop publishing revolution of the late 80s, and I was eager to experiment with the new tools I had access to. The reasons for ceasing publication were that I was broke (I've never been cut out to be a businessman and I guess I either never got a critical mass of subscribers or else never charged enough to build a financial cushion), and that I was eager to broaden my musical horizons and spend more time learning about and listening to jazz, folk, and ethnic music.

The title, On Reflection, is the name of a song by Gentle Giant, which is an all-time, hall of fame favorite band of mine, right up there with Brian Wilson. This English sextet-turned-quintet was, as its name suggested, both minimalistic and maximalistic. Eschewing long jams, songs, and solos, the group has been called chamber rock, constructing a musical jigsaw puzzle by stacking short, repeated, polyphonous phrases on top of each other. In addition to the standard arsenal of acoustic and electric guitars, multiple electronic and acoustic keyboards, bass, and drums, the members played such instruments as violin, cello, vibraphone, recorder, saxophone, and trumpet. They also were expert at astonishingly complex four- and five-part vocal harmonies. Given my love for the band, and the fact that the heyday of progrock was long over (though it continues to endure below the radar), I thought the title appropriate.

Here's Gentle Giant performing that song:



During my tenure, I had the opportunity to interview a few prog musicians, including the lovely Annie Haslam from Renaissance (she began the phone interview by saying she had just stepped out of the shower, and I nearly fainted), the weird Daevid Allen from Gong, and the ambitious Derek Shulman from Gentle Giant, who at the time was president of Atco Records and now is the founder of DRT Records, which has reissued a few Giant titles.

Check out Haslam's astounding vocal gymnastics:



After I called it a day, a subscriber named John Collinge, who had been a reporter for the Lowell Sun newspaper, asked if he could resurrect it. I helped him with his first two issues and he has grown it into a much more professional-looking publication called Progression Magazine.