Trollheart

Before we leave 1969 then, it's time to take one more trip

to find an album by a band who basically lived in an attic. Well, sort of. With very little money, no transportation and barely enough food, the band ironically called It's A Beautiful Day hung out in a cramped freezing attic in Seattle while they recorded their debut album. Now that's rock and roll! Or, perhaps, not. At any rate, this is the one we're finishing up our look at the sixties with.

Album title: It's a Beautiful Day
Artiste: It's a Beautiful Day
Nationality: American
Label: Columbia
Year: 1969
Tracklisting: White bird/Hot summer day/Wasted union blues/Girl with no eyes/Bombay calling/Bulgaria/Time is
Comments: You can hear what I guess would be called the California sound, the kind of thing you'd have heard from The Mamas and the Papas around this time as “White bird” gets things underway with a nice soft organ line and pretty good double vocals from David and Linda LaFlamme, with some beautiful violin from David. The way these two complement each other vocally is very impressive, and I think the dude is playing violin and flute here, almost on top of each other (or produced that way anyway); it fleshes out the song, but I still think six minutes is pushing it a little. “Hot summer day” has a nice line in organ and some fine harmonica, and again the singing is superb. Another lovely violin solo, really adds something to a song I already like.

Then there's a total (and I mean total) shift for “Wasted union blues”, with a big nasty squealing guitar and hard piano, some of it a little discordant, the song perhaps reflecting the band's frustration at their situation as described in the intro. Some slick harmonica coming in though, however it gets seriously frenetic at the end, and we're into “Girl with no eyes”, a lovely little gentle waltzy ballad, with what sounds like a harpsichord solo, really beautiful song. Oh yeah, I hear it, the elephant in the room. I know Deep Purple were accused of ripping it off for “Sweet child in time”, and the opening of “Bombay calling” does sound really similar. Think it will turn out to be an instrumental. Great work by David on the violin, and yes, it is an instrumental. Seems like “Bulgaria” may turn out to be a really nice ballad, very evocative and moody, totally superb and builds up to a hell of a climax.

The last track is nine minutes long, but somehow I don't think that's going to be a problem, as I have thoroughly enjoyed everything (almost) here. “Time is” starts off as some sort of mad frenetic folk dance style and then the vocal comes in and it just gets better. Just David on the mike initially anyway, kind of has an almost Nick Cave thing going, very energetic. Some superb organ work here, and there's even a drum solo that doesn't suck or have me reaching for the Glock. Bit of a fun jam all round, very enjoyable.

Favourite track(s): Hot summer day, Girl with no eyes, Bombay calling, Bulgaria
Least favourite track(s): Wasted union blues
Overall impression: Really surprised how much I loved this. I thought it was kind of a joke record, but it obviously is not, and in fact displays emerging talent and vision that would see this band release another three more albums into the seventies, although by the second album Linda LaFlamme had left. They apparently still gig even now, over forty years later.
Personal Rating:

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Trollheart

Before we move on to 1970, a few last words about the late sixties. The effect, both of the bands formed and of certain albums released, as well as the overall embryonic first steps of progressive rock can't be overestimated. Although much of the better known and indeed more successful albums, the ones that have stood the test of time and gone on in some cases to become classics, and which broke certain bands commercially, happened in the seventies, it's likely that they would not have had the chance to do this had it not been for the trendsetting (and, perhaps paradoxically, trend-defying) bands who came first. As noted in the original intro, though prog rock later became known for and reviled as overblown, pretentious and up itself – accusations I can not, in most cases, defend – at the time of its birth it was something entirely new. Breaking away from the restrictions of the standard song format, sacrificing chart success in order to produce meaningful albums, utilising instruments and arrangements that had not been popular before, and not worrying about the length of songs were all ideas that were very new, and indeed risky at the time, so there was no guarantee that they would find favour with the music buying public.

And in many cases, they did not. Prog was not by any means successful by itself initially; many of the bands who played prog, or dabbled with it, or skirted along its edges, were of course already known for other, more perhaps standard and accepted forms of music – the Beatles, Chicago, Santana – so did not have as much to lose, theoretically, as did the newer kids on the block – Pink Floyd, Yes, Frank Zappa, Beefheart, Soft Machne, Van der Graaf Generator – who had no following and had to rely on the hope that people would buy into the new music they were creating. But as more and more of these types of bands began to rise up, and as psych and blues and jazz crossed over and mixed, and elements of classical married up to more conventional rock, a strange kind of hybrid was being born, and soon most if not all of these bands would be a part of it. As 1969 gave way to 1970, the following decade would produce some of the most iconic and important albums in the genre.

1969 was also more or less the death knell for the end of the flower power and hippy movement, the Summer of Love would be followed by the Winter of Discontent as the shootings at Kent State loomed large and ugly on the immediate horizon, and overall protests against the Vietnam War escalated and got more militant, leading to crackdowns by the US government against their own people, as the gulf between old and young, traditional and new ideas, establishment and counter culture grew. It wasn't a civil war of course, not on the streets anyway, but within the hearts and minds of the young people who had grown up in this era of war on one side and peace and love on the other, there was certainly a battle raging, and one that would not be easily won. Haight-Ashbury was closed for business, free love now had to be paid for and hippies turned their energies from writing songs about wizards and castles to chanting “Hell no! We won't go!” as those in power watched, simmering with rage as the beloved Stars and Stripes went up in flames, a harsh symbol of and rallying cry for a country opposed to a war they did not believe was their concern, but which their young men were expected to die in.

Musically, the 1970s would see a huge shift in musical direction with the explosion of disco and funk, which would expand on the soul music coming out of Detroit in the sixties and move to take over the charts for most of the decade, while slowly, hard rock would metamorphose into and give birth to heavy metal, while there would also be a minor resurgence in folk and Country music, with the likes of John Denver, Cat Stevens and Gordon Lightfoot all making it into the charts. Against this background, progressive rock would strive and thrive, and for a while it would be seen as the thinking man's music, as fluffy disco and chart hits peppered the top reaches of the charts, and whimsical folk tunes would also make a respectable showing. Prog rock would without question champion and make popular the idea of buying albums, as distinct from the chart-topping record-buying public, who would prefer to shell out on singles and often not care what else the artist had written or played if it was not popular. Prog would introduce the idea of stories in songs, stories in albums, and birth the idea of the concept album as well as pioneering a trend which would see some of the most lavish and detailed cover art adorning their albums, with artists like Roger Dean and Storm Thorgerson rising to the top of their field.

Prog bands would also engineer huge advances in the concept of the stageshow, with lighting, effects, the emerging video technologies and stage art all being used to their utmost, often leading to a band so wreathed in dry ice and surrounded by such massive backdrops that it could be hard to see them onstage. Gigs would become no longer just a way to see the band and hear the music; they would become totally immersive experiences, equivalent in some cases to seeing, or even participating in, a movie only the audience there would ever get to see, and bring the fans closer to the band while simultaneously, if not deliberately, pushing them back and holding them at arm's length. Massive talents would rise in the seventies who would go on to become legends, dominate the music scene for decades, some of whom are still with us.

In 1970 alone, both ELO and ELP would be formed, and this first year of the new decade would also see the rise of Gentle Giant, with already formed bands like Genesis and Yes releasing important albums, and others, formed but without an album, releasing their debuts, such as Supertramp, Egg and Focus. Though it would really take another two or three years before prog rock really found its stride, it was at this point climbing out of the cradle and if not actually walking yet, certainly crawling across the floor like certain characters in a later Genesis song. And to further paraphrase that song, these bands were already beginning to lift their faces to the sky, like the forest fight for sunlight that takes root in every tree, and soon those trees would blossom, grow and yield wonderful fruit.

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Trollheart: Signature-free since April 2018

The Batlord

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Trollheart

Just because it hasn't got pictures, huh? Don't you have comics to read?

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The Batlord

read: 0
didn't read: 1

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Neapolitan

I'm not a fan of It's a Beautiful Day but found that interesting. Journey might not had happen if that coin went the other way.

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Trollheart

Chapter III: New World Rising: Learning to Crawl

There are those (myself among them) who will tell you that the seventies was the best time for music. Now that may or may not be true, depending on your viewpoint and also, critically, depending on whether or not you lived through that period. But what can't be denied is that this was the decade of innovation and change. So many new and varied music forms came bubbling up in the 1970s, more than I believe any before or since. Hard rock, already well established through bands like Free, Cream, The Yardbirds, The Stones and The Who, would slowly metamorphose into heavy metal, while breaking down cultural borders, the soul, funk and r&B from the black ghettoes would find its place in the mainstream, as disco began its careful takeover of the airwaves and the charts. And of course, waiting in the wings, one of the branches from the hard rock tree, progressive rock would make this time its golden period. Bands like Yes, ELP, Genesis and Camel would come forth – some of whom had already made their mark a year or two earlier, some of whom had yet to make themselves heard – melding influences like psychedelic rock, jazz, classical and folk to form what would become initially one of the most exciting forms of rock, but which would overstretch itself, become complacent and eventually more or less die a bloated corpse, choked on its own excesses and unable to move with the changing times.

Taken as a whole, the 1970s is a pivotal decade for prog. You could say, without too much fear of contradiction really, that it both rose and fell within those ten years. With a penchant for costumery and lavish stageshows, light sequences and the beginnings of multimedia, eager to tell stories instead of just write love songs or feel good songs, and a core of true, dedicated musicians, progressive rock would be seen, for a long time, as the thinking man or woman's rock, the intellectual side of heavy rock, and a welcome alternative from the fluff and nonsense of disco. Disco music was, and still more or less is, unsurprisingly, made for dancing, so there's not, to be fair, a huge amount of worth in the lyrics, generally. Prog rock was made for those who wanted to stop and think about what was being sung; concept albums ranged over such diverse topics as politics, war, space exploration and the nature of good and evil, among others. These were not throwaway lines and to be fair again, they would generally not be guaranteed to get you laid, at least not in the way a Marvin Gaye or Drifters song might. Disco, soul and funk had its own agenda and its own messages to impart, and to his credit, the aforementioned Gaye was perhaps one of the first, if not the first soul artiste to realise this and do something about it, setting something of a trend for those who followed. But prog rock had always been, from the start, about the music but especially about the lyrics. Yes, there were and would be bands who performed instrumentals, but even these were imbued with a sense of fantasy, of importance, of storytelling. Prog rock appealed to the reader, the thinker, the dreamer.

Prog rock audiences and fans were also different to disco fans in that to them, buying albums was more important than buying singles. In fact, while disco survived largely on the sale of songs that took its adherents into the heady reaches of the charts, few prog bands would even bother releasing singles. Much of this of course had to do with the fact that most prog songs were too long to be singles, with some notable exceptions, but a lot of it also had to do with the fact that the bands wrote their music – even if the album in question was not a concept – more as a suite, a collection of related songs, and to take one out of context meant the song lost something. It's easy to say prog bands didn't sell singles because nobody wanted to buy them, and to some extent yes, this is true: your proper prog fan was more interested in buying the latest Yes or Rush or Camel album than he (mostly, they would be male fans, at least for the first few years, and probably further) was in buying their single. He knew he would just buy the album once it was released, so why bother shelling out for the single? Unless it was the lead single of course.

So on the face of it, chartwise, prog bands would seem to look as if they had little or no impact on the record-buying public, or at least the single-buying ones anyway. There were some exceptions, of course: Genesis released “I know what I like (in your wardrobe)” in 1974 and it did quite well in the charts. “Wondrous stories” took Yes up into the rarefied and unfamiliar territory of the top ten, and of course “Money” was a hit for Pink Floyd, to say nothing of The Moody Blues almost hitting number one with “Nights in white satin”, although that was towards the tail-end of the sixties. But the point is, that whereas buyer of pop or disco singles would in all likelihood not go on to buy the album, any prog fan who bought a prog single either had the album or was waiting for it to buy it. Singles were not the be-all and end-all in the world of prog, and while of course record companies wanted prog bands to have hits, the overall success of their music, their growing fanbase and the rise of the popularity of prog rock through the seventies meant that their albums sold really well and to some extent there was no need for singles. Prog bands survived – even thrived – despite a lack of chart success.

Another thing that prog brought to the fore was the gatefold sleeve. If the genre had been successful in focussing the attentions of its fans on the album rather than the single – or at least, the album as an entity to be enjoyed as opposed to backup tracks for the single(s), it was certainly almost responsible singlehand if not for the actual creation of the gatefold sleeve, but its elevation to an art form. Gatefold sleeves (a cover for the album that opened up, often presented with double albums, one record in each sleeve, but not always) allowed for far greater expression of creativity. Up to this, mostly, album covers had been adorned by pictures of the band or artiste, maybe some landscape or other feature, but usually nothing more. The Beatles may have been the first to have explored this new form with Sgt Peppers, though I don't know that for certain, and I'm sure others were using gatefold sleeves before them. But as a statement of creativity, and with the rise of artists like Storm Thorgerson and Roger Dean, albums – at least, prog albums, and later many heavy metal ones too – began to “peacock out”, for want of a better phrase. Where an album would previously have had as mentioned above a photograph or drawing of the artiste, now they had far deeper aspirations. Bands like Yes, ELP and Gentle Giant would do much to advance the whole idea of album covers as art, and of course Pink Floyd and Genesis, using Thorgerson's Hypgnosis company, would create some iconic album sleeves.

But it wasn't just the art, either. Inside the cover would often be printed, in beautiful, lavish script sometimes, the lyrics to the album, and other information. The cover art might continue over to the inside, so that essentially you might have one painting, as it were, beginning on the front, going on to the inside and ending on the back. With progressive rock, art had definitely arrived for the humble album sleeve. Look at the differences between, say, Yes's first two albums and Tales from Topographic Oceans, below, released only three years later. It's fair to say that art on album sleeves had developed, even in that short time, in leaps and bounds.

1970 is still something of an embryonic year for prog rock bands, hence the subtitle Learning to Crawl. Although Genesis would release their first proper prog album this year, it would be largely ignored, and while Yes would get a chart placing with their second this year, it would be very much at the lower end of the scale, and little interest would be generated. Mostly, the actual prog revolution, such as it was, would only really kick into gear around 1973, with major releases from ELP, King Crimson, Yes, Genesis, Caravan and Pink Floyd. After that, almost to the end of the decade really, there would be no stopping it.

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Trollheart

We will of course be getting back to the timeline presently, but I'd just like to diverge slightly from the laid down path, stop and take a breath, and pay tribute to the bands and artistes that did so much for progressive rock, some of whom are rightly lauded, some of whom are not, but all of whom are what I would definitely class as

The first guys I want to look at probably fit more into the latter category, and personally I know little about them, and have heard I think one album (though that will of course change as we move along the timeline), but they are certainly recognised to be a large part of the progressive rock movement overall.


With a name like that, if you don't know them, you'd probably think they were a folk band, quite low key and laidback, relaxed sort of chaps. You might be interested to hear that although yes, they did incorporate folk music in their sound, they also used soul, jazz and classical elements, and over their ten-year career they produced no less than eleven albums. Perhaps one of the only prog rock bands to not only contain, but be founded by, three brothers, Gentle Giant was Derek and Ray Shulman, and their younger brother Ray. Perhaps not too oddly, but still interesting, the first two were born in Scotland (Glasgow) while Ray did not arrive until the family had moved to Portsmouth, perhaps as far from his brothers' birthplace as it is possible to get and yet remain on the mainland of Britain, and so would be technically English while his siblings were Scottish.

With a musical family background, the boys were all encouraged from a young age to learn whatever instruments they could, with the result that the three of them grew to be multi-instrumentalists, again something of a rarity in a family, but certainly good groundwork for their later ventures into progressive rock. Originally though – and again almost uniquely – they were a soul/pop band which turned to psychedelia as that became popular and actually had a top ten hit single. Instead of capitalising on that though, the brothers hated the new sound their record company was pushing them towards and dissolved the band, and after a short stint as another band called The Moles, they eventually decided to create and found Gentle Giant.

The oddities with these guys continue. With three of them in the new band they hired three more bandmembers, two of which were ... wait for it ... multi-instrumentalists too! These were Gary Green and Kerry Minnear, and drummer Martin Smith. He wasn't a multi-instrumentalist. How left out he must have felt! Not to mention that the newly-formed band now had three lead vocalists – Derek and Phil Shulman and recently-joined Kerry Minnear – and even two of the remaining six members also sang on occasion. Gentle Giant released their first, self-titled album in 1970 (which we will be looking at soon), a relatively short affair with only seven tracks and clocking in at just over a half hour in total.

Less than a year later they were back with their second, much more experimental album, which contained their “mission statement”: ”It is our goal to expand the frontiers of contemporary popular music at the risk of being unpopular.” Their, even for prog rock, eclectic approach to the subject matter for their songs was evident in their usage of the writings of a French Renaissance humanist in one of the songs. The album, again, was short, just over half an hour with this time eight songs.

The title may have been quite appropriate, as it was certainly not to everyone's taste, and in what was becoming, and would become, the standard for prog rock bands in the seventies, their third album was a concept. Even at that, it was short and had again only six tracks. It would appear Gentle Giant were not eager to follow the likes of Yes and ELP with side-long compositions and multi-part suites.

Nevertheless, that same year they released their fourth album, Octopus, which is generally regarded as one of their best works. Sadly, during the tour to promote the album Phil Shulman left the band, and the remaining band members carried on to release their fifth album, 1973's In a Glass House, another concept, followed by yet another concept album, The Power and the Glory in 1974, which is generally rated as a favourite among fans but which of course did nothing commercially, and also led to them changing labels, to move to Chrysalis Records, with whom they spent the rest of their career.

The first album released on the Chrysalis label was the more accessible, almost commercial Free Hand, which even scraped into the top fifty in the US, followed by the weird In'terview in 1976, a concept album based on the idea of an actual interview (not surprisingly, that bombed and failed to capitalise on their recent mini-success in the States). Although their albums were not exactly shifting platinum or gold units, Gentle Giant did become famous for their incredibly versatile onstage musical prowess, and their fame spread that way, but soon the advent of punk would make its mark upon the world, and Gentle Giant found their eclectic and energetic music no longer appealed to the general populace. They retreated into a sort of semi-pop style, as both 1977's The Missing Piece and 1978's all-out pop Giant for a Day!. Their final album, 1980's Civilian maybe says it best with its title: after trying to live up to their grandiose statement on their second album, Gentle Giant had slowly succumbed to the pressure of commercialism and the changing attitudes towards music as the 1970s became the 1980s, and finally retired after their eleventh album.

Perhaps one of the great “could-have-been” stories of the prog rock movement, Gentle Giant typified a band who started off with lofty ideals, tried to remain true to them despite little real commercial success or recognition, and eventually gave it up as a bad job. We'll be sampling all of their catalogue (or most of it, depending on the years and what was released) as the timeline goes on, so I can't speak to whether or not they deserved to be bigger, or it was right that they faded away, but whatever the truth is, it's a pity they didn't make it as they seemed to be genuine musicians with a genuine desire to entertain and please.

Unfortunately, as bands like Genesis, Yes and Rush learned, sometimes that just isn't enough.

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Trollheart

As mentioned in the previous article, progressive rock bands really started something of a trend, later taken up by hard rock and metal bands, as well as AOR ones but for a long time almost exclusive to prog rock, for intricate and often rather beautiful album covers. I'll be looking at some of the best in this section.

Bearing a striking resemblance to much of the artwork from 70s Yes album covers, which is no coincidence as artist Roger Dean worked on both, and this was basically a Yes album by any other name, Anderson Bruford Wakeman Howe was the debut, and only album by the ex-members of Yes before they got back together with the rest of the band.

Although their early album covers were nothing much to write home about, once Pink Floyd joined forces with Hipgnosis they began turning out some very iconic sleeves, such as this one from Wish You Were Here.

Rush had some great ones too, like 1977's A Farewell to Kings

Early work from HR Giger, who would go on to become famous as the designer of Ridley Scott's Aliens, this is the 1973 album from Emerson, Lake and Palmer, entitled Brain Salad Surgery.

Camel's 1979 I Can See Your House From Here uses a rather risque subject, the joke about Jesus on the cross, and transposes it to an outer space setting. Very clever.

I like the pure expressionism on this one from Eloy, entitled Floating

while King Crimson's Lizard is ornate, detailed and intricate.

Finally, this 1975 album from Hawkwind shows the beginnings of fantasy art becoming almost standard on prog rock album covers.

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The Batlord

You call your posts "articles"?

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