IT’S THE DOC40 HISTORY CLASS (for Dysfunctional History Month)

DEPT. OF MONKEY AND MONOLITH

Fifty years ago today -- on Feb. 20th, 1954 -- President Dwight Eisenhower interrupted his vacation in Palm Springs, Calif., to make a secret nocturnal trip to nearby Edwards Air Force base to meet two extraterrestrial aliens. And that, according to some theories, is when it all went really wrong. For just the facts (ma’am)...
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/4306380/

DEPT. OF ROCK AND HARD PLACE

I wrote this cautionary tale from the elder days of rock & roll, on how psychedelic music was corrupted into progressive rock, for Mojo. It ran in December ‘03 issue, but I figured, now the mag’s well off the stands, I’d post it for those among you who like this kind of esoteric musicological trainspotting...

PSYCH TO PROG

The Who were at the Marquee. The place was packed with rabid mods blocked on fine SKF Dexedrine. I think the tune was Smokestack Lightning, their early auto-destruct finale. Townshend had pulled round his two stacks of sixteen 4x12s so they faced each other leaving a nine inch gap. Holding his shell-shocked Rickenbaker by the neck, like a garroted vulture, he thrust the guitar into the space to create an electric alien banshee. Moon killed his kit in primitive anger management, Entwhistle made a noise like a nuclear submarine stripping it’s gears. We’d obviously come a long way from Be-Bop-A-Lula or Apache. It this wasn’t the future it was quantum progress.

More progress a couple of years later at the UFO Club, Pink Floyd played Interstellar Overdrive; similar psychosis, but far less rage. The piece commenced with a repeating four chord theme, little more than Green Onions in reverse and descending. The crowd was now stoned on Moroccan or Manfred’s acid. The paisley tide swayed and waved, submarine and languid. The theme cleared the gravity well, and meandered with whirling Binson echo boxes, out past John Cage and Albert Ayler to somewhere near moons of Saturn, straight from a Dan Dare hallucination, courtesy of Syd Barrett. Here again was rock & roll shaping its future, and making clear it was boldly going where none but Sun Ra had ever gone. Sadly, Barrett would soon be mistaking the dawn for a supernova, and being advised to take a rest from piping at the gates, but no matter, Sgt, Pepper was upon us and all manner of weird floodgates were bursting.

In the beginning, psychedelic meant novelty records; My Friend Jack Eats Sugar Lumps by the Smoke, Granny Takes A Trip by the Purple Gang, but, very quickly, the Rolling Stones went Marakesh/Owsley/Satan, while Steve Marriot and Pete Townshend were hard at work on a psychedelic pop idiom for Ogden’s Nut Gone Flake, and Pete’s underappreciated pop masterpiece, I Can See For Miles. Strawberry Fields were taking us down. Nights grew so neuron-hammered that we listened to Sister Ray by the Velvet Underground over and over, and very loud, and breakfast with Boss Goodman meant Paki black, bacon sandwiches, and all four sides of Live Dead. The MC5 were actually playing Sun Ra songs along with the more predicable rama-lama, while Jimi Hendrix blazed a trail all of his own to places where few humans could completely follow. The air was day-glo electric for those who Jim Morrison called the “stoned immaculate.” The only fly in the ointment was an insistent voice from the other side of the dressing room demanding we hold on a minute.

“Hold on a minute? Why?”
To engage in what seemed to be a very pointless argument turned out to be the answer. Was psychedelic music nothing but a drug groove? The slogan was bandied about; “what can be achieved by drugs can be achieved by other means.” To we Star Fleet dopefiends, the concept was plainly nonsense, but a number of bands, led by a Syd-less Pink Floyd, were backing off from public association with the drug culture. On one level this was an understandably pragmatic. In 1967/8/9, the official heat was on, from the high profile busts of Jagger, Richards and Brian Jones, down to the constant stop-and-search street harassment of the velvet and hairy. To blatantly promote oneself as “psychedelic”, or as a “drug band” was a red flag to the drug squad. In our neck of the woods, the Deviants, Sam Gopal, later Hawkwind, and all the stoner combos to follow, acted nonchalant, bollocks to pragmatism, and went our merry way flattering ourselves that we lived outside the law, and at least tried to be honest. Others, though, with their eyes on the prize, the contract, and dreams of shipping platinum, became circumspect. At the same time that CBS was developing their fatuous marketing campaign “The Man Can’t Bust Our Music”, house hippies working for major labels brainstormed for a generic term not so overtly druggie as “psyche”. The term Progressive Music floated from some hellspawned corporate meeting. A decade later, punk would be sanitized to suits and narrow ties by the sobriquet New Wave, and so it went when Psyche became Prog.

The house hippies had correctly noticed the all-night idiot dancers in what Zappa dubbed psychedelic dungeons went even more bananas than they were already were over America by the Nice, and this was absorbed as a template for Progressive. The greatest template of all, of course, was Whiter Shade of Pale – one of the most beautiful and deliberately witless pieces of pop music of all time. The major-label house hippies failed to grok, however, how, by embracing this approach, they were opening a Pandora’s box of pretensions and ugly trousers. Bad lyricist wrote screeds of illiterate Pre-Raphaelite poetry, but worse than that, keyboard players were encouraged. Led, as far as I could tell, by John Lord, Rick Wakeman, and Keith Emerson, these were a breed who had gone to Guildhall or some lesser college, and needed to get fancy with G-sharp diminished ninths, while making portentous judgements about Good Music. Unfortunately, rather than pillaging Bartok or even Richard Straus, and totally leaving Carl Orf for metal to discover years later, they leaned to the pop classics, Ravel, even Elgar. Sometimes it worked, as in Roy Wood’s early shoe-horning of Tchaikovsky’s 1812 into the bad-trip, proto-punk classic, Night Of Fear, or, on a more grandiose scale, Townshend’s orthodox operatic design for Tommy. Too often, though, grandiose became the dumb bombast of (say) Robert Plant’s Band of Joy. Progressive Music had to be de-capitalized, and some u/g press wag, maybe Charlie Murray, shortened it to “prog”, making it sound like a Saxon mining implement.

My real problem with prog was that I sensed totally different and more valid progress being made well away from its beaten tracks. Capt Beefheart represented progress in spades. With Trout Mask Replica, he had established rock’s own Mars Colony. The Stooges braved the metaphor of napalm in the morning and prepared for Search and Destroy. David Bowie sang Lou Reed like Anthony Newley dressed as Veronica Lake, while Bob Dylan was taking us down home for another look at country music. In such circumstances, it became very hard take the pomp and circumstance of King Crimson (even with the wit of Bob Fripp) as significant musical progress. Strange fusions were coming, but, for me, the strangest would be tragically denied us. Two great Kubrick monoliths, Jimi, post-Experience, and Miles, in Bitches’ Brew mood, appeared to be drifting into each other’s orbit. But then Jimi was a sunbeam, and that was the end of that. But damn, if nothing else, that would that have been progressive.

Of course, the psyche/prod conflict is now only in the minds of collectors. Those of us from back in the day have pissed over a lot of bridges in the intervening years. For the most part, we have kissed, made up, and even worked together, learning the lesson that method and madness are by no means antithetical, but are in fact two symbiotic halves of the same creative process. But remember, all of the above is highly subjective and shamelessly biased.

CRYPTIQUE – Smoke if you got some.