Prognosis

A new generation exhumes the lost wisdom of the ‘70s

By Chris Gill

O caste off ye weary and tyred three-chorde punke rocke clichés Kyss yer insypld pop song structures goodbye. Burn yer dyngee flannel frockes and wyrk bootes, and don thou beholden sylk and lynen wyzyrd suit. Rejoyce, for thou most exalted of musical formes, progressive rock, has rysen and will rule the wyrld again.

Not so fast, Merlin mouth. Although grunge, thrash metal, and punk have dominated the rock scene long enough to inspire an uprising, these genres are not about to be overthrown by music made by some tofu-eatin’, Tolkien-talkin’ hippies with bad teeth and renaissance-fair clothes. Or are they?

Though it hasn’t yet infiltrated the mainstream, progressive rock is making a bold comeback. Annual prog- fests in Europe and America are attracting growing audiences. Record stores specializing in prog rock from the past and present are popping up in major urban areas like mushrooms in a dairy yard. Scores of independent labels are releasing records by bands like Anglagård, Anekdoten, Minimum Vital, 5uu’s, Leviathan, and Magellan, and new bands are appearing at a frequency that rivals the peak of Seattle’s grunge movement. A few bands such as Pennsylvania’s Echolyn have been signed by major labels. Awake, Dream Theater’s latest Atco album, debuted at #32 on the Billboard charts. And, lo and behold, that venerated bastion of prog rock, King Crimson, has reformed once again.

What exactly is a progressive rock band? Here are a few ways to tell. Is the band’s name exceptionally odd or virtually unpronounceable? Are any of the band’s songs more than ten minutes long? Are the songs arranged in several movements or chapters? Does the music undergo a significant time-signature change at least once a minute? Does the album cover feature a sage, gnome, faerie, or nymph? Are any of the band’s albums part of a trilogy? Does the keyboard player use a Mellotron? If you answered yes or Yes to any of these questions, it’s probably prog.

A few of the current crop of progressive rock bands are little more than thinly veiled imitations of Genesis, ELP, and Kansas, which makes the “progressive” tag something of a misnomer. Others are heavily inspired by obscure prog experimenters from yesteryear such as Premiata Forneria Marconi (PFM), Van Der Graaf Generator, Gong, and Colosseum. But many of the new bands who truly deserve the progressive label are combining ‘70s improv-rock aesthetics with sounds and ideas lifted from speed metal, fusion, ethnic, techno, and 20th-century classical music.

“I find myself getting sick of the normal rock band format,” says Ed Wynne, leader and guitarist of England’s Ozric Tentacles. “That puts me in a situation where I have to go completely out there and find inspiration from either ethnic strangeness or acid house dance music, which is everywhere in England at the moment.”

With their spacey synth textures, precise rhythmic grooves, and hyperactive guitar solos, Ozric Tentacles have become one of Europe’s most successful new prog rock bands. The group formed about a dozen years ago as a loose collection of musicians who gathered to jam. “We played at a lot of free music festivals in the beginning,” notes Wynne. “The sound that made people come around was space rock, so that was the sound that we started off with.” After releasing several albums on their own Dovetail label, the band signed a distribution deal with I.R.S. Records in the early ‘90s. Since then they have released three titles through I.R.S., their latest being Arborescence.

But unlike many bands of the genre, Ozric’s appeal reaches well beyond the prog cult. “Our audience used to be a lot of hippies who go to festivals,” comments Wynne. “Now quite a few jazz freaks and Deadheads come to our shows. A lot of people who are into England’s rave scene are into us as well because we make funny noises like on those rave tracks. Part of our appeal is due to the fact that our music is instrumental and we have strange styles popping in and out, which is quite prominent in the rave thing nowadays. Recently our audience has become quite a cross section. They all usually wear colorful clothes, I’ve noticed.”

Despite the fact that many bands are being lumped under the progressive rock label, most of them have little in common with each other except for the “prog rock” tag. Ozric Tentacles’ spacey improvised instrumentals sound nothing like Mike Keneally’s humorous bizarro pop, which is far removed from Dream Theater’s dry, dramatic images and metal-inspired riffs.

“My relationship to progressive rock these days is I’m almost confused by it,” says Keneally, who played in Frank Zappa’s band for several years and is a member of Dweezil and Ahmet Zappa’s band Z. Keneally, like many of today’s new progressive musicians, finds more inspiration from current musical styles and sounds than those from the past. “I’ve got that progressive grounding, but where some of that stuff falls flat for me now is the humorlessness of a great deal of it. A lot of the bands were concerned about structure and complexity at the expense of tonality. Some of the stuff that I got off on 20 years ago sounds really ugly to me now. When I listen to it, I go, ‘What an awful guitar tone. Ugh! Check out the way the keyboards and the bass are reacting. They didn’t spend much time on that drum sound.’ What I’m after now is trying to capture the interesting qualities of that music but in a way that sounds appealing.”

Keneally’s solo albums hat and the recent Boil That Dust Speck [both on Immune, 9269 Mission Gorge Rd. #211, San Diego, CA 92071) are compelling combinations of Zappa-inspired wackiness, bizarrely orchestrated guitar harmonies, and pop song sensibilities. “I’m completely enamored of pop song structure,” says Keneally. “The first music that I ever loved was the Beatles. Then I became completely trapped by XTC in the ‘80s. That influence continues to reign supreme. They Might Be Giants have done some fascinating things in terms of pop song structure when tied to an overall peculiar vision. Their album Flood is a complete masterpiece. I got off quite heavily on the new Ween album. Smart-ass pop songwriting is very appealing to me. What some people are responding to in my stuff is a marriage of some of this music.”

Surprisingly, many other prog guitarists share Keneally’s affinity for pop. When he was learning to play guitar, Wynne was heavily influenced by the Beatles and ‘70s glam rock bands such as T. Rex. Dream Theater guitarist John Petrucci remarks that his band appreciates pop music as much as instrumental proficiency. “Even though we’re into progressive and technical stuff, we love U2 and Billy Joel,” he says. “We’re really into writing songs. Our music may be heavy, but there’s always a sense of melody, composition, and hooks.”

However, the biggest influences for most prog guitarists are the great guitar heroes. “I got into people like Hendrix and Santana, all those amazing guitarists from that era,” says Wynne. “I also enjoyed Steve Hillage, Gong, and Hawkwind – that space rock sort of style. There’s a band from Germany called Kraan, and their guitarist had a very strange style – very angular and German. Then along came the Vais and Satrianis of this world. It was amazing to hear that.”

Petrucci credits Steve Morse, Rush’s Alex Lifeson, and Yes’ Steve Howe as his biggest influences. “Morse taught me about discipline and clarity,” says Petrucci. “He has a purpose and a schedule, but at the same time he can create on an emotional level. He’s not afraid to combine a varied array of styles in his compositions. It’s a fusion, not in the negative sense of the word, but in a grand picture, whether it’s jazz or country or bebop or classical or rock and roll. It’s making it all work. There’s strength and power in his playing. Alex Lifeson has to make up for the lack of other instruments. That’s where you get the big chorusy chords, open strings ringing out, and suspended voicings. His playing makes the band sound thicker and bigger. Steve Howe is the exact opposite. I learned about orchestration from him. Yes really took advantage of the instrumentation within the band. It seems like they wrote in a collective manner. Everyone wasn’t playing over each other and wasn’t necessarily playing the same exact part. They were very orchestrated. Each guy might play a part that wasn’t the most intricate thing in the world, but when you add it into the whole picture, it makes a lot of sense. It’s important to find your place in an ensemble.”

Mike Keneally is also an admitted Howe freak. Boil That Dust Speck features a humorous “tribute” to ‘70s-era Yes where Keneally performs snippets of dozens of Howe’s licks behind a falsetto Jon Anderson impersonation. “I’m hoping that the targets will have a sense of humor about that one,” remarks Keneally. “It’s an homage to Steve Howe, because I didn’t have any Yes albums in the studio with me when I recorded that song. All those licks were dredged up from memory. I spent many hours listening to Yes when I was growing up. All that stuff was lodged very deeply in my DNA. An unusual percentage of the snippets come from Relayer, which I realized was probably my overall favorite because I kept thinking, ‘Oh, we need something else from “Gates Of Delirium” here.’ I hope that Jon appreciates how the lyrics were constructed because, unlike the guitar snippets, there aren’t any direct quotes from Yes songs in the lyrics.”

In many ways, the current progressive rock movement is an extension of the ‘80s shred mentality. Progressive rock bands have become a refuge for guitarists who spent most of the ‘80s studying music theory and working on their chops, and then found few places to go when alternative music started dominating the public’s taste. Guitar-hero groups may have become passé, but bands like Primus and Voivod proved that you could play songs with more than three chords, possess a reasonable amount of technique, and still be considered hip.

“I don’t understand why technique came into question,” says Petrucci, who attended Boston’s Berklee College Of Music for a year before he formed Dream Theater. “If you decide to play an instrument professionally and develop it as a craft, there’s every need and desire to excel. If you’re using the instrument as a vehicle for your songwriting, then maybe you don’t have to be so proficient and don’t have to have those type of goals. I know a lot of people who aren’t proficient on certain instruments, but they write great songs. But for people who want to develop the craft, it’s to their benefit. The more you know, the more you can do; the greater your vocabulary, the clearer your expression. Listen to a piece of classical music. There are the different movements that go from very sensitive and personal emotions to aggressive and fast passages. It’s very dramatic. If you’re able to do that on whatever instrument you play, you can move your listener in that way. You can make the drama come through.”

Petrucci feels that his music education was highly beneficial for his songwriting. “Going to Berklee was really helpful because the harmony classes were taught from a jazz standpoint,” he remarks. “I really learned about voicings and tensions and substitutions. I’m still trying to develop that even more. There’s some great books, like Chord Chemistry by Ted Greene and Joe Diorio’s Fusion, which contain some amazing, beautiful chord voicings. The moods that are evoked are so much more dramatic and intense. The chords are so colorful. If you want to write something mysterious and delicate, there are so many choices. You don’t have to play one ugly chord over and over.”

Although Keneally is no technical slouch, he is grateful for the current slew of musicians who confess that they don’t know how to play their instruments. “There’s a lot to support the idea that if you give somebody the world of music as their playground, it is the untrained person who will frequently come up with the most interesting stuff,” he comments. “It’s more exciting and surprising. Whether it’s ultimately of more value is a judgment for every person to make. I get a kick out of hearing people who have invented their own rules. It actually results in more crafty songwriting.”

Keneally enjoys the songwriting and pop melodies of Nirvana, Green Day, and Dinosaur Jr, but at the same time he is highly attracted to more abstract and adventurous forms of music. Journalist Michael Bloom introduced him to several obscure progressive bands such as Italy’s Picchio Dal Pozzo, who were involved with the Rock In Opposition movement started by the band Henry Cow in the ‘70s. “There’s a French composer named Albert Marcoeur who has been doing this very peculiar amalgam of rock, jazz, and contemporary classical music for a couple of decades now,” says Keneally. “He’s almost entirely unknown in the United States. In fact I don’t think his CDs have ever been available here. He’s obviously indebted to Frank Zappa and Captain Beefheart. He will take a very abstract theme and repeat it several times in such a rhythmically compelling way during the course of a piece that it turns into the most accessible pop hook. He’ll take a freaked-out section of music and make it bore into your skull. By the end of the song you can’t wait to hear it again.”

Ozric’s Ed Wynne shares Keneally’s sentiments, and he hopes to encourage more musicians to push beyond the boundaries of what is currently popular. “I do feel that a lot of music has lost its sense of adventure,” he contends. “Few musicians are actually trying to show somebody something they haven’t heard before, like there used to be 20 years ago. Suddenly music all became very commercial. I’ve always regretted that. I feel that we’re flying a flag – we’re telling musicians, ‘Don’t give up, because people will listen to it.’”

The most promising aspect of the current progressive rock movement is that a new generation of musicians is getting tired of borrowing ideas from the past and Is starting to look forward for inspiration. These musicians have been exposed to a wider variety of music than ever before, they are willing to learn the techniques necessary for expressing their ideas more coherently, and they welcome the technological advances that enable them to produce new sounds. Whereas much alternative rock has devolved to little more than a rehashing of ‘70s blues rock and punk, today’s progressive rock shows the potential for becoming a truly alternative form of music in the ‘90s.