PROG SLOGS

 

King Crimson

Progressive rock has never been a genre that inspires much enthusiasm, even though Frank Zappa's instrumental records and the vast majority of King Crimson's discography stand among the most outstanding and influential releases ever to fall under the ever-expanding and increasingly ambiguous label of "rock" music. These albums have remained consistently vital, continuing to sound fresh and inventive rather than fading into irrelevance or becoming mere artifacts of a bygone era.

Repeated listens to albums such as The Grand Wazoo or Larks' Tongues in Aspic—even after all these years—still inspire lengthy essays exploring the rich musical ideas captured in recordings that are now nearly fifty years old. The enduring freshness and relevance of these works, which have withstood countless shifts in musical trends, passing fashions, and fleeting fads, can be attributed to the singular vision that Frank Zappa and Robert Fripp brought to the Mothers of Invention and King Crimson, respectively. Each led with remarkable independence, shaping the identity of his band through restless experimentation and a relentless pursuit of new sounds and ideas. Although their musical approaches were distinctly their own—each band forging a unique sonic identity—they shared a fearless willingness, over several decades, to transform their artistic direction. Neither Zappa nor Fripp hesitated to change styles, adopt unconventional strategies, explore unfamiliar musical territory, or pivot toward new artistic horizons whenever curiosity demanded it. Both bands possess recognizable hallmarks—signature techniques, stylistic quirks, and recurring musical traits—but anyone listening carefully can trace the wild, unpredictable evolution that defines the history of each ensemble.

Artists of this kind—those who never stop challenging themselves, who constantly seek new ideas and sonic experiences, and who approach every creative endeavor with a clear sense of purpose—continue to fascinate. Especially compelling are musicians who enter unexplored musical territory with deliberate intent, absorbing, transforming, and ultimately reinventing the sounds they encounter. Not every artist working within the broad world of rock music is capable of doing so. Progressive rock began—and, for the most part, remained—a musical field defined by a relatively narrow set of ideas: complex time signatures, lengthy instrumental passages, references to classical compositions, and, all too often, overwrought reflections on philosophical and spiritual themes delivered in pretentious poetic language. Musically, the genre initially generated genuine excitement and intrigue. It was adventurous and challenging, sometimes to the point of lifting the phonograph's tonearm simply to skip the vocal sections and move directly to the intricate instrumental passages that followed. Yet after only a handful of years, much of the music began to blur together, with different bands revisiting the same territory and recycling ideas that had already been thoroughly explored. In doing so, they established their own conventions and repeatedly relied upon them, often to diminishing artistic effect. The personal breaking point came with Tales from Topographic Oceans, Yes's sprawling double album, which somehow managed to be even more sluggish and ponderous than the slowest recordings by Pink Floyd.

The lyrics, unfortunately, reached new heights of insufferability. They were grandiose, impenetrable, and saturated with platitudes masquerading as profound insight, promising little more than the illusion of a transformative experience. The only real miracle, as far as this listener was concerned, was that the album eventually ended—that there was, in fact, a final side, a concluding track, and a last note, after which it became possible to return to the real world, where clear thinking once again prevailed.There are, of course, numerous exceptions to this general skepticism about progressive rock. However, the genre itself holds less appeal than those individual artists whose work continues to surprise, challenge, and engage by refusing to stand still.

WHEN LESTER BANGS STOPPED LOVING LOU REED

 

The infamous and almost comically bitter feud between Lester Bangs and Lou Reed remains one of rock criticism's most entertaining soap operas, endlessly dissected by readers and critics with a taste for the dramatic. I have to tip my hat—perhaps with some eye-rolling—to Greil Marcus for including Bangs's over-the-top, detail-obsessed account of their ongoing squabbles and ego clashes in Psychotic Reactions , a collection that gives us front-row seats to the freak show of personalities and philosophies behind the music. Bangs was practically in love with the existential, dead-end fatalism that the Velvet Underground and the Stooges turned into their own brand of musical misery—songs oozing with hopelessness and emotional wreckage. He was convinced that nothing in adult life ever rivaled the pure, unfiltered agony of a teenage boy drowning in his own overblown, melodramatic emotions, feelings so tangled and extreme that the only logical conclusion was an operatic eruption of rage and angst. Because, apparently, nobody feels feelings like a teenage boy with a guitar and a grudge.

In his writing, Bangs often soared to moments of genuine poetry and insight while decoding the music that spilled out from the ignored corners of urban and suburban sprawl. Still, for all his eloquence, he conveniently sidestepped the messier question of what actually happened when all those glorified emotions spilled over into real-world violence—whether it was self-inflicted or aimed at the nearest unlucky bystander. Back then, everyone seemed content to shine a spotlight on these feelings and call it a day, as if exposing them was a public service. But Bangs, being the endlessly restless self-examiner he was, couldn’t leave it there. As he got older, he started poking holes in his own fanboy worship of obviously damaged artists and began to question the entire cultural urge to prop these people up as icons—never mind that, in reality, their “genius” usually meant being a cautionary tale in a world supposedly trying to stay decent and humane.

These waves of second thoughts—followed by third, fourth, and probably fifth thoughts—inevitably seeped into his run-ins with Lou Reed. Reed, who inspired more ink than most monarchs, was, in Bangs's acerbic estimation, the ultimate aesthete: a walking, talking relic of the old decadent scene. Bangs, with his signature blend of admiration and exasperation, watched Reed fall headfirst into the myth of “Lou Reed,” apparently so entranced by his own legend that he couldn't resist hamming it up for the crowd. The result? Reed came off as ever more decadent, self-absorbed, and all too happy to spoon-feed his fans exactly what they expected, simply because their appetite for his myth knew no bounds.

From start to finish, Bangs was on a never-ending quest for “authenticity” in both music and motive. Eventually, however, he got a little queasy over the growing notion that the ultimate artistic statement was to go full-throttle into oblivion—to die for art, because, apparently, nothing says “commitment” like self-destruction. Bangs, to his credit, finally decided this trope was a load of nonsense, and started calling out the cultural obsession—embodied by the likes of Sylvia Plath and John Berryman—with lionizing the artist who flames out spectacularly. This newfound skepticism arrived just as Reed, ever committed to the bit, seemed to be doubling down on the whole tragic artist routine—the philosophy that art justifies any cost, and the artist’s misery (or even demise) is some kind of noble, necessary sacrifice. As if the world needed one more reason to light a candle for tortured souls with guitars.

DIAL TONE VOCALS FOR THE SQUALOR AND THE SQUALID

 

Somewhere in the digital jungle, a rock-and-roll malcontent, some leather-jacketed heretic strumming discord on the X platform, dared to spit on the sacred banana, that Warhol-stamped relic of the Velvet Underground’s first brawl with eternity. The album title said it all, The Velvet Underground and Nico, released in 1967, a crusty, rusty , crud laden slice of the New York underbelly where the junkies, the poets, the whores, the crossdressers, the street artists of all shades and ways of expression, gathered. It was a love letter to the squalor of the squalid. Headed by Lou Reed and buffeted the Euro-drone of John Cale's tuneless avant gard clamour and Nico's dial tone singing, it was the nightmare that came after the sweet dream of the summer of no-fault love . My friend was having none of that stuff, you see. .She called it overrated, a tired artifact, and I, hunched over my screen, growled like a beast cornered in a Bowery alley, muttering curses about the young who chew up history and spit out TikTok platitudes. The Velvets’ debut wasn’t just a record—it was a Molotov cocktail lobbed into the smug face of the Sixties, a sonic fistfight born not by design but by the sheer, brutal necessity of a band becoming itself, forging avant-noise like a blacksmith hammering steel in hell’s own forge. While the longhairs out West chased utopian sunsets, crooning of free love and endless horizons, and the Brits draped their riffs in centuries of aristocratic echo—blues and Berry twisted into polite rebellion—the Velvets stood apart, alien, unyielding. They didn’t beg to differ; they *were* difference incarnate, spawned in the claustrophobic gut of New York City, that teeming, screaming cauldron of 17,843,000 souls, a metropolis choking on its own ambition, commerce, and madness. Lawyers schemed, CEOs barked, junkies twitched, hookers prowled, and experimentalists—those splintered poets of the underground—scratched at the edges of sanity, all fueled by speed, smack, and a sardonic snarl. The city was a 24-hour assault, a cacophony of violence and neon, demanding you scream back or be crushed. The Velvets screamed. Their sound was no peace-and-love lullaby but a primal, minimalist howl—raw, jagged, deliberate—like a switchblade cutting through the hippie haze. Lou Reed, that street-saint of the dispossessed, turned his back on the hack tunesmith’s life, shunning the saccharine babble of flower-power bards. His lyrics were a blade, spare and sharp, slicing open the city’s underbelly: suicide, dope, the shadowed lives of queers in a world that wished them erased. This wasn’t art for art’s sake, not some Laurel Canyon daydream spun by pampered troubadours. It was war, a dispatch from the front lines of a New York that gave you all the vibes you could choke on—then dared you to survive.

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SYNDICATE OF SOUND

 

The ongoing fascination with garage rock, the music created by young American teens in the 60s in emulation of British bands and West Coast Psychedelia, has a much to do with the aesthetic value that arose from the crude approximations of an earlier trend, and, most certainly, the realit of the lyric universe those one shot wonders were creating. Emotions were not poetically expressed , not disguised in  faux philosophy or glittering generalities. It was raw-dog honestly, simply put, self-centered and loud. In other words, it was perfectly teenage, juvenile angst. I remember, as I was a teen once myself. Heartbreaks were existential crisises of the grossest sort, and they happened frequently. Seems not much has changed since I've survived my worst thinking and behavior since then.

There's palpable misogyny in a lot of the hits by one-hit wonders and garage bands in general. "Hey Joe," the old standby favored by bands in the '60s (my favorite version is by the Byrds from their 1966 album Fifth Dimension)—wherein a man solves a relationship problem with a gun and seemingly brags about it—is the most notable example. Thankfully, most of the other teen-male "women are bitches" material does not end in murder. It was more like the young man howling equal amounts of rage and regret at the moon, wishing the entire universe would swallow him whole to rid itself of the cuckold's moans and swear words. "Little Girl" by the Syndicate of Sound is a bit different; it is neither a revenge fantasy nor a case of making the woman evil and mean-spirited. It’s simply the testimony of a rejected suitor, aimed at the girl in question, detailing how their roles have been reversed. She rejected him and gossiped about him to all her friends, but now she is persona non grata among her peers—friendless, alone, a pariah. It is a perfect high school drama: so venal, petty, and intensely felt. It’s a wonder how odd life’s lessons turn out during lunch period. It is a great song with a killer guitar intro, galloping drums, and monotonic, "talk-sung" vocals delivered with a tossed-off reading of the lyrics that makes you imagine a smirk.

SNOBSTERISM IN ROCK WRITING

 

Of interest, I think, is a symposium of sorts about music versus lyrics and what different listeners, writers, and editors prefer. I like to think that I've been a combination of both, but it's evident in my record reviews that I like to spend some time discussing and critiquing lyrics if I think doing so adds to making a point—a hangover from my Literature grad student days. 

The reason I started writing reviews fifty or so years ago was that lyrics were coming into their own as an art form, in a way, with the arrival of Dylan, Simon, Cohen, and Mitchell on the rock side of things. It was pretty much the standard to listen to both the music and read the lyrics at the same time, and to consider that both words and music combined to make a whole aesthetic object that would be far less intriguing, provocative, worthy of contemplation, and replaying if either were missing. Rock tunes without solid lyrics and an effective singer tend to be bland and generic, grinding through simple chords, and rock lyrics on paper, read without music, don't read well and certainly don't scan well. The unaccompanied lyrics, in fact, lack rhythm and sway, have no real meter being the metronome; they sound stupid, banal, and pretentious, in large measure, without the music. So I concentrated on both and, as I delved deeper into the literary canon during literature graduate work, became pickier about what I would find merit in. My standard became so high that I dismissed nearly entire genres because the words didn't meet approval. 

I generally dislike the host of progressive rock bands like Yes, ELP, and many others because the lyrics were the worst sort of poetry—the tripe one finds in high school poetry magazines. Over time, I loosened up as my tastes in music broadened, finding merit in lyricists who had no intention of writing in a manner like Dylan. What I seek these days are lyrics attached to catchy melodies, refrains, and the rest that are direct, freshly stated, unburdened by literary freight or ready-made cliché, and which fit the expression and emotion of the tune.

HARMONICA MELODRAMA : a fabulation

 
The last open jam I was at was at Blind Melon's in the San Diego beach area, a blues jam, and the room was lousy with guitar tappers , grotto mouthed garglers posing as vocalists, and horde of harmonica players in the audience, jamming along with the creaking 12 bars the band was putting out . The barstools and cocktail tables were awash in wheezing, freewheeling waves of unsubstantiated merit. Those not tooting along were arguing over who was better, Bob Dylan or Graham Nash. On stage was the city's super star harmonica player, Sturdy Gert Quakeshaker, a large man with a leather harmonica ammo belt draped over his chest. The band kicked into a shuffle in 17/2 time . Sturdy Gert took a large breath, sucking out all the air in the bar , causing everyone to pass out for a minute,. Good thing I brought my oxygen mask to this jam. When everyone came to, they saw the legendary Sturdy Gert Quakeshaker had exploded. It was a mess, and I never got to play.

Poetry in General, some questions, some answers

 Which poet’s book of collected poems is your favourite go-to set of works?

For the last few years it’s been The Collected Poems of Frank O’Hara. I like his personality, his love of the city, his cattiness, the sometimes gossipy tone, but I would say there is a rhythm in his joy at being alive in the art capital of the world , New York. He feels joy deeply, he gets sad and depressed deeply, but rebounds quickly, laughs, has a drink with a friend, he talks, he laughs, he reads poems and goes to art galleries and listens to the quick witted genius of modern jazz. He’s more than that, of course, but I adore his lack of pretentious language and rhetoric—as with many in his generation and with many other American poets, he found poetry , a profound and original poety, in plain language. Using clear language to contemplate and express experience, for him, makes what’s been experienced even more profound, exposed as being precisely the way we were supposed to see it.

When writing poetry, how have you chosen the form that you wanted to use that makes the best structure for what imagery you want to create?

How did I choose a form that provided the best structure, style and tone for the poems I write? Good question, always a good question, but I really can’t say that I chose a style, or even be clever and reverse the saying by maintaining the style chose me. It’s evolution, really, trying on many stylistic hat, writing a lot of bad, naive, self-indulgent poems in an attempt the poets to inspire me and slowly coming to a habit of compositional mind that resulted in verse I felt were the least pretentious, most honest, most direct . A friend, Paul Dresman, who recently passed and himself one of the best poets I had the pleasure to know, told me that revision was key, to remember that poetry was a craft, an art no less than any other art form , compositional or plastic, and that much of the time the best of what I considered the best writing , the most potent ideas, had to be taken out in order to find the images and the ideas that can be linked into a remarkable, hopefully memorable of expression.

Did Charles Bukowski write in all lowercase because he couldn't spell?

Why would a poet writing in lower case make you think he couldn’t spell? Let me ask another question: how would lower case compensate for an author’s supposed bad grasp of correct spelling? Think what will of the man’s chosen lifestyle , but he was a literate man and certainly knew the ins and outs of grammer and such things. He could certainly afford a dictionary.I will bet you that he owned several. Bukowski wrote in lowercase because hundreds of famous poets wrote in lower case, e.e.cummings being the outstanding example. Typing in lower case for poems was and remains a standard practice among thousands of published poets. In any event , typing in lower case wouldn’t disguise spelling errors in the least. A misspelled word is very obvious, capitalized or not. Bukowski, though, was a good speller, and any misspellings were deliberate rather than from an inability to spell. He wrote in an informal way, to the rhythm of actual speech, and using idiomatic speech at times requires unconventional renditions of words.

What did you discover about yourself while writing your poem?

Usually, I write to find out what comes after the sentence after the one I just wrote. I have a particular set of strategies, notions of musical phrase, cadence, rhythm, and structure I’ve developed over a good many years—and this isn’t implied that I’ve mastered this form of poetry, free, at all — and I’ve internalized these linguistic habits much as a jazz musician internalizes his training and notions of theory; I come up with a first line and consider what object, word, image, attitude it contains and try to imagine what sounds musical and rhythmic and a logical expansion on the details the first sentence contains. It’s theme and variation, improvisation of a sort in the moment of creation, seeing where the initial idea takes me, stanza to stanza, until I come to a place to a poem where it can end with a resolution (or irresolution) that satisfies me, and perhaps satisfies a reader. What I discover about myself is that there is another way to explore emotion, experience, spiritual and philosophical concepts without resorting to the mechanical language of the academy.

POUTING ABOUT PROG

 

The moderator of a Facebook page dedicated to music journalism asked its members what their general view of Progressive Rock happened to be. As with most who wrote for a time about hip sounds from young rockers, my relationship was ...problematic.

Never a great fan of prog rock, although I count Zappa's instrumental albums and most of the King Crimson releases among the greatest works released under the increasingly vague classification of "rock." Theirs is music that's stayed fresh in my mind; the likes of Grand Wazoo or Larks' Tongue in Aspic still make me want to write long essays on music that was recorded nearly half a century ago.

The fact that the music has withstood decades of changing trends, fashions, and fads comes from the singular obsessions of Zappa and Robert Fripp in how they ran their respective bands, the Mothers of Invention and King Crimson. Though their sounds were singular, unto themselves, distinct from each other in many ways, Zappa and Fripp were unafraid through the several decades of their existence to change styles, adapt new ploys, experiment, extend, and suddenly change course in musical directions as it suited their individual interests. Granted, there are signature tricks and sounds that one identifies with either band, but it's a safe bet that one can easily note the wild evolution of both through their long histories. 

It's the artists who continue to challenge themselves with new concepts that intrigue me and keep my interest, especially the ones who have a definite idea of what they want to assemble with the new sonic territory they've decided to invade, plunder, exploit, and make new. Not every eclectic spirit in rock is able to do this.For the genre in general, it started out as—and remained essentially—a one-idea concept: tricky time signatures, long instrumental passages, classical quotes, awful, awful, awful pontification of philosophical and spiritual matters in the worst kind of poetic form imaginable. Musically, it was exciting stuff, riveting, challenging (I lifted the tone arm to skip vocal parts and get straight to the extended trick-tempo jams ahead), but after a very few years, too much of it started to sound alike, sameish—a retreading of ideas already successfully explored previously. The bands in general created their own brand of genre clichés and repeated them.

For me, the tipping point was Tales from Topographic Oceans, the three-disc release from Yes that achieved the distinction of being even slower moving than the most lugubrious tracks from Pink Floyd. The lyrics were impossibly insufferable, grandiose, incoherent, and glutted with toothless bromides that at best suggested that the listener was on the verge of experiencing a miracle. The only miracle here was that the album did have a last side, a last track, a last note, from which one could again rejoin the land where one is allowed to think clearly about a world that actually exists.

I have many exceptions to my general rule of not being a fan of prog rock in general, but in general I walk the other way.

A FANTASY OF A SORT

 

There comes a time , once in car door moon, where a man has to grab the microphone that's been sitting in front of him for a decade and bring it too his wretchedly trembling lips. And in that time we note from home that the close up reveals sweat beads had formed on his lips and collected in a glistening pool in the filstrum, that tiny divit in the center of the face, between the nostrilsand the top of the mouth. America was about to witness a man Go Off Script and do something primordial and aristing from the bowels of contricted and foulness of bad faith and guilty trips to the shed, matters that had been restricted , regulated and otherwise controlled by fragile and finally dubious means of will power were giving way, splintering and shattering and crackling in whatever metaphorical sound effect might lead to a clue to the maggot brain pest control relays that now ran the cerebral circus. He twitched, he undid his tie, he stood from the desk and showed the audiences up and down the coast line, where the ocean slapped the shore line like a drooling vegitarian driving past a Meat City location, that he was wearing red and white striped clown pants which were pulled right up to where he kept his available cash. The camera pulled closer, his glasses were fogged up , the insanity was already coming out of his eyes with an energy that shorted out the tv studio lights and carried through the available powerlines and radio transmitters to the world at large . Cop cars blew up, left handed teen agers practiced their signatures on lined notebook paper, the city lights dimmed to a a color remindful of off stains that showed up over night on new shirts. But then he took his seat, set the microphone back down on the desk, wiped the sweatbeads from under his no
se with a single, elegant swipe of the thumb. Our man on the screen looked straight into the the camera. "Thanks for joining us this evening. With all the hoot and holler going on about the Prez, we have two representatives of the newly Youth for Nixon group..." With explanation, a test pattern baring the station call letters and a laughing Indian in full head dress came on replacing the man behind the desk on the screen, and just as quickly audiences were made to watch a scene from The Robot Versus the Aztec Mummy.

THE HERO AND THE FOOL

 

PICASSO AS PUNCHLINE?

 

Gadfly Patrick Marlborough offered a 2023 sorta-kinda-basically fence-sitting  defense of Australian quasi-comedian Hannah Gadsby's critical and creaky post-feminist takedown of Picasso with a piece claiming to detail what Americans are missing about her show. It's because Americans are unfamiliar with the Australian vernacular, goes the article's claim. You might expect a brief linguistics lecture to be offered here, since it couldn't be anything as obvious that Gadsby isn't really all that funny. 

It's clear from the outset that Gadsby's has no love for the artist, and is committed to debunking his myth and exposing his misogyny with a late comer's vigor. (I remember quite a few books and magazine articles about Picasso over the decades that hanged him in effigy for being a brute and all-purpose lout, but no matter). If enough people “miss” what an artist is trying to do or attempting to tell us / teach us/ lecture us about, and if it takes a nervously apologetic essay in a major online platform to direct us to the wisdom that was waiting for us, it's a safe bet the artist flubbed the chance to do anything interesting at. 

It's impossible for every misunderstood artist to be an anonymous genius. The odds are not good for even most of them to be any good as visual artists.  The more I think about, it seems to be the case that most artists striving to make big statements in abstract fashion are muddle-headed fools who have the talent, none of the less, to secure grant money to fund their projects and pay their rent. Her worst sin, it appears, is the smug obviousness of what she's up to with Picasso. Naming this project with the anemic and obvious pun “Pablo-Matic” previews a level of banality that is ironically break—taking. Is this comedy? Criticism? Post-feminist grave digging? Is this any sort of attempt to get us to see Picasso differently through a specifically focused lens? It is none of these things. Worse, it's none of the things in any interesting way. It's a shrug of the shoulder, a flat punchline, a cocked head, a side glance, another shrug, another try at irony.  All gesture, no ideas.