A progressive rock show – ending with a Gov’t Mule blues/rock/jam band twist given the Mule’s take on a King Crimson song. Nothing to do with music, perhaps, but March 8 also happens to be the 54th anniversary of the so-called Fight Of The Century, the first Muhammad Ali-Joe Frazier boxing match between then-unbeaten heavyweights at New York’s Madison Square Garden, March 8, 1971. And, to digress further, 54 was my football number in high school and college. OK, enough of that; on with the show.
As for the artwork, it’s a progression of rocks, in acknowledgement of the progressive rock theme.
1. King Crimson, Book Of Saturday
2. Genesis, The Musical Box
3. Emerson, Lake & Palmer, Knife-Edge
4. Yes, The Gates Of Delirium
5. Soft Machine, Chloe And The Pirates
6. Kansas, The Pinnacle
7. Jethro Tull, Baker St. Muse
8. Supertramp, Rudy (live, from Paris)
9. Pink Floyd, Echoes
10. Gov’t Mule, 21st Century Schizoid Man (King Crimson cover, live, from Mulennium)
My track-by-track tales:
1. King Crimson, Book Of Saturday . . . A natural for a Saturday show, from Crimson’s 1973 album Larks’ Tongues In Aspic. A pastoral song with typically interesting instrumental accents courtesy Robert Fripp’s guitar and David Cross’s violin, all propelled by John Wetton’s warm vocals. Wetton was later part of the first lineup of prog/pop rock band Asia that also featured drummer Carl Palmer of Atomic Rooster and Emerson, Lake & Palmer fame, plus Yes-men Steve Howe on guitar and keyboardist Geoff Downes. Downes, back in Yes since 2011, played on the one-off Yes album Drama, released in 1980 featuring former Buggles members Downes and vocalist/bassistTrevor Horn of Video Killed The Radio Star fame. It was a controversial albeit I think excellent Yes release featuring my favorite track from that period, the metallic Machine Messiah.
2. Genesis, The Musical Box . . . A powerful performance of shifting elements of light and heavy music from 1971’s Nursery Cryme album, the first to feature drummer Phil Collins and guitarist Steve Hackett in what fans of truly prog-period Genesis consider the classic lineup of Collins, Hackett, singer Peter Gabriel, bassist/guitarist Mike Rutherford and keyboardist Tony Banks.
3. Emerson, Lake & Palmer, Knife-Edge . . . A hard-edged, dark track from ELP’s self-titled 1970 debut album, adapting classical pieces – as ELP often did – in this case by Czech composer Leoš Janáček and Germany’s Johann Sebastian Bach. The classical-meets-rock approach is, to use a term music critics love to employ, accurate but overused so I write it with tongue planted firmly in cheek, “quintessential” ELP.
4. Yes, The Gates Of Delirium . . . Music is is an experience often fueled by one’s mood, so while obviously I’m primed for progressive rock for this show, it’s still fun to suggest that Yes represents the ultimate in prog-rock excess. Between 1972 and 1974 the band released three studio albums – Close To The Edge, double vinyl album Tales From Topographic Oceans and Relayer, from which The Gates Of Delirium comes. Total song count over the three albums: 10 – three on Close To The Edge (albeit two of them featuring multi-part suites, essentially songs in themselves), four (one per vinyl album side) on Topographic Oceans and three on Relayer. Relayer is the only Yes studio album to feature keyboardist Patrick Moraz, who brought jazz fusion elements to the party. The 22-minute Gates Of Delirium is loosely based on the novel War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy and includes heavy rock portions depicting battle, with the soothing final section, Soon, extracted as a single.
5. Soft Machine, Chloe And The Pirates . . . Hauntingly beautiful, dreamlike jazz fusion from Six, the 1973 release split between live and studio albums, by which time the band and its ever-changing roster of musicians had long since abandoned vocals and become a purely instrumental unit.
6. Kansas, The Pinnacle . . . Perhaps the, er, pinnacle of Kansas’s progressive rock achievements? Difficult to say, lots to choose from although this symphonic epic from the 1975 album Masque is up there with the band’s best such statements. It took me a while to embrace Kansas as a prog act. Like perhaps many people, I discovered them via their 1970s hit singles Carry On Wayward Son and Dust In The Wind and aside from, in high school, owning Dust In The Wind’s parent album Point Of Know Return and thus discovering excellent songs like Portrait (He Knew), I really wasn’t much aware of their output beyond those singles and compilation albums. Until, that is, I got into other progressive rock acts, almost exclusively British bands like Genesis, Yes, ELP and King Crimson and finally decided to take a full crack at this American act that was travelling some of the same territory. It’s been a rewarding experience.
7. Jethro Tull, Baker St. Muse . . . I’m a big Jethro Tull fan and about to go out and purchase the new album Curious Ruminant, released today, once I finish writing these track tales on Friday, March 7, in advance of Saturday’s show. Curious Ruminant is the suddenly wildly productive band’s third album in four years after a long hiatus of formal Jethro Tull releases during which leader/singer/flautist/multi-instrumentalist Ian Anderson was releasing albums under his own name, eventually essentially stamping his solo band with the Tull label.
The new album has been getting mostly good to excellent reviews, despite the challenges faced by Anderson’s ‘shot’ voice which is too painful even for me, fan that I am, to consider ever seeing the band live again since the disappointment of a less-than stellar 2007 gig in Toronto. The show was still decent enough, but not up to previous standards I had experienced. But the studio setting, particularly on new material, can be tailored to adapt to those vocal limitations, as has been the case on recent Anderson and Tull releases. We shall see and hear of course. I’ve heard a couple earlier-released tracks online, they’re fine, harken somewhat back to the period of the album Songs From The Wood in 1977, and I plan to play at least one cut from the new record on Monday night’s show.
All of which is a long, roundabout way of saying that the new album features a long song – Drink From The Same Well – of exactly the same length, 16 minutes, 42 seconds, as Baker St. Muse from 1975’s Minstrel In The Gallery album. Perhaps that’s why the new track is titled, with a twinkle in Anderson’s eye, what it is. As for Baker St. Muse, the lyrics muse, with a typical Tull mixture of wit and introspective social commentary, about city life amid a musical menu of acoustic passages and full-band bombast.
8. Supertramp, Rudy (live, from Paris album) . . . A song from 1974’s studio album Crime Of The Century, taken from the live document of 1979’s Breakfast In America tour, when Supertramp was among the biggest bands on the planet. I saw the tour in Toronto, the last of three summer stadium shows before a combined audience of more than 150,000. I hadn’t planned on going but, on a whim one Saturday afternoon, a college friend and I decided to head to the show, ticketless but aiming to purchase entry from scalpers. We got tickets, at not much higher than list price, perhaps an hour before the gates opened only to soon discover that our tickets were forged, good forgeries but lacking the grocery store chain logo of legitimate tickets. Thankfully, they were general admission tickets, not assigned seats, we got in, unlikely these days with scanners and such, ran like hell in the stampede to the front of the stage, and enjoyed the show. But I remember thinking ‘there but for the grace of god go I’ might-have-been of that risky race to the Supertramp stage when, sadly, five months later dozens of people were trampled and 11 died in similar general admission circumstances at a Who show in Cincinnati, at least temporarily putting a pause on what’s known as festival seating.
9. Pink Floyd, Echoes . . . Mind-blowing music that closes 1971’s Meddle. It’s the album that arguably broke Pink Floyd more into the mainstream after the band’s earlier more experimental phase often guided in large measure by the creative vision of co-founder Syd Barrett. Thanks in part to drug use, Barrett sadly became increasingly erratic and was ousted from the band in 1968, leaving one to wonder sometimes in what direction Pink Floyd might have headed, would they have been as commercially successful, had he stayed. At 23 minutes and change, Echoes is an immersive experience in various musical forms from spacey atmospherics to blues-based improvisation, not to mention those ‘pings’ that start the song and always make me think of submarine warfare books and movies. And then, after Meddle, came The Dark Side Of The Moon, Wish You Were Here, Animals and The Wall during a dynamically creative period through the 1970s.
10. Gov’t Mule, 21st Century Schizoid Man (King Crimson cover, live, from Mulennium) . . . A twist in the prog tale, a progressive rock group’s song covered by a blues rock jam band. That said, 21st Century Schizoid Man, from King Crimson’s 1969 debut album In The Court Of The Crimson King is more hard rock, even metal, than it is progressive rock but then again, there are myriad heavy musical moments throughout the influential King Crimson catalogue. This live version by the Mule appeared on the band’s 2010 release Mulennium, documenting a show at the Roxy Theatre in Atlanta, Georgia as 1999 became 2000. Gov’t Mule, a band led by guitarist/singer/songwriter Warren Haynes that formed in 1994 as a side project of The Allman Brothers Band, shines on its own material but has proved so proficient on covers of classic rock tunes that, long ago, I burned my own mix CD of that material.
The list is a long one, including The Beatles’ She Said She Said and Helter Skelter, Steppenwolf’s Don’t Step On The Grass, Sam, Free’s Mr. Big, War Pigs by Black Sabbath, Humble Pie’s 30 Days In The Hole, Deep Purple’s Maybe I’m A Leo and Lynyrd Skynyrd’s Simple Man. The Mule has also pulled off excellent full covers albums like Dark Side Of The Mule (Pink Floyd), Stoned Side Of The Mule (The Rolling Stones) and Dub Side Of The Mule, a largely reggae-tinged release of Mule songs, classic rock covers and a set fronted by the late Toots Hibbert of the Maytals fame, featuring tracks like Pressure Drop and Reggae Got Soul.
