5.The Uplifting Sounds of Yes
Drummer Bill Bruford was inspired to start Yes after he attended an early King Crimson concert. (In Japanese, Yes is transliterated as i-e-su, or イエス, which is exactly the same as the way the Japanese write Jesus.)
The lineup of Yes is a textbook example of how progressive rock musicians mostly came from a middle-class background. Bruford had attended a boarding school and took up the drums after seeing American jazz drummers perform on the BBC; bassist Chris Squire grew up singing in his local church and school choirs; keyboardist Tony Kaye was born to a family of musicians, started learning the classical piano at age six, and dreamed of becoming a concert pianist until he encountered jazz; vocalist Jon Anderson was born to championship ballroom dancers and has a singing style that more evokes an Anglican church choir than it does the bluesy, soulful vocals of American rock.
While the band’s sound was still rough around the edges, its unique chorus work attracted attention. The band began producing albums as it refined its chops.
In the early 70s, the band was joined by guitarist Steve Howe, who was strongly influenced by classical guitar, jazz, and flamenco. When keyboardist Tony Kaye left the band, he was replaced by Rick Wakeman, who had attended the Royal Academy of Music. The additions gave the ensemble’s sound a larger presence and sense of scale. (Kaye was fired because he was not keen on incorporating the Mellotron and Moog Synthesizer into the band’s sound.) This lineup would release Yes’s breakthrough album, Fragile.
Fragile
Yes’s fourth studio album reached #7 on the U.K. album chart and #4 on the U.S. album chart. According to keyboardist Rick Wakeman, the album’s title refers to the band’s state of mind during recording.
The album’s first track, “Roundabout", is one of Yes’s best known songs and is considered a classic of prog rock. Clocking in at over eight minutes, it was considered unsuitable for radio play; ahead of its release as a single in the U.S., the song was cut to about three-and-a-half minutes for the radio and was ultimately a hit, peaking at #13 on the U.S. Billboard Hot 100. The song “Cans and Brahms" is keyboardist Wakeman’s adaptation of the third movement of Johannes Brahms’ “Symphony No. 4 in E minor", played using an electric piano, grand piano, organ, electric harpsichord, and synthesizer.
The band’s fifth original album, Close to the Edge, is considered its masterpiece and most expansive work. The title track is an 18-minute piece composed of four parts. It was co-written by Anderson, who was inspired while in his hotel room during the Fragile Tour. He had been reading J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings while listening to Jean Sibelius’s “Symphony Nos. 6 and 7”. A more progressive combination of music and literature I could not imagine.
Close to the Edge
Yes’s fifth studio album reached #4 on the U.K. album chart, and #3 on the U.S. album chart.
After the completion of the album, Bruford left the band, dissatisfied with the band’s uplifting and lighthearted sound, and joined King Crimson. Yes would continue, producing increasingly intricate music that critics increasingly wrote off as pompous and bloated. As the title Close to the Edge implies, the band had truly been walking on the fine line between “pushing the limits” and “gone too far”.
6.Genesis, the Most English of all Prog Rock Bands
Of all the prog rock bands, Genesis was the most art rock-leaning and theatrical.
Genesis was formed in 1967 by several students of the elite Charterhouse School, a boarding school in Surrey. Vocalist Peter Gabriel and bassist Mike Rutherford explored different directions before settling on an art rock aesthetic.
In the 70s, the band was joined by guitarist Steve Hackett and drummer Phil Collins, who steered the group in a more progressive direction. Its live shows became a stage for Gabriel’s theatrics, and the band achieved renown in Belgium and Italy before it finally broke through in the U.K. with its fourth album, Foxtrot. It was during the band’s tour to promote the album that Gabriel first started dressing up in costumes on stage, including bat wings on the side of his head along with blacklight makeup, as well as the red dress and fox head depicted on the cover of the album.
Foxtrot
Genesis’s fourth studio album reached #12 on the U.K. album chart.
The centerpiece of Foxtrot is the 23-minute lyrical epic “Supper’s Ready”, which was inspired by the Book of Revelations in The Bible and follows a romantically involved couple’s strange, out-of-body journey.
Genesis would go on a U.K. and U.S. tour to promote the album, which brought it increased recognition in the U.S. However, music critics continued to compare it unfavorably to bands like ELP and Pink Floyd. The band’s label subsequently released a live album against the band’s wishes and pressured it to produce a follow-up album within 2 to 3 months. The result was Selling England by the Pound, which took its title from a slogan adopted by the Labour Party manifesto, and was the band’s way of pre-empting its critics from saying it had “sold out" to America. The album deals with topics such as the decline of English folk culture, and the increasing influence of American culture. In more ways than one, it was an unabashedly English progressive rock album.
Selling England by the Pound
Genesis’ fifth studio album reached #3 on the U.K. album chart and #70 on the U.S. album chart.
With the success of Selling England by the Pound, the band began working on new material. But tensions between Gabriel and the rest of the band had been building up for a while. He had a somewhat adversarial rivalry with Phil Collins, who was starting to discover he could sing, and the band was not happy with the fact that it was Gabriel’s theatrics that were getting all of the media attention, rather than the music. Gabriel would eventually leave the band in 1975, and begin a solo career.
The band would audition new singers but were unable to find a suitable replacement; in the end Collins became the band’s new singer and frontman. This new configuration would release the album A Trick of the Tail in 1976, which was both critically and commercially successful, proving that the band could continue without the presence of its idiosyncratic singer. The song “Squonk” is the band’s tribute to Led Zeppelin’s “Kashmir”.
A Trick of the Tail
Genesis’ seventh studio album reached #3 on the U.K. album chart and #31 on the U.S. album chart—the band’s first top 40 hit in America.
Gabriel’s exit would mean the band would lose much of its theatrical flair and lyrical wit, but Collins’ pop-leaning sensibilities and smooth singing voice would bring the band considerably more female fans. Led by Collins, Genesis would go in a more pop and new wave-oriented direction as the 70s ended and the 80s began, and soon began filling stadiums around the world.
7.What Americans Think of Progressive Rock
The 70s saw many progressive rock bands from the U.K. achieve considerable success in the U.S. market. What was seen in the U.K. as a progressive attempt by middle-class English musicians to fuse rock and classical music was received in the U.S. as white music made by white musicians for white people. For white, blue-collar American workers who weren’t feeling black music, or were otherwise feeling left behind or marginalized, the progressive rock sound was the perfect escape.
And while progressive rock brought elements of the highbrow (classical music) into the lowbrow (rock) and had a penchant for abstruse lyrics, it also had something much more obvious and accessible: technical virtuosity. Even if you had no knowledge or experience with classical music, the aural assault and spectacle of someone playing the guitar or a keyboard as fast as possible was something that anybody could appreciate. And Americans love a good show.
That being said, American rock critics were skeptical about progressive rock from the beginning. To their ears and eyes, prog rock was all show and no substance—technical wizardry for technical wizardry’s sake. They argued that all of the studio experimentation, sound effects, and exotic instruments went too far, resulting in a complex but soulless sound.
American rock fans, too, would eventually come to look back on their infatuation with prog rock with some embarrassment. It hit them that the very attempt to elevate rock into art as the epitome of snobbishness, which they despised more than anything. Real rock and roll music was about a perpetual state of adolescence—songs about love and rebellion. Intellectualism was a drag. And no matter how good you were at your instrument, the combination of self-seriousness and a desperate desire to show off was incredibly square.
Above all, progressive music lacked the groove of American rock and roll; it could not be, and was not meant to be danced to. For Americans, music is for dancing.
America’s relationship with prog rock is perhaps best summed up by the fact that, as critics and rock fans pointed out, Emerson, Lake & Palmer sounds more like the name of a law firm than that of a rock group.
8.Progressive Rock in Japan
Meanwhile, in Japan, progressive rock has enjoyed a steady popularity since the 70s, with little to no regrets. Why has the genre been so well received in Japan?
For one thing, Japanese children generally receive some music education at school, and are much more exposed to classical music—like children in the U.K. and Europe. (The only exposure many American children get to classical music is at the dentist’s office.) As such, they can appreciate the daring marriage of highbrow classical music and lowbrow rock. Add on top of that the wow factor of technical virtuosity.
It also helps that so much of prog rock is instrumental, and that the esoteric nature of the lyrics renders them just about meaningless to non-English speakers. Unlike American rock, where the focus is often “the message”, prog rock is all about creating an atmosphere. Where there are vocals, there are often sound effects that distort them, or as is the case with a band like Yes, intricate, almost choral vocal arrangements. The words often don’t mean as much as the overall sound.
It’s also interesting to note that there is a nerdy, almost otaku-like aesthetic to prog rock, most obviously in the fantasy and sci-fi themes of the genre’s concept albums. Musicians pursued their musical visions to the ends of the Earth and beyond, and their works are manifestations of their singular commitment.
The influence of British progressive rock would also lead to the rise of a native progressive rock scene in Japan. The most iconic (and most important) band of the scene was Yonin-Bayashi, which was formed in 1971. Yonin-Bayashi released its debut album, Isshoku-Sokuhatsu, in 1974, which is now widely regarded as one of the seminal albums of Japanese rock.
Isshoku-Sokuhatsu
Yonin-Bayashi’s debut album is considered one of Japanese rock’s towering achievements.
The early 70s saw rock musicians branching out into many different directions, establishing West Coast rock and Southern rock in the U.S., and hard rock and progressive rock in the U.K. Meanwhile, in Japan, enka (a form of traditional ballad music) and kayokyoku (Showa-era J-pop) still ruled the charts, although folk music—artists like Inoue Yosui and Yoshida Takuro—had become the popular music among the younger generation. City pop progenitor Happy End had broken up in 1972, and rock was still very much an underground phenomenon.
Yonin-Bayashi came onto the scene with one of the definitive artistic statements of Japanese rock, a pure gem of an album that was the magnum opus of a band that had internalized Western rock and channeled it back outwards through a uniquely Japanese prism. The word bayashi, or hayashi, refers to a group of performers who provide musical accompaniment for Noh or kabuki theater, rakugo performances, or at festivals. The group’s surreal lyrics capture the extraordinary and unusual in everyday Japanese life, such as in this line from their song “Sora to Kumo" (which has echoes of “Riders on the Storm" by the Doors): “There were many old temples in the area / And the children seemed to be having fun". The third track of their debut album is even titled “Omatsuri", that is, “festival". In the aforementioned “Sora to Kumo", the band also sings about “the cicada’s cry in the summer"; on another song, the band employs the sound effect of a ping-pong ball in much the same way Pink Floyd employed the sound of change in “Money". But while “Money" is a commentary on greed, Yonin-Bayashi is going for something more specifically Japanese: the idea that there is a musicality to the sounds of nature and even the noise of everyday phenomenon.
Two names worth knowing from the band’s lineup are Morizono Katsutoshi and Sakuma Masahide. Morizono was the band’s guitarist and husky-voiced frontman, able to play the guitar both delicately and aggressively. He would go on to play with the jazz-fusion band Prism and work as a studio musician. Sakuma was the bass player but he could also play keyboards and guitar. He would go on to become the record producer behind a veritable who’s who of J-pop artists: Boøwy, The Blue Hearts, Glay, Judy and Mary, and Elephant Kashimashi, just to name a few.
In recent years city pop has become a popular subculture in the U.S. and in other parts of the world; while Yonin-Bayashi are undeniably outside of the bounds of genre, I would highly recommend their work to any fan of Japanese music, and more importantly, rock. In 2019, a special deluxe edition of the band’s debut album Isshoku-Sokuhatsu was released to commemorate its 45th anniversary.
9.Epilogue
The heyday of progressive rock would last about ten years. Most of the genre’s biggest names would either run out of gas or move on to greener pastures—namely, new wave.
King Crimson would go through a number of different lineups before reforming in 1981 with Robert Fripp and Bill Bruford—at which point it began to incorporate pop and new wave elements into its sound.
ELP disbanded in 1979. It would reform with a different drummer in 1985, only to disband again after releasing one album.
Yes split up in 1981. It reformed with a new lineup in 1983, sporting a new pop-leaning sound that would help it achieve new levels of success in the U.S.
Pink Floyd had already transcended the prog rock label by the mid-70s, but its 1979 album The Wall is arguably the last masterpiece of the genre. The album’s biggest single, “Another Brick in the Wall Part II”, has a disco-like beat, and would become the band’s only #1 single in the U.S.
The Wall
Pink Floyd’s two-disc concept album reached #3 on the U.K. album chart, and #1 on the U.S. album chart. It sold more than 30 million copies worldwide.
The album tells the story of a fictional rock star (modeled after Waters himself and Syd Barrett) experiencing abandonment and isolation, which is symbolized by a wall. Pink Floyd had began to play large stadiums following the release of its previous album, Animals, and had grown disillusioned at the behavior of audiences on its U.S. tour. Fans in the front rows would be screaming and shouting but not really listening to the music; fans in the back were so far away that they could barely see what was happening on stage. Waters began to feel that there was a wall between the band and the audience. For the tour, a wall of cardboard bricks was gradually built between the band and the audience as the band played. During the tour, tensions grew between the four members, and in the years that followed Waters and Gilmour would be increasingly at odds. Waters would eventually leave the band in 1985.
The end of progressive rock’s decade was marked by two developments. First, prog rock musicians recognized that their pursuit of bigger and bigger artistic statements was heading toward a dead end. Second, the rise of punk and new wave meant that purveyors of prog rock had become dinosaurs. Indeed, the genre became known as “old wave”.
For English working class punk rock musicians, the pomp and bombast of prog rock must have been unbearable. Their short, stripped down songs were a direct rebuttal to the sprawling epics that had come before them. Punk rock icon Johnny Rotten, of the Sex Pistols, wore a Pink Floyd shirt on which he had written the words “I HATE” above the band’s name.
