The Show that Never Ends

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NOTE for Prog Archives readers:
I originally wrote this for a MySpace post, and wanted to share it with a more appreciative audience.  Please overlook the MySpace references.  Thanks for reading and commenting in advance.
-Brian Dotson

*****************************

Let me start
this by giving credit to this very inspiring writer friend of mine,
Doug Boucher.  You can enjoy reading his ode to Keith Emerson, "Hang on
to a Dream" (January 31, 2008) by going to
http://www.myspace.com/dougboucher and locating it in his blog pages. 
Since Dougie inspired me when he posted this, and last night I read the
last pages of Keith's bio, I feel like sharing my thoughts on this
incredibly brilliant musician, and ... here goes!

In the art
form we call rock music, there have been very few power
instrumentalists that dominated the stage with their playing on
keyboards.  This has been a place held by guitarists.  My music worship
began with a band presenting with a loud, powerful guitarist - Jimmy
Page.  I have been an avid music listener since the age of five when my
Dad blessed me with the priviledge of playing his album collection as
much as I wanted!  The thing is, growing up in south Alabama, I didn't
really have anyone to hold my hand over the years and turn me to the
artists who were changing things.  I did hear Yes for the first time
around 1973 or so on our amazing local FM radio station [manned by
music-loving acidhead kid DJ's, God bless them!], and was immediately
drawn to a form of rock that had elements of jazz, classical, and
brand-new forms of musical expression.  I wouldn't know to call it
"progressive rock" until much later.

The lineup of Yes at the
time had a virtuoso guitar player that could achieve God status in the
minds of young music listeners (Steve Howe), but he had some serious
competition for attention in the group's keyboardist, Rick Wakeman. 
Rick has this classical piano player's studious approach to writing his
music that I love to this day.

When you're 18, you have to
evangelize upon your current music gods, and I remember going to work
one day at the little Radio Shack franchised dealer I was lucky enough
to be employed by, and raving to the twenty-something audio repair
technician at the place about something Wakeman was playing on a record
I was listening to, and he said something to the effect that if I
though Rick is the best rock keyboardist, I should go check out Keith
Emerson's playing on the Emerson, Lake, and Palmer album "Brain Salad
Surgery"!  I promptly did.  This guy played with classical influences,
but he brought some emotional dynamics into his playing that just
absolutely blew me away!  There was rage, sadness, fear, and even
horror in some places!  I have often thought since then that there just
wouldn't have been room in this band sonically or socially for an
electric guitar virtuoso.  Keith
just filled the musical space with his melodic ideas!  With this guy,
it wasn't just rocking up the classical genre, but a love for jazz and
the blues that he worked into his compositions and playing, as well.

In
my typical fashion, I began to collect albums in a very focused way -
"Trilogy" next, then "Pictures at an Exhibition" (actually one of ELP's
earliest works).  Over the next few years, I bought all of them - you
don't need the discography here.  What made me able to listen to this
music for hours was the eclectic mix of  root influences to be found in
it.  I had a respect and slight interest in classical music, but the
adults in my life were hung up on the "Great Masters" - Beethoven,
Bach, etc.  It was all very White Anglo-Saxon, and I kind of blahed out
on it early.  There is a darker realm of musical expression available
to the symphony orchestra that I had, at that time, never heard.  It
came from "The Russians"!  This kind of orchestral music had emotional
dynamics that  Beethoven just didn't get to.  There was rage and anger
in spades, counterbalanced with idyllic sweetness and euphoria!  Who
introduced me to "The Russians"?  It was this "rock" keyboardist, Keith
Emerson.  The album was "Pictures of an Exhibition", written by Modest
Mussorgsky.  Who introduced me to this amazing sound journey?  Keith
Emerson did!  I remember my Dad heard me listening to the record, and
was immediately intrigued.  He asked me to turn it up, because he
wanted to know what lyrics Greg Lake and writer-collaborator Pete
Sinfield had come up with.  He wasn't impressed in the performance as a
whole.  Maybe this was due to Keith's insanely over-the-top Moog
synthesizer freakouts which he sprinkled in between the movements. 
Anyway, he very quickly produced a conventional classical LP of a
"Pictures at an Exhibition" recording, and we had ourselves the most
memorable shared musical experience of our lives!

My music
education - deprived childhood was remedied almost entirely by Keith
Emerson.  As I just pointed out, he prompted Dad to kick in with some
education that he would have otherwise forgotten to give to me!  Not
only would Keith give me a lifelong love of Russian classical music as
composed by Mussorgsky, Ravel, Prokofiev, and other contemporaries, but
he introduced me to this amazingly rhythmic piano player  and composer
by the name of Scott Joplin.  This introduction would be the immortal
"Maple Leaf Rag" as arranged by Emerson and recorded on "Works, Volume
2" [1977].  He brought me my first piano jazz recordings.  Any ELP fan
knows, he sprinkled them everywhere - even in the middle of the famous
rock suite, "Karn Evil 9", on the "Brain Salad Surgery" album.  Oh, and
I'm about to forget my introduction to the work of the man who is
perhaps the finest American orchestral composer to date - the great
Aaron Copeland.  The wide-open musical landscapes evoked with
Copeland's beatiful progressions of fifth intervals just urged me
deeper and deeper into my study of music!  As recently as the early
2000's, I happened across a collection of live recordings by the late
(very recently deceased), great Oscar Peterson.  I heard a lot of
Keith's pianistic musculature in the way Oscar savagely attacked the
jazz chords and scales!  I felt the same anger and forcefulness.  Keith
didn't create a new music style; he just wove a tapestry of the
greatest writings of many different artists into rock pieces!  Very,
very, cool!  It is hard to underestimate the impact that Keith
Emerson's approach to being a rock musician has had on my life, and
indeed, on the lives of countless others who grew up in the 1970's.  I
know he's not here on MySpace, but I'm glad I got some kind of forum to
acknowledge how he has spoken into my life.

This, dear readers,
is what PROGRESSIVE ROCK, is about.  It was invented when rock - and
-roll was a baby, at a time when young white Brits took the amazingly
emotionally expressive African-American art form known as the blues and
adapted it into something new.  Progressive artists like Keith from the
seventies, cross-pollinated this new blues styling with classical and
jazz root forms in a wonderful, "throw - it - all - in - there - and -
let - it - cook" soup.  You listen to these recordings, and it's an
adventure, a journey of musical styles that can point you in a hundred
different directions!  Ahmet Ertegun, founder of Atlantic Records, knew
that in the early 1970's, rock was a baby that had to develop its own
personality.  Thank God that he was open-minded enough to help finance
its mad scientists, like Keith Emerson.

But was the Progressive personality representative of the whole of rock?  Probably not.  It
is interesting and somewhat sad to note, that later, even Ertegun saw
the financial necessity for rock musicians to write "radio-friendly"
pop songs that weren't too long and didn't delve too deeply.  Here is a
quote from Ertegun in the final chapter of Keith's autobiography:

"Look,
why don't you guys just get yourself into a studio and jam like you
always did back in London and Montreux?  There's no need for concept
albums, just do your own thing.  Come up with short, radio-playable
stuff and don't make it too complicated."
[reported by Keith from a conversation at Atlantic Records offices, New York City, 1978]

I'll
give Mr. Ertegun due respect - he was feeling the needs of the mass
market, which relies on FM radio, and for which it was not practical to
come up with songs that took a while to listen to.  Emerson, Lake, and
Palmer delivered "Love Beach" [1979] after taking his advice.  It
didn't really fit ELP as they managed to come up with a mini-concept
piece which took up most of side 2 of the album.  This suite, "An
Officer and a Gentleman", was decidedly NOT radio-friendly, and I love
ELP for including it.  I'll give Lake his due here, because I think it
has more of his and Pete Sinfield's signature on it than it does
Keith's.  Sadly, this was to be ELP's last studio album for about 12
years.  It was obviously unfullfilling work for them.  I know that it
kind of left me flat, too.

An interesting question that I ponder
about progressive rock is this:  Were Mr. Ertegun and other powerful
people in the Record Biz right about the market demand for music, or
were they trying to influence it based on greed?  Are the masses
incapable of taking longer musical journeys?  Radio-friendly doesn't
matter anymore in the age of MP3 downloads, satellite radio systems
with gazillions of channels, and even the same terrestrial FM
transmitters being cheaply outfitted for simultaneous transmission of
two digital broadcast programs.  The bad news is that mega-corporations
own all the FM stations now, and the likelihood of grace being shown to
musical experimentalists who STILL EXIST TODAY like Keith is not good. 
However, many of you who have enough money to spend are subscribing to
your own listener-financed music delivery - XM, Sirius, cable music
channels, subsciption internet radio, whatever!  The radio-friendliness
was driven, I expect, by the need for frequent commercials, and many of
us are buying ourselves EMANCIPATION from the advertisers!  Can you say
amen?

But I digress, and I think I have landed on a subject for
my next blog.  I will leave you readers, and particularly the younger
ones who make up most of MySpace (hope some of you are here reading
this!) with a question.  If you are emancipating yourself from
commercial FM radio in this brave new digital world, what will you
choose to listen to?  MySpace has a few young artists who are trying to
make sure that Progressive Rock becomes "The Show That Never Ends". 
Keith Emerson was, to me, the founding father of this genre.  Other
Progheads will argue that this is giving him too much laud, and perhaps
they are right; there were many, many others with equal genius which
blazed the trail now followed by a tiny few.  The question I want to
ask all of you who actually have the time and interest to read this far
is this: do you have the time to actually SIT AND LISTEN to great
music?  Do you need radio-friendly because your lifestyle won't
accomodate the requisite attention span, or are you willing to go on a
musical road trip and "see" things you have never seen before?  There
are still artists who are willing to take you on a trip like that, and
I hope you will support them.  I don't want The Show to End.

Peace!

Yours truly,
Brian Dotson

(lines removed by Max)

Edited by M@X - February 24 2008 at 16:31