LITMIR.BIZ

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days and the great energy and inspiration of them.

      Edward Macan situates progressive rock in terms of a broad sixties counterculture. Progressive rock is no longer a part of this counterculture—which itself now only exists in the form of embattled or recuperated fragments. But if there was ever a “culture” (if such it is) that needed to be countered, the one we live in is it. In two important books, Postmodernism and The Seeds of Time, Fredric Jameson has spoken to the way that meaning and history are flattened and consigned to stasis and oblivion in this period of postmodern capitalism. In the latter book, he describes this in terms that are brutally stark:

      Parmenidean stasis [changeless Being in itself, to which Jameson is comparing the postmodern resistance to history] . . . to be sure knows at least one irrevocable event, namely death and the passage of the generations. . . . But death itself . . . is inescapable and [has been rendered] meaningless, since any historical framework that would serve to interpret and position individual deaths (at least for their survivors) has been destroyed. A kind of absolute violence, then, the abstraction of violent death, is something like the dialectical correlative to this world without time or history. (p. 19)

      When I argue that we should seize again the day, and take up again the idea that music, and a certain music in particular, was and is important, it is ultimately this absolute violence to which this argument and this proposed raid is opposed.

      As Macan argues, progressive rock has gone from being part of a more general counterculture to being simply what sociologists call a “taste public.” This means, as Macan explains, that whereas there was something like a world view associated with being an afficionado of progressive rock at a time when this kind of music was part of a larger counterculture, after the heyday of progressive rock it is more likely that afficionados only share an interest in the music, and do not necessarily share any larger set of values (see especially pp. 72–83). There is a good argument to be made that the degeneration of a counterculture into a mere taste public fits in all too nicely with a more general “culture” of consumerism and with the idea that there is nothing more at stake than individual “tastes.” Furthermore, and returning once again to the question of formalism and my friendly critic’s attempt to isolate “purely musical issues” from “political” questions, the move from counterculture to taste public is surely a monumental defeat, in that the move is an acceptance of the idea that music is not really that important in terms of this larger thing called “life.”

      So, again, What is music? If it is only capable of being entertainment, something to occupy us in our leisure time, but of no greater importance, then perhaps some of the components of the sixties counterculture really were invested with a significance all out of proportion to their actual worth.

      The response to this charge, I think, is seen first of all not in one of my more theoretical discussions, but instead in the fact that people who are into progressive rock seem to love this music, seem to think that it is important, seem to feel that it speaks to them on the level of the soul and not just as passing entertainment; there is a deep feeling that this music can be engaged with. Why, then, retreat into a sterile formalism when the larger issues begin to get rough and where one is challenged to examine where one’s commitments lie? My aim, instead, is to show why we need to go in the opposite direction.

      Another way to put this is that, if I dealt with this music only from the standpoint of history or musicology done from a purely academic perspective, or as a mere nostalgia trip—“warm fuzzies” and nothing more—then there wouldn’t be much point, as far as I’m concerned, in attempting to deepen our understanding of this music. Instead, I’d just put on Thick as a Brick or Larks’ Tongues in Aspic, and sit around with my friends and say, “Man, that is really something, that is really cool!” Of course, it is really something, it is really cool (in the pre-jaded sense of “cool,” that is), and it is good to just sit back and listen from time to time, without too much of an agenda as to what one will make of the experience. But my perspective is that there are two central issues here that are deeply linked. First, there is something about progressive rock that is not only to be enjoyed on the surface, but also to be understood and appreciated in depth. This depth appreciation is not unassociated with enjoyment, but here we would be interested in moving beyond surface pleasures and more into the realm of what speaks to the possibilities of human flourishing. Second, I would argue that, if we break with formalism (which, again, doesn’t mean absolving ourselves of the need for analysis of musical structure), then our perspective on the aforementioned understanding, appreciation, and enjoyment must be an engaged perspective. That is, we accept that, although “music” (or art more generally) and “life” do not at every point describe the same thing or activity, neither is there a way to strictly separate the two. This would go even more for the kinds of music that one could get very seriously involved in, “wrap one’s life around”—and, of course, I hold that progressive rock is one such kind of music. (In this connection, I can’t help but think about the title of Valerie Wilmer’s book on four major jazz innovators, including Cecil Taylor: As Serious As Your Life.) Therefore, a commitment to the importance of a kind of music that goes beyond surface enjoyment, toward that which speaks to the human spirit and the possibilities of human flourishing (and even a cosmic co-flourishing), must be understood, on reflection, to also entail a commitment to working those changes in the world that will enable this flourishing.

      This is to ask a great deal of music and of any one kind of music. And yet, I imagine that the kinds of people who are deeply interested in progressive rock will be able, upon reflection, to follow out these claims and to grapple with them. After all, we are interested in progressive rock because it is a thoughtful music.

      Alright—I realize that I am asking a great deal of you, dear reader; I hope that you will take this in the same spirit as progressive rock itself, which also asks a great deal (and therefore isn’t something that thoughtless rock music “criticism” has any time for). Just to be clear, I am not arguing that there is any single progressive rock “ideology” or political “agenda,” or something on that order, but rather that there is a fundamental connection between thoughtfulness and care in art and an engagement with the possibilities of human flourishing.

      Now let us turn to a brief tour of the rest of this book.

      Chapter 2 will deal with what I call the “prehistory of progressive rock.” Here we will discuss the history of rock music from the founders (including, for instance, Ray Charles and Chuck Berry), up through the Beatles, as well as other more experimental forms of rock that prepared the way for the emergence of progressive rock. This will necessarily be a skewed and slanted history; I do not believe that the only raison d’être of other kinds of rock music than progressive rock was to prepare the way for the latter, but in chapter 2 I will proceed as though this were the case. In addition to those already mentioned, I will discuss the Beach Boys, Hendrix, Cream, the psychedelic movement, and then four groups that are very important for being close to the edge (to coin a phrase!) of progressive rock: The Who, Led Zeppelin, the Moody Blues, and Pink Floyd. Obviously, I will need to explain why I do not place the Floyd, especially, in the category of progressive rock, and this will require the construction of definitions. Some of this work will be done in the second chapter, some in the third. Finally, I will discuss a group that was truly transitional to progressive rock, namely The Nice.

      In taking up this somewhat channeled history, I will foreground the experimental tendencies that have been around since the beginnings of rock music in order to show what larger cultural and social forces shaped these tendencies, and, ultimately, how these tendencies underwent, in the late sixties, a transformation of quantity to quality such that a distinct trend in rock music, progressive rock, emerged. I will argue, in a dialectical but I hope not a too-overdetermined way, that the seeds of progressive rock were always already present in the music of the “founders,” especially Ray Charles, Chuck Berry, Little Richard, Jerry Lee Lewis, and Bo Diddley. (When I say that I hope to avoid overdetermination, I mean that there was no absolute dialectical necessity that these seeds blossomed—which is again where there is a need to go beyond merely formalistic analysis.)

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