Weekend Musical Break: Pink Floyd

No posts this weekend, so this one is going up early.

Pink Floyd is a hard band to sum in in three paragraphs. One can make the case that three very different bands have performed under that name: the original band led by Syd Barrett, the later Roger Waters-led effort that produced the band’s most memorable albums, and the post-Waters David Gilmour Pink Floyd which stayed Prog to a great extent but which had a wholly different sound. One funny thing is that pretty much nobody has ever managed to duplicate the sound of any of the three Pink Floyds, and there are those who have tried – Queensryche comes immediately to mind as the most successful attempt – to ape this very influential act.

One of the reasons that Floyd remians so distinct is that they didn’t craft songs so much as whole albums, and consuming radio staples like ‘Money’ or ‘Comfortably Numb’ is a totally different experience than sitting down to listen to The Wall, Wish You Were Here or Dark Side of the Moon in their entirety. The last of these was so successful that it stayed on the sales charts for over fourteen years, and was only removed from that list when the rules changed. To this day, no other album is as thematically cohesive and complete as Dark Side.

The early Floyd albums The Piper at the Gates of Dawn and A Saucerful of Secrets predate their best known work, but would introduce science-fictional themes in tracks like ‘Astronomy Domine’, ‘Interstellar Overdrive’ and ‘Set the Controls For the Heart of the Sun’ that the band would revisit in later years to a lesser extent. Such concepts would be widely adopted by acts as diverse as Blue Oyster Cult and David Bowie, and would launch a movement within Prog that would eventually become an entire branch of its own. Space Rock would be very much the child of Pink Floyd.

 

Weekend Musical Break: David Bowie

With the birth of punk in the early 70s, rock began to split into two branches; one focused on simple, punchy songs and the other on ornate, sophisticated arrangemnets. Both would, at times, take these archetypes to the extreme, and even though the punk tradition won out on the music charts (because it’s easier to sell,) Prog never went away, either.

David Bowie was the poster child for Glam but, really, has often straddled the fence between the two halves of rock music. Indeed, he’d dabble in pop-infused rock eventually, and in post-punk alternative with Tin Machine.

This particular track is from the seminal 1972 concept album The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars.

 

Weekend Musical Break: Mott the Hoople

Watching (the US version of) <i>Life on Mars</i>, I was surprised to hear Hoople’s ‘All the Way to Memphis’. I should not have been – it’s an iconic piece from the early 70’s – it’s just a little surprising that US TV producers thought to include a lesser-known track from what I would have thought they’d see as a very obscure band.

The band’s best-known track is of course today’s track. It was the (unintentional and inappropriate) anthem of the Glam Rock era, eclipsing even the writer’s own works.

The writer, of course, was David Bowie, who wrote the track for Hoople as an incentive for the commercially unsuccessful band to stay together and stick with it. Although the band would break up anyway eventually, the resulting album and single were smash hits.

About Bowie, of course, there is more to say.

 

Weekend Musical Break: T. Rex

If someone else seems today to be the most visible face of early 1970s Glam Rock, T. Rex was its heart and soul at the time, with singer/songwriter Marc Bolan the embodiment of the Glam ideal, to the point that when a film, Velvet Goldmine was made about the Glam era, it was he whose life formed the basis for the protagonist’s, even where the movie borrows the symbology and music of others.

The only T. Rex song that gets airplay on today’s corporate radio is the pernicious ‘Get It On (Bang a Gong)’ with its flamboyant and blatantly sexual lyrics. This entry is in my opinion a much stronger song, and more typical of T. Rex at its glammy best.

The Glam Rock movement spawned acts like Roxy Music and Sweet, was a formative influence on punk, particularly on Lou Reed and the Velvet Underground, and was key to the rise of proto-metal acts like Alice Cooper and KISS – in that sense it is the root of what would eventually become hair metal during the 80s. But one of its more obscure acts was to have a strong influence on the most enduring and eclectic musical artists of the rock era.

 

Weekend Musical Break: The Crazy World of Arthur Brown

The Progressive movement had deep roots in the rock of the 1960s, a lineage that the early efforts by King Crimson makes very clear. In British bands of the second half of that decade, like the Moody Blues, Procol Harem, the Yardbirds and The Beatles, you’ll find a sort of ‘proto-Prog’ clearly moving rock in a direction of ornate instrumentation, baroque and mystical lyrics, orchestral arrangement and classical influences. The other half of this proto-Prog comes from largely American psychedelia, with examples including Iron Butterfly, The Doors and Jefferson Airplane.

Today’s selection, the glorious theme song of every Bright Wizard, is from one of the relatively few British psychedelic acts. You’ll have heard this song before, a bizzare masterpiece that you’ll be tempted to call a one-hit wonder, but its mad architect had later roles with his own band Kingdom Come, with Space Rock icons Hawkwind, as a priest in The Who’s rock opera film Tommy, and with the much better-known Alan Parsons Project.

You will, of course, notice a particular piece of theatricality in the video that would rise to prominence with another band that picked it up a few years later. And you’ll see, too, in the intensity of both the music and the staging, the beginnings of that notable cousin of Prog, Glam Rock.

 

Weekend Musical Break: King Crimson

Yes may lie at the heart of the Progressive Rock movement, with their complex arrangements and symphonic sound. They are probably the core Progressive band that has the most songs in radio rotation today. But less well-known, and far less frequently heard, is the act that is the bedrock of Prog’s other half, the experimental and avante-garde.

1969’s In the Court of the Crimson King was deeply influential to the Prog movement, and its effects can still be felt in contemporary successors like Muse, the Flower Kings and Porcupine Tree. It was King Crimson’s first album, and it’s probably their most accessible. The title track, which you’ll see below, is still heard occasionally on the abomination that is corporate radio, much less frequently than the band’s lone other entry on Classic Rock stations, ’21st Century Schizoid Man’, which has seen numerous covers.

King Crimson is not representative of the experimental side of Progressive Rock; in five decades, it has defined it, and with its fusion of rock, symphonic sound and improvisation, set the stage for other avante-garde (and even weirder, in some cases,) acts.

 

Weekend Musical Break: Yes

Blue Oyster Cult is not considered a ‘core’ Progressive Rock act, for a number of reasons. They had bonafide hits, for one, something that pretty consistently eluded most Prog bands even in Prog’s heyday. During that time, one of the most enduring Progressive acts also didn’t have a hit single, despite a number of critically acclaimed and commercially successful albums, including Close to the Edge. It wasn’t until the acquisition of Trevor Rabin by the band that they finally produced a suprise smash in ‘Owner of a Lonely Heart’.

The album which spawned that hit, 1983’s 90125, was quite atypical for Yes, but over the years their sound has had a consistency that most bands never attain over such a lengthy period, despite a membership almost constantly in flux. The ‘classic’ Yes lineup in fact only endured for one record, Fragile. Today’s piece is from that album.

Over the years there has been only one perfromer who’s been a part of every incarnation of Yes, bassist Chris Squire. This particular performance shows off his talent despite the fact that one generally doesn’t find good sound quality on YouTube. Just listen to that baseline. Les Claypool has nothing on this man.

 

Weekend Musical Break: Blue Oyster Cult

Part of the joy of This is Spinal Tap is that the songs are as good as they are. They are as self-important and cheesy as it needed for the satire of the film, but they also work in the context of the milieu presented by the film, and as actual songs in the musical genre they’re satirizing.

This is, in this context, the difference between ’satire’ and ’spoof’. Spinal Tap is not a spoof, and loves the culture it’s poking fun at even while it’s doing so – you can see the joy in the actors’ performances even while they are acting ludicrously. It does not hold it in contempt as Epic Movie does to its subject matter.

I’m a great fan of Progressive Rock (of which you’ll see a lot in this ongoing segment,) and last week’s ‘Stonehenge’ is very much a crack at that subgenre of rock. I’m sure there’s a musical act that you think of when you watch that scene from the movie; I always think of Blue Oyster Cult, one of my favorite bands, and one which created a lot of epic, glorious, pompous songs. Today’s entry is one of their biggest hits, and far less self-indulgent than ‘Veteran of the Psychic Wars’ or ‘The Great Sun Jester’. But even when BOC was doing these operatic epics, they never lost sight of the fact that the songs they were performing were basically cheesy and overwritten, and thus a sense of humor, sometimes grim, pervades them. They wrote a song about a zombie Joan Crawford, for heaven’s sake, to say nothing of the one about Godzilla.

Oh, and yeah… this is the one with the cowbell.

 

Weekend Musical Break: Spinal Tap

Because it’s been on my mind a lot of late, I’ll start with this. I intend to do one of these every weekend, to make up for no real blog posts from me.

I mentioned this last week, but if anyone hasn’t already seen This is Spinal Tap, go rent it at once; it’s the funniest film there is about rock music, and one of the funniest comedies ever made.