The King Crimson Barbershop Quartet
Adventures beyond the valley of the three minute pop tune.
I think I was about 14 years old the first time I heard the album FRAGILE - it was loaned to me by the guitar player in my friend Chip's band - I think I may have borrowed the fourth Led Zeppelin album the same day. I was really fascinated by the long songs (actually the longest song is about 8 minutes, but for someone who was listening mainly to Kiss and Blue Oyster Cult, this was pretty stinkin' long) and the complicated interplay between the different instruments. The bass guitar was not just playing the root of the chord, it was actively playing counterpoint and melody - less like a pulse and more like the entire circulatory system. The drummer was doing things I'd never heard before (I would later learn he was playing in a different time signature than the rest of the band). I was a little leery of the lead singer's voice which was a wee bit high and twee for me but the rest of the band had chops like I'd never heard before. My previous benchmark for a band's talent was the based on the strength of the guitar solos - now I was hearing songs played by musicians that had more obvious musical skill and were less concerned with soloing, I guess because they were showing off musically all the time, not just after the bridge.
This experience opened me to the world of Progressive Rock, which I am going to define for my purposes as "music interested in pushing musical boundaries: structural, lyrical and instrumental." By this definition I consider Yes, Dream Theater, Porcupine Tree, King Crimson, Opeth, Radiohead, Peter Gabriel, and The Mars Volta all Progressive bands.
Around this same time, I was introduced to the Canadian band Rush. Specifically the record 2112. Now here was a more traditional rock record, but like the Yes record it had longer more intricate songs and virtuoso musicianship. And another weird high voiced singer. The third discovery at this time was Gentle Giant's PLAYING THE FOOL, which my friend Chip picked up somewhere. Here was a live record with amazing arrangements and musicians who were not only virtuosos, but virtuoso multi-instrumentalists, often trading instruments several times in a single song. The presence of non-rock instruments like recorders, vibes, and violin seemed natural rather than odd. And the main singer had a great traditional rock voice in a normal range.
These three bands laid the foundation for what would become a lifelong interest in a branch of Progressive Rock called Technical Metal or Progressive Metal or Math Rock any of a number of other designations. Again, I'm pretty catholic in my tastes and where others make distinctions between bands like Dillinger Escape Plan and King Crimson, I'm inclined to lump them together. So, how does this differ from the above mentioned Progressive Rock? Truthfully, it's in attitude and volume and crunch-factor. Yes is certainly a progressive band but they would never be lumped in with a heavy metal band like Dream Theater. So for me, it's about the same kind of elements as Progressive Rock - long songs, complex song structures, amazing playing - along with bone crunching guitars and more often than not, relatively fast interlocking lines between instruments.
Braless and slightly slack
King Crimson are the touchstone of this sub-genre of prog. One of the first Progressive Rock bands - their debut album IN THE COURT OF THE CRIMSON KING appeared around the same time as the first Yes album and the early Genesis recordings - Crimson made a distinct shift in their musical direction in 1973. A significant personnel change, adding John Wetton, David Cross, Jamie Muir, and Bill Bruford to sole "surviving" Crim Robert Fripp, revitalized the band and they created a record that is the musical Rosetta Stone for Progressive Metal - LARKS' TONGUES IN ASPIC. Thirty years out, the disc still packs an amazing wallop. It's interesting to hear the recently released LIVE IN GUILDFORD , which is this material on the road with Jamie Muir (who left pretty soon afterwards to become a Buddhist Monk). There is a real dynamic in the performance with Muir that isn't present on the studio version (or any of the later live versions). "LTIA pt 2" is still in the KC live repertory.
The Mark III Crimson broke up in 1974 and there's not really anyone following this path until the 1980s. Bands like Iron Maiden and Queensryche, though usually lumped in with heavy metal bands actually have as much in common with the 70s progressive bands as they do Black Sabbath. Metallica fuses a mix of traditional heavy metal, technical instrument mastery, and punk esthetic into the genre. And while none of those three bands are strictly speaking tech metal bands, their influence on the next generation of players is profound. Further, when one hears current bands discussing their influences additional groups like Queen, Marillion, Genesis (post-Gabriel era), Kansas, and Jethro Tull are tossed around .
King Crimson came out of a six year retirement in 1981 with a two guitar/bass/drum version (Mark IV) featuring Fripp and Bruford from the prior incarnation and adding Adrian Belew (Bowie, Zappa, Talking Heads) and Tony Levin (Peter Gabriel, John Lennon, Alice Cooper, Buddy Rich). This version favored shorter songs, less instrumentals and interlocking musical lines over metal. They lasted until 1984 before taking another ten year hiatus.
The current wave of what is true progressive metal probably begins with Watchtower in 1986. An insanely talented group of musicians, there are probably more notes in their songs than a dozen by any other band. Their first album , ENERGETIC DISASSEMBLY, contains all the elements that will define the genre henceforward. Unfortunately, the vocals are all in that very specific 1980's pop metal vein (think Journey) but if one is willing to get past them (think Rush), the music shreds. There is a second Watchtower disc from 1989, CONTROL AND RESISTANCE, which I am starting to see in stores, so I guess there's some interest in these guys reviving after they reformed and played some dates opening for Dream Theater a couple of years back.
And speaking of Dream Theater, they are probably the band that has sparked the most interest and driven the development of progressive metal in the 1990s.
More to come....
