Prog Rock Tales

YOU would have to look long and hard to find someone who felt less warmly about the movement known as progressive rock as your humble blogger. (If the genre was bad in its original appearance, it seemed doubly awful in its ‘80s AOR rebirth.) I expect a lot of us who came of age in the years after punk feel the same way, and preferred the concision of college radio or “modern rock” acts like R.E.M. and Elvis Costello to endless prog symphonies. (Of course, I will make an exception here for the bizarre genius of Robert Fripp.)

 

Why, then, can’t I put down this new book, Yes is the Answer , a collection of writers on prog? I’m still not sure, but I love its combination of humor and critical seriousness. The book is edited by longtime LA writer Marc Weingarten – an old friend whose music journalism I read in the '90s -- and Tyson Cornell, who once booked authors at Book Soup and now runs Rare Bird Lit. 

The years between Sgt. Pepper’s and those first Clash and Pistols singles were a strange disorienting time for rock music. Glam found one way out of that puzzle, and prog took another road. Was all that heavy, high-pitched silliness worth it?

In any case, Yes is the Answer includes writer/producer Seth Greenland on The Nice, novelist Matthew Specktor on Yes, Wesley Stace (John Wesley Harding) on the prog scene of Canterbury, UK, Rick Moody on Emerson, Lake & Palmer, Jim DeRogatis on Genesis, music writer Margaret Wappler on getting laid to King Crimson, New York Times food writer Jeff Gordinier on how failed sex is a lot like a Styx concert, writer/bassist Jim Greer on Guided by Voices' debt to prog, and many other sharp, counter-intuitive pieces. 

Overall, it's way more fun than it has any business being.

Keep your eyes peeled for events around town. For now, here is my conversation with Weingarten.

Why did this seem like the right time for a book on this once-mighty musical form? Is there a prog revival going on, like when Yes returned with “Owner of a Lonely Heart,” and Rush and Asia were rockin’ the suburbs? 

I think there are a lot of bands out there who secretly love prog but don't want to admit it - they have no cultural cover, so to speak, because this is the last rock subgenre that hasn't been reclaimed by hipsters.  So, we thought it was a good a time as any to point out that there's a lot of great music here, made at a time of pretty outrageous and often overreaching experimentation. Which is also part of the charm of prog - how crazily ambitious it was.  I love the idea of bands writing hour-long suites and traveling with orchestras - it speaks to a kind of silly grandeur that I think is lacking in indie rock  - you see it in contemporary metal, I suppose.  

Most of your contributors are -- like you and me -- Xers who came of age with post-punk or alt-rock. We’re a generation, then, for whom prog became a punch line or a bad memory. What undercut prog’s world domination back then? 

Because Prog was almost exclusively a British phenomenon, it was completely stomped by Punk Rock, because Punk in England was really a tsunami.  It was time for Prog to go, anyway - it had gotten really overblown and quite awful.  I don't think any of our contributors would argue that Relayer is better than London's Calling, but we all have a soft spot for Prog.  

How did you and your co-editor come up with your contributors? There are a few well-known rock critics like Jim DeRogatis, but mostly this is literary folk.

We didnt want this to be a wonky, "Robert Fripp created Frippertronics in 1979," facts-and-figures book. We didn't see the point of that, especially with a genre like Prog, which is so rooted in adolescence, and cherished memories of early drug experiences, arena shows and gatefold album analysis.  It seemed like a good idea to have non-music writers have a fresh go at it.  

I count two women among all the contributors, and suspect this is NOT the fault of the editors. Could it be that prog has traditionally been a guy thing, and as some of your essayists suggest, a pre-adolescent guy thing?

Totally young dude thing. One hundred percent! 

Do you have a favorite prog band or album? Anything involving Phil Collins?

Well, Phil Collins is an incredible drummer - and I do love all the Gabriel-era Genesis stuff. I guess King Crimson's Red is my favorite album - a noisy, dark and disturbing record. So unlike most Prog, in other words! 

Discovering Nick Drake

THE other day I spoke to Joe Boyd, the Britfolk impresario, because of his new tribute record, Way to Blue. The album is in honor of Nick Drake, who Boyd helped discover way back in the late '60s, and whose career was delicate, melancholy and all too short.

Today, Drake is revered not only be neo-folkies but by the leading jazz musician of my generation, pianist Brad Mehldau.

Boyd, of course, also had a role in Newport '65, the birth of Pink Floyd, Richard Thompson and Fairport Convention, AND produced what may be our favorite R.E.M. record, the enigmatic third album Fables of the Reconstruction.

Boyd got his start as a preppie New Jersey teenager who helped coax blues and jazz great Lonnie Johnson out of retirement.

Here is my conversation with Boyd, whose memoir of the musical '60s, White Bicycles, I cannot recommend highly enough.

British History and Texas Music

A SHORT, insightful new book about the making of the modern world – told in microcosm – has just come from the pen of a noted indie rocker.

Here at The Misread City, we’ve been impressed with the melancholy genius of Matt Kadane since the first record, What Fun Life Was, from his old band, Dallas slowcore quartet Bedhead. Like the group that followed, The New Year, Bedhead was defined by melodic songwriting and intricate, understated guitar playing – VU’s hushed third record, with a bit of Sonic Youth and New Order, a hint of Texas twang, and almost no effects. (I wrote about The New Year for the LA Times in 2008, and the video for their song "Disease" appears near the end of this post.)

Turns out Kadane (who led both groups with his bearded brother Bubba) spent much of his musical career getting a doctorate at Brown; these days he teaches history at Hobart and William Smith College in upstate New York.

In any case, Kadane’s new book is The Watchful Clothier: The Life of an Eighteenth-Century Protestant Capitalist. This is the kind of history we like – lucid, free of jargon and with a clear narrative and analytical direction. (Full disclosure: The Watchful Clothier appears on Yale University Press, the house on which I will publish my own work on the perils of the creative class, sometime next year.) It takes off from some ideas of one of our favorite historians, Christopher Hill. whose book on English radicalism, The World Turned Upside Down, inspired song sung by Billy Bragg song. (The Watchful Clothier, for what it's worth, includes an endorsement from the important historian Joyce Appleby, though it awaits its treatment by a British pop artist.)

What follows is my Q and A, conducted by email, with the historian and indie rocker. I ask Kadane about both sides of his amphibious identity.

Protestantism and the market economy are two of the key forces in the modern West, and have been specially joined at least since Max Weber and maybe since the Puritans. How did your "watchful clothier" seem like the right lens though which to gaze at these big issues?

The clothier, Joseph Ryder, lived in eighteenth-century Leeds where he ran a small business.  Leeds was one of the great cities of the industrial revolution and was undergoing big changes during Ryder's life, which ended in 1768, right around the time that industrialization was noticeably beginning.  But already while he was in his active years, the population was growing at an unprecedented rate, more and more people were becoming wage laborers, the cloth that the town produced was heading to markets further and further afield, and all these things played a major role in laying the framework for modern capitalism.  Ryder was, at the same time, a deeply pious and traditional Protestant and wrote a two and a half million word diary to document his religious life.  So he lived at the intersection of these big religious and material forces, and he's an ideal case study for seeing how they interacted.

Today, Protestantism and capitalism seem pretty comfortable with each other -- in many parts of the American South and Midwest, for instance, they both stand triumphant, with arms joined. But in the 18th century you chronicle, they seem to be in some serious tension with each other, don't they?

I agree that they now they seem designed for each other.  Mega-churches meet all the basic definitions of big business.  There are also, to be fair, subplots that complicate the story, more selfless social activists within the various denominations, and so on.  But the way things largely stand today is pretty different from how they were envisioned in the centuries closer to the Reformation.   Sermons back then railed against acquisitiveness, successful parishioners wrung their hands even when they balked at the idea of maximizing profits.  What complicates this image is that the Puritan ethos was also partly responsible for a new more relentless mode of striving in the world.  For reasons that I think Max Weber was basically the first to see, and however much the argument may need to be modified, Protestantism at its most scrupulous, at its most unguided by external authority, and in the right economic setting could encourage secular ambition as a way to overcome anxiety about salvation.

The nature of Christianity changed during this period, as Newton took hold and the Enlightenment reinforced the prestige science and rationalism. "A watchful God had become a watchmaker," you write. What happened and how was it felt at the time?

Christianity in the eighteenth century is hard to describe without qualification.  This is, after all, the age of the first great awakening.  But if traditional Christianity in western Europe was reasserting itself, this was in large part because it was also changing in the hands of rationalists, who may have been a minority of the population but who for that very reason were also radically vocal.  In the eyes of these anti-traditionalists, Jesus was often seen as a mere man, God was conceptualized as a sort of mathematician who designed a universe according to such sublime laws that it could run itself without Providential intervention, and the notion that humans are fundamentally depraved no longer seemed tenable.  Religious figures who were coming to think this way were also especially successful by the later eighteenth century in getting their message across to the emerging industrialists.  Churches throughout the north of England that had more or less been Calvinist at the beginning of the century were actively looking for religious radicals, particularly Unitarians, to start leading the flock.  Historians have more or less known that this was happening, but what has been missing from the story is the sort of parishioner's first hand account that Ryder offers.

Ryder recorded in his diary something like 5,000 sermons that he heard preached throughout Yorkshire, and what this record shows are two really interesting things.  One is that the new religious outlook, with its emphasis on the dignity of humans and the humanity of Jesus, had a natural affinity with emerging commercial self-interest.  Puritanism could also encourage economic striving to overcome anxiety about salvation, but it had a much stricter definition of what counted as economic excess.  And it's much easier to be fully self-interested if, for example, you actually believe that you're worthwhile rather than utterly depraved as Puritans thought.    So to accommodate the remarkable wealth that industrialists were generating, the religion of so many of these people had to soften on certain points.  A more rationalist religion was more compatible with more materially rational expectations.  But then the other thing that Ryder shows is that this religious and cultural shift could unsettle more conservative parishioners, who nevertheless stuck it out with some of the chapels that were basically turning the old Puritan ethos upside down.  Ryder went to his grave feeling like the ministers who were telling him to love himself a little more were actually getting Christianity wrong.  So I think you have to see religious change in the Enlightenment for the incredibly complicated process that it was.  But once you do see that, then the reason that the cultural effort to decriminalize self-interest was so concerted becomes intelligible--and this really was a decades long effort on the part of opinion makers like David Hume, Adam Smith, and others.  It was hard to convince people, the very sorts of industrious people who Smith theorized could make the nation unprecedentedly rich, that the traditional Christian take on wealth was exactly wrong.  Trying to transform self-interest from a vice into a virtue was such a massive cultural project for people like Adam Smith because people like Ryder, however poised they were to bolster the wealth of the nation by virtue of their industry and enterprise, were committed to a sort of morality that Smith and others saw as antithetical to capitalism.

What surprised you the most in your research as you dove into Ryder's life and times?

That he was actually interesting.  I recognized right away that his diary was an incredible source, and I knew I had to try to do something with it, but I was put off by his perspective.  I had originally been much more interested in the radicals.  But I didn't just grow to like him, which is in any case not a necessary condition for writing about someone.  I grew interested in how torn he was.  He equivocates about everything, not just commerce.  He could come across rioters and feel for them, but only if they were rioting from need and in reaction to unfair laws.  He had a deep sense of social propriety but could still feel sympathy for a maligned woman who showed up at his house drunk one night looking for spiritual advice.  He dressed down his household workers who helped him make cloth and afterwards confided to his diary that he was just as undisciplined in his youth and should think twice before feeling superior.  Those same workers were often orphans who he seems to have been attached to in at least of couple of cases, in no small part because he and his wife tried but failed to have children of their own.  And then that wife, a woman he never actually names in his diary, was an object of serious ambivalence.  When they married just a few months after the woman he was really in love with got away, he found her less exciting than his diary.  A few years into the marriage they had grown emotionally attached, and he was devastated when she died before her fortieth birthday and he had to go on alone for another decade and a half.  By all accounts people also liked him.  Maybe not surprisingly.  Ambivalent people see things from at least two angles, and that can make them much more empathetic beings than the dogmatists.

Which historical school or method are you most indebted to, and why is is important to you?

When I was an undergraduate I had a picture of Foucault on the wall beside my desk, still such a great picture from the interview he did in Vanity Fair in '83, not long before he died.  I don't see him in the same exalted way, but one thing I took from him I still believe:  doing history can usefully denature the present.  You get the same insight in Marx, another big influence.  Nietzsche too.  But Foucault also made me think that a key part of the story was the early modern past, especially in western Europe.  In graduate school I fell more under the influence of people like Weber, Pierre Bourdieu and others who more or less assert the importance of culture as a motive force even while staying tuned in to the material.  And when trying to describe culture I've learned not just from Clifford Geertz but from the major figures in semiotics who I avidly read as an undergraduate, from practitioners of microhistory like Carlo Ginzburg, from the British Marxists historians, especially Thompson, Hill, and Hobsbawm, that last of whom, despite his flaws, was particularly inspiring as one of my own teachers in graduate school.  A number of historians have also directly taught me the importance of archival research.  Margaret Jacob stands at the top of that list.  Her energy and curiosity in the archives are legendary, and she has had major insights about the enlightenment and the causes of industrialization because of her willingness to undertake some pretty unromantic labor.  I could say the same about my undergraduate mentor William Taylor, one of the great colonial Latin Americanists, whose footnotes will make you tremble.  Really I could say the same about two other guys who I worked with in graduate school, Tim Harris and Phil Benedict.  When you approach history as a philosophy student, as I did when I first began graduate school, there's a real temptation to be theoretical at the expense of contemporaries' experience.  I'm grateful to the theorists who can so clearly lay out the big questions.  But if I hadn't been encouraged by these historians I've just named, and they're not the only ones, then I don't think I'd have anything remotely useful to say about what happened in the past.

For a musician or music fan, there must be a double resonance to studying northern English industrial cities like Leeds or Manchester. Not only did they experience what you call "the birth pangs of modern capitalism" more acutely than anywhere else, these cities have produced more than their share of great rock music -- Gang of Four, Mekons, Joy Division, Smiths, Stone Roses, many more. Do you see any relation between those early-modern social forces and the culture that emerged much later?

I guess I don't see much of a relationship when it comes to religion.  In the centuries that separate these bands from the people I look at in the book there's a good case to be made that Christianity has almost died in Britain.  With the economy there may be more of a connection.  These bands are to de-industrialization what Ryder was to pre-industrialization.  And without the industrial revolution, Manchester and Leeds would still likely be small towns with little of the context--gritty urban decay, university life, radical class politics, and so on--that helped define those bands and their sound, especially when their music was recorded by Martin Hannett.  It's a great question, and I wish I had a better answer.

Congratulations to Matt Kadane the historian -- what is next for Matt Kadane the indie rock star?

The New Year is two-thirds finished with a new record.  The basic tracks are done and in the case of a few songs we're further along.  My brother and I also have a new band with David Bazan and Will Johnson called Overseas.  We just finished mastering the first record, which is set to come out at the beginning of June, followed by some shows in August on the east coast, west coast, and in Texas.  I'm excited to play music again.

Tom Stoppard and "Parade's End"

THIS week on HBO, Americans can catch up with a literary adaptation that hit hard in the UK last year: Parade's End. Godlike playwright Tom Stoppard adapted this series of four short novels by the underrated Ford Madox Ford -- published in the '20s and set around World War I.

Yours truly had a story today on the miniseries and the process of adapting a very long and difficult text. It meant, among other things, that I got to sip coffee with Stoppard at the Chateau Marmont while the crew set up for the Vanity Fair party. (Overall, I'd rather have a serious conversation with a major writer, so I don't mind not being invited this year.)

I have more good cuttiny-room-floor material from this story than I usually do, including a long interview with Benedict Cumerbatch, who plays the lead role. I'll post some of it here once I clean a few things up.

And here is my original ending to the piece, which will make the most sense to those who've seen most of the miniseries:

Tietjens’ wife doesn’t have the same regard for him. Hall plays Sylvia as a lusty, restless redhead – Molly Ringwald’s evil twin. But she’s not, Hall says, simply evil: The actress was in awe of her character’s audacity as well as her contradictions. “I thought, if they don’t hate me by the end of the first episode, I’m not doing my job. And if they don’t like me by the end of the fourth episode, I’m not doing my job. I have to play those extremes.”

            The stubbornness of these three characters puts them on a collision course that resolves in the mini-series’ last scenes. Stoppard, in his initial meetings with the show’s producers, emphasized that this was not going to be a war film: The war serves, instead, as a metaphor for changing times in the same way that Crawley manor does.

            “It was the war that forced British society to go through this sea change,” he says. “In 1918 women got the vote – [though] not all of them. Social values, moral values. All the arts kind of went berserk in the face of the horrors that had been witnessed. And you can see how absurd it would have seemed for Tietjens to hold onto his prewar worldview. Or his view of himself for that matter.”

Photo credit: Nick Briggs/HBO

Return of the Shoegazers

FOR a few thousand of us, last week marked one of the musical events of the decade. After more than 20 years of near-silence, My Bloody Valentine released a new, noisy, hazy, dreamy new album. I spent part of 1990 in England, where the shoegaze revolution was roaring full force, and passed much of the '90s sulking through record stores trying to find out of print EPs and import singles by this glorious band. (In the early '90s I saw Ride at the "old" 9:30 Club and the band was so loud my then girlfriend fled the venue and met me on the sidewalk outside after the show.)

So while I've not really had the chance to turn the new MBV up to 11, it all sent me back to my love of the genre, and to a story I wrote a few years ago about the shoegaze movement. The dreampop field was so out of fashion then, and so limited to fellow powerless Gen Xers, that I had to plead mightily for the space for this modest piece. It begins:

About a decade ago, while the Seattle grunge movement was drawing most of the music media's attention, a loose collection of mop-topped British and Irish musicians who explored guitar textures, converted noise into dreamy melody and experimented with hip-hop beats made some of the most compelling music of their era.

These days, a number of younger bands are emulating the rush of the original late '80s/early '90s shoegazers. One of those is The Pains of Being Pure at Heart, who also bring in other early indie movements. A former member of the band -- L.A.-based Chris Hochheim, who calls himself Ablebody -- has a fine new EP. Like his old band, it's hardly a carbon copy of Ride or MBV or Slowdive, but feels deeply connected to those bands.

Here is a link to listen to Ablebody's All My Everybody EP.

New West Coast Folk

SOMETHING about the cool weather, the melange of religious songs and the reflective tone of the end of the end of the year leads me to play a lot of acoustic folk music around the holidays. (And lest you jeer at the frigid winters we have in Southern California, I’ll tell you that it was in the 50s most of today and I could actually see my breath this morning. Okay, so we’re not in Yorkshire.)

In any case, two newish records have pushed their way into my end-of-year folk canon. Both have connections to the West Coast, which may be the best folk (and folk-rock) terrain outside the British Isles.

The first is Deer Creek Canyon, by the youngish Seattle-based folk singer Sera Cahoone. This is her third record, but she’s new to me and I don’t know her story in much detail. (Turns out she played drums in Band of Horses for a while – huh?)

I’ll just say: I don’t often hear an artist who’s able to blend tradition with a solid personality this well. None of these songs make me rethink the history of music, but all are intelligent, tastefully played and effortlessly tuneful. A few – Rumpshaker, Shakin’ Hands – are better than that.

The other album comes from a whole other generation. Bert Jasch was a Scotsman and one of the fathers of Britfolk. His show at Largo a few years back – his last American tour, I think – was one of the most riveting performances I’ve ever seen, with his peerless fingerpicking, his adaptation of traditional English and Celtic songs, and his rough-hewn voice.

Janch made a number of classic records in the ‘60s, some with John Renbourn; my favorite live record of his is the reasonably obscure Live in Australia.

But Omnivore has just released a two-CD disc that captures the late fingerpicking hero near his high point. The title disc, Heartbreak, was recorded in 1982. But even better is the second disc here, Live at McCabe’s Guitar Shop, which captures a 1981 solo date at the Santa Monica shrine.

Jansch opens with the old Irish song “Curragh of Kildare” and works his way through “Blackwater Side,” “Come Back Baby,” “The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face” (a Celt folk tune by Ewan MacColl before Elvis made it famous) and a song he had special sympathy with – the darkly romantic “Blues Run the Game.”

All of this music will be ringing and chiming around my house this week. Happy West Coast folk holidays to all.