and New Orleans. If Jerry Lee Lewis and Little Richard came out of Southern charismatic churches where the religion is intensely physical, Diddley seemed to connect with something else, something, there as well, hidden in the charismatic Christianity of warmer climes (that Southern thing again)—something in the vicinity of the old religions of the Earth, something “pagan,” animistic, akin to voodoo, and haunting.
It is worth noting that the intertwining of Christianity and the old nature religions will also be found in progressive rock. Perhaps the most important examples are Yes’s Close to the Edge and Tales from Topographic Oceans (e.g., “a dew drop can exalt us like the music of the sun”).11 Admittedly, the intertwining found in this music is probably rooted in more specifically European and British Isles forms of hermeticism, but the link of affinity still has significance. At the very least, it is a question of a “force” that “comes through” (spoken to again quite recently in Yes’s “That, That Is,” as well as in Robert Fripp’s notion that King Crimson forms when there is King Crimson music to be played). I think that every musician who hopes to “go somewhere” with the music understands this subterranean welling-up.
In Diddley’s case, the welling up is also a redemptive force, as his seemingly simple one-note or one-chord meditations also call to mind the field hollers of slaves and poor sharecroppers. Listening to Diddley’s music in preparation for this all-too-brief discussion of it, I was also struck by an interesting parallel. An omnipresent force in this music is the maraca playing of Jerome Green. The maraca is an instrument that goes back to Africa—it is basically a gourd filled with dried seeds or beans. There is something basically unpredictable in the use of maracas, something like a quantum effect at work—regardless of how much rhythmic sense the maraca player has, there’s a limit to how much control can be effected over the falling of those seeds. Not to head too far into the territory of theoretical physics, the point is that the maracas fit well into Diddley’s music because they represent the essence of that music—simplicity and steadiness combined with complexity and unpredictability. A parallel I am thinking of concerns the way that the great African (Nigerian) musician Fela Kuti always has the afuche (a gourd covered with strings of beads, which the player moves by hand over the surface of the gourd) at the center of his music. Fela has a rather large group (twelve or more instrumentalists, seven or eight singers, and seven or eight dancers), but the afuche is always in the front of the stage, in some sense leading the band—or perhaps serving as its soul. In either case—Diddley’s maracas or Fela’s afuche—there is an idea at work, and it is both simple and deep.
Incidentally, the maracas and the afuche are among those “simple” percussion instruments, like the tambourine, that everyone assumes they could easily play—but it ain’t necessarily so.
Diddley also expanded the sonic range on top, with the use of violin and often very angular guitar (visually represented by Diddley’s famous rectangular-shaped instruments, which also evoke another part of the Southern culture of poor people, namely the cigar-box fiddle).
It should be mentioned, too, that Diddley was probably the only early rocker to feature women instrumentalists in his groups (the best known of whom was a guitarist called “The Duchess”).
The underground and innovative (“going somewhere”) aspects of early rock music gave rise to a trend that was both developmental—“progressive”—and outside of the mainstream. Despite claims, from Theodore Gracyk and others (see, e.g., Gracyk, pp. 180–85, on the question of “selling out”), that most of rock music’s “rebelliousness” is just a pose for selling records, certainly there is a sense in which the more developmental and underground aspects of rock music (perhaps even quite apart from what specific musicians thought they were doing) were set against the mainstream. The interesting rock music, whether from the fifties, or the time of progressive rock, or today, is set against pop formulas and pop sensibilities. In some of the early rock music, such as that of Little Richard or Bo Diddley, there is an expansiveness that is both sonic and social. It is quite possible to trace the lines of development, from the early and middle fifties, to the late sixties, that led to quantum leaps in the sophistication of rock music.
Many groups and musicians played important roles in this developmental process, but none more than the Beach Boys and the Beatles. A slogan that I will appeal to more than once in the course of this book is the following: “If you don’t like progressive rock, blame it on the Beatles.” I only mention the one group in my slogan for sake of brevity and for shock value (hardly anyone wants not to like the Beatles), but the same blame could be laid at the foot of the Beach Boys. Consider the “danceability” question. I admit, for what it’s worth, that the issue of what happens to a music that is based in dance (or is originally meant to be primarily music for dancing to) when it is no longer danceable is a valid question. But, the fact is, the same reasons why much progressive rock is difficult to dance to apply just as much to “Good Vibrations” and “A Day in the Life” (where’s that backbeat?!).
On top of the firm foundation laid by Ray Charles, Chuck Berry, Little Richard, Jerry Lee Lewis, and Bo Diddley, the Beach Boys and the Beatles brought expansions in harmony, instrumentation (and therefore timbre), duration, rhythm, and the use of recording technology. Of these elements, the first and the last were the most important in clearing a pathway toward the development of progressive rock. Although this is an oversimplification, it might be said that progressive rock grew out of the combination of African rhythms and European harmonies that passed through the southeastern United States and then went out to the world as rock and roll. (This is the “Afro-Celtic” idea again, which has lately made a reappearance by way of hip-hop.) Certainly, by the time we reach the turning point represented by the Beach Boys’ Pet Sounds (1966) and the Beatles’ Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts’ Club Band (1967), it seems that Bo Diddley, Little Richard, Mississippi, New Orleans, and Africa are a long way away. Then again, when we trace the evolution of, say, Peter Gabriel, from Genesis to Secret World, it seems that things have come full circle—or perhaps “full spiral” would be a more apt description. (In the video of the Secret World concert, Gabriel closes with what to my mind is a fantastic song, “In Your Eyes.” As the song and concert come to the finale, most of the large group of musicians is dancing around the edge of the circular stage, a wonderful—and utopian—image of this spiral.)
Framed once again in these terms, the line that leads from the originators, through the Beach Boys and Beatles, and ultimately to progressive rock, is clear. Look somewhere in the middle of this line, to King Crimson’s Larks’ Tongues in Aspic or the third part of Yes’s Tales from Topographic Oceans (“The Ancient: Giants Under the Sun”) or the Mahavishnu Orchestra’s Inner Mounting Flame, and you find a solid core of adventurous rhythms, very much traceable to African music, and innovative harmonies, building on the tradition of nineteenth- and twentieth-century European classical music. A music historian might say, “So what? Isn’t this combination already in place with Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring?” Admittedly, there is a large component of Stravinsky in much of progressive rock—along with smaller doses of Debussy, Bartók, Sibelius, Orff, Messiaen, Cage, Stockhausen (and, though rarely, Schönberg and Webern)—but where the African European combination appears in Stravinsky as exoticism and dramatic juxtaposition (and even as colonialism and exploitation), in progressive rock there is an integration into a new kind of music. The Peter Gabriel example is apt, because the works by King Crimson, Yes, and the Mahavishnu Orchestra mentioned just now are already full-blown examples of “world music.”
This generous synthesis is already well along with the Beatles’ Rubber Soul (1965). This album represents a turning point in another regard: at this moment, for rock musicians who were pursuing the underground and developmental possibilities of the music, the album rather than the song became the basic unit of artistic production.
In discussions of progressive rock, the idea of the “concept album” is mentioned frequently. If this term refers to albums that have thematic unity and development throughout, then in reality there are probably fewer concept albums than one might at first think. Pet Sounds and Sergeant Pepper’s