songs.) Among the groups that played progressive rock from their inception are King Crimson (f. 1968) and Emerson, Lake, and Palmer (f. 1970). In both cases there was a predecessor group. King Crimson was preceeded by Giles, Giles, and Fripp, whose “cheerful insanity” (1968) is only of specialty interest today (though I still feel sorry for little Rodney thirty years later). However, Emerson, Lake, and Palmer was preceded by The Nice, and we should take a moment to mark the significance of this group for the development of progressive rock.14
Originally a foursome (the first two versions of the group included guitarists Davy O’List and Gordon Longstaff), The Nice became most interesting, in my view, with their third album, where they pared down to a keyboard-led trio. This assemblage, consisting in Keith Emerson, keyboards (mainly piano and Hammond B-3 organ), Lee Jackson on bass guitar and vocals, and Brian Davison on drums, was in many ways a streamlined paradigm for the progressive groups that formed around them. Starting with the first of the three albums recorded by this trio, The Nice (1969), Keith Emerson showed that it was possible to bring together a very large range of influences, including European classical music, jazz, ragtime, Broadway, boogie-woogie, psychedelic, and Bob Dylan. Emerson’s classical influences at that point ran from Bach to Sibelius, while his jazz chops seemed especially indebted to Oscar Peterson.
The Nice’s fourth album, Five Bridges (1970), was recorded live with a full orchestra. This was not the first major symphonic outing for a rock group—the Moody Blues had already pioneered this idea three years before, with Days of Future Passed (1967), which is certainly the superior album as well. However, as with the other sides of Sergeant Pepper’s that we hear in such albums as the Stones’ Satanic Majesties, there is something to be said for the second time something happens. In the case of The Nice, another blow was struck for an expanded range for rock music. The actual “Five Bridges Suite,” which fills side one of the original LP, moves from a more baroque classical style to, ultimately, a mini-concerto for jazz reeds and brass, featuring some of the major figures from the English scene (including Alan Skidmore, Kenny Wheeler, and Chris Pyne). Keith Emerson’s liner notes for the album capture nicely—if not altogether coherently (but that’s part of the trip!)—the experimental mood of the times:
On a journey from the almost Utopian freedom of our music to the established orthodox music school I met Joseph Eger [who conducted the Sinfonia of London in this project] who was travelling in the opposite direction.
Since that meeting we have on various occasions been catalysts in combining together the music from our different backgrounds forming sometimes a fusion, and other times a healthy conflict between the orchestra, representing possibly the establishment, and the trio, representing the non-establishment; ourselves having complete trust in a rebellious spirit and highly developed, broad minded music brain whose reformed ideas in direction have been frowned upon, almost spat upon by some so-called music critics. That being Joseph Eger, the fighter.
[The “Suite”] uses bridges as a musical symbol. I worked on building a musical bridge combining early baroque forms to more contemporary ideas. . . .
In conclusion to all this The Nice and Joseph Eger have been trying to build bridges to those musical shores which seem determined to remain apart from that which is a whole.
It was easy then and it is easy now to be cynical about this sort of thing.15 And so, a contrast opens up around Emerson’s sentiments that continues to permeate the discussion regarding progressive rock: a contrast between a visionary idealism—albeit sometimes a naive one—concerning both purely musical and social aims, and a cynicism that regards striving for “utopian freedom” and similar goals as deluded.
Incidentally, Five Bridges features an album cover by Hipgnosis, who would design many important covers in the seventies (the best known of which is Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon).
As protoprogressive rock, Keith Emerson and The Nice represented the best and the worst. At their best, The Nice could come up with compositions and performances that were both subtle and innovative. “Azrael,” the lead-off piece from The Nice, is a fine example of these qualities. At their worst, the group—and especially Emerson—resorted to bombastic histrionics, of a sort that later became associated with progressive rock in general. (I’ve seen Emerson abuse his organ a couple times with ELP, once in the seventies and once in the nineties; at the expense of sounding like a stick in the mud, I still have to say that I find the whole exercise tedious, pointless, and unamusing—even if a large segment of the average rock concert audience gets off on it.)
Finally, something ought to be said about the absence of guitar on these albums. As the reader is undoubtedly aware, most progressive rock groups have guitar players. Furthermore, it is best, in my view, to resist the overidentification of progressive rock with keyboard wizardry. (After all, one of the pillars of progressive rock, King Crimson, never featured multiple keyboard work.) Still, we might consider The Nice, in its trio form, as presenting exemplary protoprogressive rock in that the guitar is not the center or dominating force in the music. Obviously, there are many other examples of this displacement, going back to Little Richard and Jerry Lee Lewis, and coming forward to the later music of the Beatles. The key issue here is not the guitar itself, but instead what would be the dominating presence in rock music—would music come through the guitar or the guitar through the music?16 Indeed, from Rubber Soul onward, a demarcation opens up between rock music that will remain more closely tied to the blues form and to the electric guitar, and rock music that explores other possibilities. Again, my term for the insistence that only the former is “real” or “authentic” rock music is “blues orthodoxy.” To be sure, there is much music, including music from the later Beatles, that straddles this line.
Looked at this way, we might also consider that progressive rock straddles various lines as well, with one foot in the kind of rock music that rejects blues orthodoxy, and the other foot perhaps out of rock music altogether. From the perspective of blues orthodoxy, this kind of music really isn’t rock music at all. We will explore this issue further in the next chapter (and also ask why this matters in any case), but it still seems to me that the fundamental crossing of lines was accomplished by the Beatles. The Beatles made rock music with a developmental perspective; the question then becomes, Where do you draw the line, how much development is too much? But I would also like to ask, Why do we want to draw the line? What forces are at work in making us think that a line needs to be drawn?
The “forces at work” are not simply folks who want some “old time rock ’n’ roll”—instead, this is a question of social and cultural shifts. But first we will need to explore the cultural currents that actually demanded some “new time” rock music.
Rock music, up to a point, developed through qualitative leaps that were not entirely or even primarily driven by the commercial imperative to deliver salable product. Instead, the driving force was a synthesis of social and musical experimentalism.
To conclude this strange and rather tendentious romp through the history of rock music, let’s bring the connections forward one more time. Allan Kozinn discusses the way that John Lennon would often borrow a tune or a hook from some earlier song, and use it as the launching pad for his own composition.
Not that Lennon worked this way all the time. Many of his best songs are entirely without precedent or model. Still, using an earlier piece of music as either a source of ideas or as the foundation for a new work is a time-honoured practice. In the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, church composers like Guillaume Dufay and Josquin Despres routinely based their Masses on popular melodies, tunes that any listener of the time would have known. But these composers did not have copyright lawyers looking over their shoulders. Lennon knew that if he were going to use existing works as models, he had to disguise them, but occasionally he let a clue slip through. In 1969 he patterned “Come Together” after Chuck Berry’s “You Can’t Catch Me.” (p. 24)17
Progressive rock represents a qualitative development in one of the core ideas of rock music: the generous synthesis, carried forward in an open and developmental way. The key