Wowie Zowie!

Progress of sorts, 1969

The Sum of its Parts - prog rock predicted in The Augsburg Book of Miracles, 16th C.

Let a hundred flowers bloom; let a hundred schools of thought contend.

~ Mao Zedong


The Deram label had the first progressive rock pop hit in 1967, with ‘A Whiter Shade of Pale’ (“crap” – Jenny McLeod). What made it “progressive” was the chord change and organ line stolen from J.S. Bach, and the mystical meaningless lyrics, written by a real poet who wasn’t a member of the band (the Grateful Dead and King Crimson had similar arrangements) which took concepts from the classics (“one of 16 vestal virgins”, “while the Miller told his tale”) and scanned like a proper poem. Thus, the song pretended to two “respectable” artforms, classical music and poetry, and this was progress, because it allowed intellectuals, defined as those interested in the products of higher education, to partake of the pop honey pot.
Deram decided to invest further in the new rock, and the first fruits of this appeared on the compilation LP Wowie Zowie! The World of Progressive Music in 1969.

Wowie Zowie opens with ‘Down at Circe’s Place’ by Touch, which as its title suggests is a kind of bacchanal. Touch were a favourite discovery of Jack Bruce, Cream’s bassist, at the time, and they have the sound of a big jazz-rock band getting in touch with something more primal than 60’s jazz conventions allowed. Men becoming beasts and loving it. The lyric reads like a psych-prog manifesto:

You've lost your form, bridged the norm
And come to the land, where the sirens play
Faces of red, yellow, blue, red
White sound, they will sensify you
Gently pull back your mind petals
And listen, listen, listen

Prog, like everything else, had grown from the British Blues boom. Consequently, several tracks on Wowie Zowie were from the more serious students of the blues, like John Mayall, who provides ‘Where Did I Belong’, a gentle and ramshackle folk blues thing reminiscent of The Small Faces’ ‘The Universal’.

More boisterous, but similarly based in folk blues style, is Savoy Brown’s ‘Train to Nowhere’. This UK representation of US folk history, for all its fine musicianship, doesn’t strike me as progressive today, and the blues is going to be dropped from our understanding of that term once it’s shortened to “prog”:

The Johnny Almond Music Express returns us to modern jazz, with a touch of exotica, with ‘Voodoo Forest’. Modern jazz was definitely “progressive music”, and many prog bands (e.g. Soft Machine, Colosseum, Van Der Graf Generator) had jazz roots. Jazz chops, like classical repertoire, met the intellectual standard that prog came to represent better than the blues did.

But it’s with Genesis, who offer ‘In the Beginning’ from their first album From Genesis to Revelation, that we first hear from a band that would lead the 70’s prog revolution. On this early album, produced by pop impresario (and jailed sex offender) Johnathan King, who gave Genesis their name, they have a soft psych sound much like The Zombies, with only a hint of the grandiosity that would make them great for the next few albums.

In Freaks Out Luke Haines makes the case for Peter Gabriel’s Genesis being a major freak band, and the budget Chrysalis LP Genesis Live, which opened with the sci-fi epic ‘Watcher of the Skies’, was, in 1973, the greatest thing I’d yet heard; after an eerily impressionistic opening, the sensitivity of Gabriel’s vocal melody, laid over riffing of hostile complexity, tames it and leads it to sing along in a way that still sems wonderful.

Critical consensus used to be that Genesis were cool up until Peter Gabriel left and radically uncool with Phil Collins singing (and not dressing as a flower or god knows what) and for once critical opinion was exactly right.

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Side Two of Wowie Zowie opens with the biggest hit of one of Deram’s most successful signings, the Moody Blues, that is, ‘Nights in White Satin’, a slice of meretricious gloop. They did better, over concept albums of bubblegum psych rock inspired by the Pretty Things’ S.F. Sorrow with names like In Search of the Lost Chord and Days of Future Past, portentously psychedelic prose poems that stoners loved, and lyrics like

Timothy Leary's dead
No, no, no, no, he's outside, looking in

He'll fly his astral plane
Takes you trips around the bay
Brings you back the same day
Timothy Leary
Timothy Leary

Timothy Leary's dead
No, no, no, no, he's outside, looking in

Or,

Somebody exploded an H-bomb today...But it wasn't anybody I knew

From ‘Dear Diary’, on 1969’s On the Threshold of a Dream which enjoys a second life as a rap sample, as in the trip hoppy ‘Free the Robots’ (2012) by Capital STEEZ.

The Moodys are followed by Deram’s most left-of-field signing, the US singer-songwriter William R Strickland, with a track from his only LP release, William R Strickland is Only the Name, ‘Computer Lover’.

Mysteriously, Strickland, probably happy enough with his acoustic guitar, was set up with producer Buddy Kaye – a Tin Pan Alley veteran who wrote the title song from Treasure of the Sierra Madre and the theme music for I Dream of Jeannie – and, as arranger, Philip Springer, another career songwriter (he co-wrote Santa Baby) and film and TV score composer. Wikipedia says

“Springer taught electronic music at the UCLA extension from 1974 to 1986; a number of his students went on to make careers in the music world, including Eric Drew Feldman and Bill Bell. In 1981 he worked with Paul Simon, teaching him how to transcribe music.
Springer is also the author of the 1977 book "Switched on Synthesizer", a widely used manual for operating analog synthesizers.”

Perhaps recording William R Strickland is Only the Name was the experience that introduced Springer to the Moog, because the instrument is also credited to Gershon Kingsley, of electronic pioneers Perry and Kingsley, who produced the first synth pop hit, ‘Popcorn’, in 1969 (its cover by Hot Butter was a hit in 1972). In any case, the Moog on ‘Computer Lover’ plays two parts – one is that high “futuristic” sequence burbling throughout, with scant regard for the key or tempo of the song, but the other part is really ahead of its time, with two bass notes nailing down the chorus. It could be even louder, but it’s there.

You like doing things that you like to do
And you know them
They’re all around you
You like the standard games that participate your soul
And you think that it’s found you

Strickland was still being promoted, only a few years ago, as “the world’s fastest songwriter”, which is no sort of recommendation, but does I think mean that he’s freestyling a fair bit of what he does, perhaps all of it, and looked at that way, it’s impressive how much he gets into a song like ‘Computer Lover’. Or, into the existential eruption that’s ‘Oops, That’s Me’.

The theme of most of Strickland’s songs is criticism of the social order from an existential outsider position, 1969 zeitgeist ethos reminiscent of early Roy Harper or The Edgar Broughton band, helping to explain why he’s on a UK progressive label. Today we might categorize him as freak folk or outsider music, but that didn’t apply back then; Strickland’s generation overthrew enough of the social order in a more-or-less united way, and the outsider label doesn’t really fit this man, who at the last report (circa 2010) was still going strong, adapting to society by playing gigs, doing voices for radio adverts, and making hog calls (a respectable American practice) in Santa Cruz CA.

’Computer Lover’ is followed by some very normal jazz, the John Cameron Quartet’s ‘Go Away, Come Back Another Day’. Okay, there wasn’t much real prog in 1969, and this is the filler. Perhaps it’s being considered progressive is a hangover from the UK’s trad vs modern jazz debate of the 1950’s, if anyone remembers how that went down, I don’t, being a little too young and Beatles-obsessed to care by the time it was time for me to get involved.

Wowie Zowie’s final track is ‘Not Foolish, Not Wise’ by the Keef Hartley Band, once again showing that the more serious blues outfits were considered progressive.

Once prog sorted itself out, it considered itself the high art form on the rock spectrum, and the blues musos often devolved into its low art section, becoming heavy metal bands. Keef Hartley was a drummer and bandleader, and his bassist was Kiwi Gary Thain, who’d go on to join Uriah Heep, a group who, like Deep Purple (who wrote and recorded a long-forgotten Concerto for Rock Group and Orchestra), walked a fine line between prog rock and heavy metal on albums like The Magician’s Birthday.

Earlier in 1969 Thain and Hartley had played on Friends and Angels, an album by singer, and playwright and actress, Martha Velez, alongside Paul Kossoff, Eric Clapton and Stan Webb on guitars, Christine McVie and Brian Auger on keys, and Mitch Mitchel on drums.

Prog was a hairy business in these days, but there’s a woman saxophonist in Hartley’s big band, Barbara Thompson, whose band Paraphernalia included her husband Jon Hiseman (of the prog group Colosseum, who she also recorded with) on drums.¹ The best female-fronted UK prog band in these early days was Curved Air, with singer (and Buffy Saint Marie fan) Sonja Kristina, a band that included at different times members of the Police and Roxy Music.

From surveying Wowie Zowie, I can see that progressive music, in 1969, was a broad tent, working towards a kind of consensus. Luke Haines in Freaks Out suggests, amongst other things, that post-punk was prog redux, an idea that has merit. Compare ‘Trap’ by the excellent German prog psych collective Amon Düül II (1973) with Penetration’s Moving Targets or early Magazine.

In 1969, prog includes a wide range of genres – pop, blues rock, various kinds of jazz, Moog experimentation. It’s the synthesis of these elements, and the dumping of the blues element, by Genesis and Yes in particular, that will create the most commercially successful brand of prog rock.
This involved prog dropping “gutbucket” blues singing, a token of authenticity, for a softer androgynous vocal – Touch and Genesis, on this compilation, are already there. Similarly, outside of the heavy metal bands, the obvious blues guitar licks will be replaced with scales derived from classical music, Indian music and impressionism (modern jazz, in large part, was jazz filtered through the ideas of its European admirers). By the time we get to post-punk progressive music, blues and jazz as African influences will have been replaced by dub reggae and funk.

Bob Sutton tells me that the eponymous first Touch album, Touch, was a favourite of both Jane Walker (keyboardist of Toy Love) and Peter O’Neill, keyboardist of Invercargill’s 1970’s prog group Watchdog (he played a Hammond B3 or C3 through a Leslie speaker). Watchdog’s set, which I loved as a teenager, never made it onto tape, but some New Zealand prog bands left good recordings, highlights include The Underdogs’ Wasting Our Time (1970), an excellent example of a blues band (one of many local acts inspired by the 1965 Pretty Things tour) inventing their own version of prog, and Ragnarök’s 1974 LP, easily as good as any UK prog of its day, and recently remastered and reissued.

You can’t stop progress, which today in Aotearoa as elsewhere often involves inventive acts of nostalgia and revisionism. Like Earth Tongue’s entertaining Great Haunting, heavy psych metal with frequent signs of prog intent. Gussie Larkin, who also plays in indie band Mermaidens, makes a thick fuzz guitar sound that spans octaves, and writes evocative (if maybe sometimes tongue in cheek) Gothic lyrics, which play out in long, slow crawling riffs and rapid-fire blasts brought home by Ezra Simons’ loud and lively drumming.

1. In 1967 Thompson joined the British-Canadian all-woman group She Trinity. I can’t find any She Trinity recordings with saxophone, but I did find this – a live recording of the Third movement of Barbara Thompson’s Saxophone Concerto.