THE EMERGENCE OF ART ROCK

   For all the symphony rock fans out there, here is Fugazi/Taurus with
another article for you. This time I present an article written by John
Rockwell concerning, yeah you're right, symphony rock (or art rock, as
Rockwell calls it). Rockwell's style of writing can in this article seem
nearly as complicated as the music he describes, but if you understand this
advanced English you might find it interesting. My address is given after
the article in case you want to contact me for some reason.


 There is a mythology, an inherent developmental cycle, to artistic
movements. They begin with a rude and innocent vigor, pass into a healthy
adulthood and finally decline into an overwrought, feeble old age.
Something of this process can be observed in the passage of rock & roll
from the three-chord primitivism of the Fifties through the burgeoning
vitality and experimentation of the Sixties to the hollow emptiness of much
of the so-called progressive, or "art", rock of the Seventies.

 The whole notion of art rock triggers hostility from those who define rock
in terms of the early-middle stages of its development. Rock was born as a
street rebellion against pretensious and hypocrisy - of Fifties society.
Fifties Tin Pan Alley pop and high art in general ("Roll Over Beethoven").
Thus the very idea of art rock strikes some as a cancer to be battled
without quarter, and the punk reversion to primitivism was in part a
rejection of the fancier forms of progressive rock. The trouble is, once
consciousness has intruded itself into the process, it's impossible to
obliterate it (except maybe with drugs, and then only temporarily). And so
even primitivism, self-consciously assumed, became one of the principal
vehicles of art rock.
 The Beatles' "Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band" (1967) is often cited
as the progenitor of self-conscious experimentation in rock. It was the
album that dramatized rock's claim to artistic seriousness to an adult
world that had previously dismissed the whole genre as blathering teen
entertainment. The Beatles aspired to something really daring and new - an
unbashedly eclectic, musically clever melange that could only have been
created in a modern recording studio.
 One inevitable implication of the whole notion of art rock, anticipated by
Sgt. Pepper, is that it parallels, imitates or is inspired by other forms
of "higher", more "serious" music. On the whole, imitative art rock has
tended to emulate classical music, primarily the eighteenth- and
nineteenth-century orchestral sorts. The pioneers in this enterprise were
the Moody Blues, whose album "Days of Future Past" paired the group with
the London Festival Orchestra. Although Moody Blues devotees seemed to
think they were getting something higher toned than mere rock, they were
kidding themselves. Moody Blues records were mood music, pure and
regrettably not so simple. There's nothing wrong with that, of course,
except for the miscategorization into something more professional.
 The vast majority of the bands that pillage traditional classical music
come from Britain. Why British bands feel compelled to quote the classics,
however tounge-in-cheek, leads into the murky waters of class and nation
analysis. In comparison with the British, Americans tend to be happy
cavepeople. Most American rockers wouldn't know a Beethoven symphony if
they were run down by one in the middle of a freeway. One result of such
ignorance is that American art (music, painting, poetry, films etc.) can
develop untroubled by lame affectations of a cultured sensibility. In
Britain the lower classes enjoy no such isolation. The class divisions and
the crushing weight of high culture flourish essentially untrammeled.
Rockers seem far more eager to "dignify" their work, to make it acceptable
for upper-class approbation, by frightening it with trappings of classical
music. Or, conversely, they are far more intent upon making classical
music accessible to their audiences by bastardizing it in the rock context.
Or, maybe, they feel the need to parody it to the point of ludicrousness.
In all cases, they relate to it with a persistence and intesity that
Americans rarely match.
 The principal examples here from the Seventies are acts like The Nice,
Emerson Lake & Palmer, Deep Purple, Procul Harum, Renaissance, Yes and Rick
Wakeman. Much of what these artists did was just souped-up, oversynthesized,
vaguely "progressive" rock of no particular interest or pretensions. But
at one time or another all of them dealt in some form of classical
pastiche. Wakeman, classically trained as a pianist at the Royal Academy,
is as good an example as any. After serving time as a session pianist for
the likes of David Bowie and Cat Stevens, he joined Yes, helping to lead
the group into a convoluted pop mysicism. He eventually left Yes in 1974 to
pursue a solo career devoted to such elaborate, portentously titled
orchestral narratives as "Journey to the Centre of the Earth", "The Six
Wives of Henry VIII" and "The Myths and Legends of King Arthur and the
Knights of the Round Table". These ice-skating epics had their elements of
elephantine humor. But his classical excursions were dispatched with such a
brutal cynicism as to be genuinely appalling.
 Even when such groups weren't busily ripping off Grieg their music was
operatically arty in the bad sense, though their ponderous appeal to a
middle-class sensibility and their lame reliance on electronically updated
nineteenth-century vaudeville stage tricks. Too often these pastiches were
further burdened by the seemingly irresistible weakness certain sorts of
loud, arty British bands had for science-fiction art and "poetry". Yes'
album covers make the point as well as anything, but such puerile
mythologizing - Tolkien for the teenyboppers - pervaded much of British pop
poetry and lapsed over with insufferable affectation into much of the
British electric folk-rock camp, too; think only of Jethro Tull and Cat
Stevens.
 Classical borrowings don't have to be limited simply to quotations,
however, nor do they have to be bad by definition. The whole Craze for
"rock operas" of the Kinks-Who variety produced some fascinating work.
Similarly, some of the fairly straightforward heavy-metal groups have
colored their music with the judicious application of nonrock styles, to
telling effect (the use of Eastern modes and intrumental accents in Led
Zeppelin's "Kashmir", for example).
 Such use of classical and other nonrock styles and formal ideas blends
imperceptibly into all-purpose stylistic eclecticism - the free and often
febrile switching among different styles within the same piece.
Eclecticism, by now a talisman of the entire post-Modernist movement in all
the arts, was more prominent in the Seventies pop world in London than
anywhere else, and, at its best, it stops being lamely imitiative and
enters the realm of creativity.
 Numerous British bands of the Seventies fell into the eclectic art-rock
camp: Genesis, King Crimson, Gentle Giant, Electric Light Orchestra, Queen,
Supertramp, Sparks, 10CC and Be-Bop Deluxe. There were continental band
like Focus, and even American groups like Kansas, Styx and Boston that fit
here also. Certainly there were differences between these groups, large
differences, and there were many more groups that could be listed. But they
all shared a commitment to unprepared, abrupt transitions from one mood to
another. Sometimes the shifts were between tempos, sometimes between levels
of volume, sometimes between whole styles of music. The effect in any case
was violent, disruptive and nervously tense, and as such no doubt answered
the needs of the age as well as anything. At their best (or at their most
commercially successful) these groups never lost sight of older rock
basics, as with Queen's best work.

 In a sense, Roxy Music might be considered the leader of this particular
pack, especially between 1971 and 1973, when Brian Eno was a member of the
band. But even from the first, and despite the strong contributions of Phil
Mananzera and Andy McKay, this was always Bryan Ferry's band, as proven by
his continuity in his subsequent solo albums. Ferry's artsiness expressed
itself so much as style over substance that style itself became
substantive. As the ultimate self-professed lounge lizard, he managed to
take pop-rock's hoariest conventions (the love song, even actual oldies on
his solo albums) and coat them with very intimations of unspeakable
decadence. But the real art rocker in Roxy Music was Eno. Aside from the
quality of his music, which is considerable and which he sustained into the
Nineties, he is interesting from two points of view: his command of the
synthesizer and his relation to others on the London and New York
experimental scenes.
 The synthesizer is a much-abused, much-misunderstood instrument. When
played like a souped-up electric organ by people like Keith Emerson, Jon
Lord (of Deep Purple) or Rick Wakeman, it can sound simply flashy and
cheap. The obligatory synthesizer solo, preferably with smoke bomb and
laser obligato, was the curse of the Seventies. If synthesizers weren't
regarded as newfangled organs, they were taken literally, as something that
"synthesizers", and we were subjected to Wendy Carlos' and Isao Tomita's
synthesized versions of the classics.
 The synthesizer is an instrument with its own characteristics, and those
characteristics are just beginning to be explored by rock musicians. When
played with the subtetly and discretion of a Stevie Wonder or a Garth
Hudson, it can reinforce conventional textures superbly. And when somebody
like Brian Eno or Edgar Froese of Tangerine Dream gets hold of it, the
synthesizer can create a whole world of its own. Eno's "Discreet Music"
(1975), with its title-track first side full of soothing, hypnotic
woodwindish sounds, or "No Pussyfooting" (1975) and "Evening Star" (1976),
two collaborations with Robert Fripp, ex-King Crimson guitarist, or "Music
for Airports" (1978), were masterly examples of genuine rock avant-gardism.
Of course, they weren't really "rock" in any but the loosest sense: There
was no reference back to a blues base, even in attenuated form. But they
still counted as music produced by rock sensibility aimed at a rock
audience.
 Eno's position within the London avantgarde, and the nature of that
avantgarde, are both of interest, too. London, like New York, has a
thriving avantgarde musical community that doesn't place much of a premium
on formally acquired technique, thus remaining open to fresh infusions from
ostensible "amateurs". In London the experiment relatively free from Top
Forty pressures. This robbed the London scene of some potential big-name
experimenters like George Harrison and John Lennon (whose "Two Virgins"
with Yoko Ono was another particularly appealing early art rock entry in
1969).
 Still, what was left in the forefront of experimentation was interesting
enough. The mere fact that Eno had to leave Roxy Music (quite apart from
the question of clashing egos with Ferry) indicates the difficulty of
pursuing experimentation and commercial success at the same time. The
London avantgarde scene, insofar as any outsider can tell, is marked still
by a fascinating if rather private and sporadic interchange between the
classical and pop worlds. In the Seventies the pop stars (Eno, guitarist
Phil Manzanera of Roxy, Fripp) did rather more interesting work than those
who over from a classical background (David Bedford, Stomu Yamashta). Mike
Oldfield fits here to a certain extent, although his work - particularly
after his best-selling "Tubular Bells" (1972), which did admittedly have a
bland appeal as a reduction of California composer Terry Riley's ideas -
was lame beyond recall.
 Much of this work, from Oldfield to Eno and even Riley, is head music, and
relates to a rather interesting form of avantgarde trance music, which
brings us to the subject of drugs. The avantgardism is rock of the Sixties
and Seventies, for all its ultimate debts to surrealism and other vanguard
movements from earlier in the century, owed its primary fealty to the
proliferation of drugs in the Sixties. It would be misleading to overstress
this, but just as false to repress it. Marijuana, LSD and other
psychedelics, and metherdrine, or speed, all had a profound effect on how
music in general, and art rock in particular, was made and perceived. This
is not to say that you had to be stoned to play or enjoy this music. But it
does mean that the climate and stylistic preoccupations of many varieties
of present-day art art built in part on perceptions analogous to the drug
experience. Sometimes it takes only one trip, as with acid, to give you a
whole other fix on the world.
 The kind of quiescent, dappled textural shiftings that mark much of
American composer La Monte Young's music (Eno was strongly influenced by
Young; and john Cale, formerly of the Velvet Underground, worked closely
with him) owe something to grass, at least originally: Maybe Young has
never smoked in his life, but his art could have germinated only in a
subculture primed for it by marijuana. And the same is true for the whole
acid-rock phenomenon.
 the pure acid-rockers of the Sixties - from The Byrds to Jefferson
Airplane - don't really concern us here. But Pink Floyd, originally
Britain's premier acid-rockers, do. After cutting a couple of British hit
singles in 1967, the group concentrated on extended compositions, often
with spacey lyrical motifs. "The Dark Side of the Moon" (1973) became one
of the most successful albums of the decade, a bestseller in Europe and
America aswell as England. Pink Floyd turned out some of the most
consistently interesting "head music" of the late Sixties and Seventies,
and managed, in its various shards after its breakup, atleast to re-create
some of that work arrestingly thereafter. The group had a sense for line
and continuity and ritualistic repetition that was quite special, and to
dismiss it simply as technically limited in philistine.
 In Los Angeles the drug scene helped spawn the Mothers of Invention, one
of the first rock groups to emphasize mixed-media presentations, dubbed
"freak-outs" by leader Frank Zappa, a selfprofessed teetotaler, was forced
after the first few L.A. freakouts in 1967 to disavow the use of drugs at
these affairs - naturally to no avail. The Mothers combined social satire,
parody of rock & roll oldies, classical references - Zappa regularly paid
homage to Edgar Varese - and a growing taste for vaguely avantgarde jazz
improvisation. It has been an influential collage of styles, affecting the
work of such diverce musicians as Jean-Luc Ponty, the jazz violinist, and
Paul McCartney, who once cited the Mothers' first album, "Freak Out", as a
key inspiration for "Sgt. Pepper".
 The psychedelic enthusiasms of the late Sixties, kindled by (among others)
Pink Floyd and the Mothers of Invention and centered in San Francisco and
in London, found their most sustained resonance in the Seventies in West
Germany. Kraftwerk had the biggest commercial impact in the United States,
thanks to the surprising success in 1975 of "Autobahn". Rather more
interesting was Tangerine Dream and its leader, Edgar Froese. The group's
records and Froese's solo albums were impressionistic extravaganzas, full
of gentle washes of electronic color. There was a parallel to Eno's work
here. But Eno is a more diverse artist than Froese, and more overtly rock
oriented, and in such purely experimental pieces as "Discreet Music" he
shows an indebtedness to the structuralist principles of classical
composers like Young, Riley (himself an offshoot of the
psychedelic/meditative climate of the Bay Area in the Sixties), Steve reich
and Philip Glass. Froese, on the other hand, owes his classical
inspirations to such orchestral colorists as Hungarian composer Gyorgy
Ligeti and the electronic music of Karlheinz Stockhausen and Iannis
Xenakis. Froese's work seems less interesting than that of his models, but
at least his choice of inspirations betrayed a certain sophistication.
 More directly related to Eno was the band Cluster, with which Eno twice
collaborated. And the artier implications of Giorgio Moroder's disco
"factory" cannot be ignored here. His "I Feel Love" for Donna Summer is one
of the best trance records of the Seventies, among the other things - as a
version performed in New York by Blondie and Fripp reaffirmed so well. And
before he hit upon his disco formula, Moroder had made an overt art-rock
synthesizer collage disc, influenced by the German psychedelic groups but
better than his models. At the time nobody could be interested in releasing
it, and since then Moroder has been too busy to bother.
 The evolution of the New York art-rock scene in the late Seventies, and
its subsequent spread to Los Angeles and other byways of the United States,
was such an eruption of energies that it merits separate treatment. But the
pattern suggested in London was brought to triumphant fruition in this
country: a rejection of overcomplexity, the development of a new artistic
primitivism and finally a direct merger with other forms of avantgardism,
both classical and jazz - with Eno and Fripp, both of whom moved to New
York, as catalysts.
 This disquisition began with talk about morphologies and
self-consciousness, and in some ways the aesthetic behind the New York
art-rock scene of the past decade brings us full circle.
 Looking at rock from a populist standpoint, one can seriously question
both its aspirations to high art and the very hegemony of high art itself.
Maybe the self-conscious primitives are right: Maybe art rock doesn't have
to be clever complexity at all. Maybe real art is what which most clearly
and directly answers the needs of its audiences. Which, in turn, means that
we can prize pure rock and pure pop, from Chuck Berry on, as "art" in no
way of inferior to that which may entail a more highly formalized technique
for its execution. Rock may be part of a far larger process in which art
broadens its gestures to encompass an audience made more numerous by the
permeation of social equality down into strata heretofore ignored.
 There is another, more philosophical side to it. What Warhol and pop
artists were trying to tell us - and what composer John Cage has been
telling us all along - is that art isn't necessarily a product crafted
painstakingly by some mysterious, removed artistdeity, but is whatever you,
the perceiver, choose to perceive artistically. A Brillo box isn't suddenly
art because Warhol put a stacked bunch of them into a museum. But by
putting them there he encouraged you to make your every trip into the
supermarket an artistic adventure, and in so doing he exalted your life.
Everybody's an artist who wants to be, which is really a more radically
populist notion than encouraging scholarly studies of the blues. Roll over
Beethoven, indeed, and make room for us.

                                              JOHN ROCKWELL

 Contact me for exchanging knowledge about the wonderful phenomenon of
symphony rock, or just for normal Amiga swapping:

Fugazi/Taurus
Robin Forsberg
Norrtullsgatan 37B III
S-826 37 Soederhamn
SWEDEN

Phone: +46-(0)270/129 83