Contemporary Authors

• The Show That Never Ends: The Rise and Fall of Prog Rock W.W. Norton (New York, NY), 2017

1. The show that never ends : the rise and fall of prog rock https://lccn.loc.gov/2017012885 Weigel, David, 1981- author. The show that never ends : the rise and fall of prog rock / David Weigel. First edition. New York : W. W. Norton & Company, [2017] pages cm ML3534 .W436 2017 ISBN: 9780393242256 (hardcover)

• David Wiegel - http://daveweigel.com/about/

  (photograph by Matt Roth)

  David Weigel is a national reporter for The Washington Post. From 2014 to 2015, he helped launch the new Bloomberg Politics site as a roving reporter, covering everything from the decline of Southern Democrats to the reasons why some practitioners of transcendental meditation support Rand Paul. From 2010 to 2014, he was a reporter for Slate, where he ran a political blog and hosted an interview podcast.

  From 2006 through 2010, David’s reporting focused on the American conservative movement. He covered the Ron Paul and Bob Barr campaigns for Reason, and covered the remaking of the right for the Washington Independent. He is an occasional commentator on cable news, and has appeared on NPR’s Fresh Air and PRI’s This American Life to discuss his reporting. His Slate blog, the curiously-named “Weigel,” was named one of Time magazine’s best blogs of 2011.

  Weigel is a 2004 graduate of Northwestern University whose work has also appeared in Bloomberg Businessweek, GQ, Esquire, USA Today, Campaigns & Elections, Time.com, Washington City Paper, The Guardian, The American Prospect, The Daily Beast, The American Conservative, The American Spectator, The Washington Monthly, Democracy, The Columbia Journalism Review, Rolling Stone, Politico, and The Nation. He currently lives in the Columbia Heights neighborhood of Washington, D.C, and is finishing a history of progressive rock, to be published by W.W. Norton, based in part on this 2012 Slate series.

• David Weigel - http://daveweigel.com/something-like-a-phenomenontelling-your-body-to-come-along/

  CV

  EXPERIENCE
  Slate, Political Reporter, August 2010 to present
  – Just click already.

  The Washington Post, Staff Writer, April 2010 to June 2010
  – Reported the “Right Now” blog

  The Washington Independent, Reporter, January 2009 to March 2010
  – Led the start-up’s coverage of the rebuilding of the GOP and the birth of the Tea Party

  Reason magazine, Associate Editor, April 2006 to December 2008
  – Covered 2006 and 2008 elections for nation’s oldest and largest libertarian political magazine
  – Wrote monthly political column on the city and on the campaigns
  – Edited and worked with writers for magazine’s web site
  – Contributed daily to the magazine’s award-winning blog Hit&Run

  USA Today, Editorial Assistant, April 2004 to September 2005
  – Reported and collected quotes for newspaper founder Al Neuharth’s column.
  – Selected and edited opinions from around America and the world at large for Friday editions
  – Fact-checked and worked with writers and columnists for the op-ed page

  EDUCATION
  Bachelor of Science in Journalism, June 2004
  Medill School of Journalism, Northwestern University
  Completed double major in Political Science and minor in history

The show that never ends
Brian Doherty
Reason.
49.5 (Oct. 2017): p77. From Book Review Index Plus. COPYRIGHT 2017 Reason Foundation http://reason.com/about
Full Text:
In The Show That Never Ends: The Rise and Fall of Prog Rock, David Weigel, a Reason contributing editor and a political reporter for The Washington Post, surveys the history of "progressive rock," a genre not beholden to American blues but relying instead on warped call- backs to European folk and the futuristic sounds of moog synthesizers.
[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]
For a while, this beautiful and ambitious musical form enjoyed massive worldly success. But huge bands such as Yes, Jethro Tull, and Emerson, Lake and Palmer were too quickly scorned by rock's vox populi and intelligentsia alike, accused of untoward grandiosity and boring pretension. Weigel tells engaging tales from the rise and the fall of some of the genre's biggest players.
Culture mavens of the 1970s will be reminded of disco's similar swift tumble from empyrean
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heights to barroom punchline. In our petty cultural high school, both the nerdy grind of prog and the flighty party girl of disco are too quickly mocked.
That's a shame: Both genres shaped a pop decade, and each deserves more of the sort of respectful consideration Weigel gives to prog rock.
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Doherty, Brian. "The show that never ends." Reason, Oct. 2017, p. 77. PowerSearch,
http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A506607268/GPS?u=schlager&sid=GPS& xid=f6b08333. Accessed 20 Dec. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A506607268
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Have flute, will rock: political reporter
David Weigel outs himself as a different
kind of progressive
David Marchese
New York.
50.11 (May 29, 2017): p121. From Book Review Index Plus. COPYRIGHT 2017 New York Media
http://nymag.com/
Full Text:
THE SHOW THAT NEVER ENDS: THE RISE AND FALL OF PROG ROCK will be published on June 13 by W. W. Norton & Company.
CHARACTERIZED BY VIRTUOSIC instrumental passages, high-blown lyrics, and fantastical imagery, prog rock achieved massive success in the '70s, as bands like Yes, King Crimson, and Jethro Tull sold millions before the genre fell out of favor. David Marchese spoke to David Weigel, who covers national politics for the Washington Post, about his book The Show That Never Ends, which recounts the history of progressive rock--and makes a compelling case for its reappraisal.
You describe prog as rock's "weirdest" and "best" rebellion. I'll give you weirdest, but best? A lot of rock is derivative or just reassembles stuff that's come before. What I like about progressive rock is that it was about people really innovating: using new technology like Mellotrons and Moogs, composing 20-minute suites--the music was defined by invention. The narrative of prog's downfall is that punk turned bands like Yes into dinosaurs. Twenty-year-old punk musicians who were trying to blow up prog in 1977 were the same age the prog musicians were when they started out. The difference is that when the guys in Genesis were teenagers, their way of rebelling
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against formulaic pop was to say, "Our album is going to be a musically complex re-creation of the Book of Revelation." It's hard to argue that prog was political, yet you make your living covering politics. What's the overlap? I'm attracted to outsiders and difference. The first stuff I covered in politics was the libertarian movement, something small and intense and interesting. I'm just as fascinated by those same qualities in progressive rock. Which album should someone curious about prog start with? I'd start with King Crimson's Red or In the Court of the Crimson King. Both of those have really accessible riffs and rock structures and then zoom into outer space. And if you listen and say, "I wish they'd just get rid of the violin and flute sections," then maybe progressive rock is not for you.
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Marchese, David. "Have flute, will rock: political reporter David Weigel outs himself as a
different kind of progressive." New York, 29 May 2017, p. 121. PowerSearch, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A498998026/GPS?u=schlager&sid=GPS& xid=93019571. Accessed 20 Dec. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A498998026
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The Show That Never Ends: The Rise and Fall of Prog Rock
ProtoView.
(July 2017): From Book Review Index Plus. COPYRIGHT 2017 Ringgold, Inc. http://www.protoview.com/protoview
Full Text:
9780393242256
The Show That Never Ends: The Rise and Fall of Prog Rock David Weigel
W.W. Norton
2017
346 pages
$26.95
Hardcover
ML3534
Washington Post and Rolling Stone journalist David Weigel brings general readers backstage and into the hearts and minds of musicians in this celebration of the experimentalism and excess of prog rock. Chronicling the rise of the genre and its signature bands, the book offers insider details on production, band formation, and prog rockAEs introduction of various instruments to rock, including flute, synthesizer, and double-neck guitar. The descriptive narrative interweaves the voices of musicians, producers, technicians, and managers from interviews held in the 1960s and 1970s, along with the authorAEs own conversations with musicians, producers, and fans. Bands profiled include Pink Floyd, Yes, Jethro Tull, Genesis, King Crimson, Procol Harum, and The Moody Blues. B&w photos are included. ([umlaut] Ringgold, Inc., Portland, OR)
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"The Show That Never Ends: The Rise and Fall of Prog Rock." ProtoView, July 2017.
PowerSearch, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A499630870/GPS?u=schlager& sid=GPS&xid=c10ecb5b. Accessed 20 Dec. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A499630870
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The Show That Never Ends
The Bookwatch.
(July 2017): From Book Review Index Plus. COPYRIGHT 2017 Midwest Book Review http://www.midwestbookreview.com/bw/index.htm
Full Text:
The Show That Never Ends
David Weigel
W. W. Norton & Company
500 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10110 9780393242256 $26.95 www.wwnorton.com
The Show That Never Ends: The Rise and Fall of Prog Rock tells how progressive rock developed and changed, and why it remains a vibrant force in popular music today, and offers a survey of musicians, music, and cultural trends in American rock music that led to progressive rock's development in response to 1960s pop rock tunes. Five decades of rock music history pinpoints how prog rock differs from other forms of rock, what made it popular, and how various bands came to represent the evolving style. One doesn't expect such a survey to begin with classical composers; but this narrative seeks to define prog rock's roots in historical context, and so the sweeping overview, which encompasses rock music personalities, memoirs, interviews and bands, succeeds in crafting a wider-ranging survey that is both unexpected and refreshingly well- detailed.
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"The Show That Never Ends." The Bookwatch, July 2017. PowerSearch,
http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A501397185/GPS?u=schlager&sid=GPS& xid=69292ad1. Accessed 20 Dec. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A501397185
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Weigel, David: THE SHOW THAT NEVER ENDS
Kirkus Reviews.
(May 1, 2017): From Book Review Index Plus. COPYRIGHT 2017 Kirkus Media LLC http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
Full Text:
Weigel, David THE SHOW THAT NEVER ENDS Norton (Adult Nonfiction) $26.95 6, 13 ISBN: 978-0-393-24225-6
Dinosaurs once roamed the Earth. Then came prog rock, as this partial but pleasing account of the love-it-or-hate-it genre chronicles.As Washington Post reporter Weigel cheerfully admits, professing a love for progressive rock--that sometimes-pretentious, sometimes-endless blend of rock, classical, and jazz forms whose chief premise would seem to be an absence of any discernible African-American influence--can quickly get a person branded as a dweeb. Indeed, as the narrative opens, the author is among "the most uncool people in Miami," preparing to climb aboard a cruise ship with "the living gods of progressive rock," namely mostly old men with what rock writer John Strausbaugh uncharitably called "melting cheese faces." They are also mostly British, and Weigel does a good job of describing what happened to American rock when it fell into the hands of the British kids in orchestra, filtered by way of psychedelic rock and its "simple formula" of guitar, drums, bass, vocals, and keyboard. By 1969, bands like Yes, Emerson, Lake and Palmer, and King Crimson were beginning to come together, forming a distinct genre marked by compositional complexity and odd time signatures. Some of Weigel's roster is debatable-- purists may argue about including Jethro Tull in the annals of prog, since Tull was really a blues band to which something strange happened along the way--and it's a little light on the Canterbury scene, but the author ably captures the ambition of rock nerds who, as Yes singer Jon Anderson put it, saw "the possibility of rock music...really developing into a higher art form." Points and plaudits are due for enlisting Rush, too, and for including the yobbos of Marillion, one of whose fans Weigel credits with inventing crowdfunding in the service of reviving a genre nearly killed off by prog-hating punk in the 1970s. Prog fans will take to this book like Keith Emerson to an upside-down Hammond.
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Weigel, David: THE SHOW THAT NEVER ENDS." Kirkus Reviews, 1 May 2017.
PowerSearch, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A491002766/GPS?u=schlager& sid=GPS&xid=1134cefe. Accessed 20 Dec. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A491002766
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The Show That Never Ends: The Rise
and Fall of Prog Rock
Eugenia Williamson
Booklist.
113.18 (May 15, 2017): p6. From Book Review Index Plus.
COPYRIGHT 2017 American Library Association http://www.ala.org/ala/aboutala/offices/publishing/booklist_publications/booklist/booklist.cfm
Full Text:
The Show That Never Ends: The Rise and Fall of Prog Rock. By David Weigel. June 2017. 320p. illus. Norton, $26.95 (9780393242256). 781.66.
Current rock wisdom dictates that progressive rock, or prog, was a bloated monolith of oppressively baroque noodling helmed by pretentious, arrogant fools, the genre itself a dinosaur too gargantuan to continue life on Earth. In his first book, Washington Post political-reporter Weigel proves this wasn't the case-not exactly, anyway-by taking a deep dive into prog history, from 1960s middle-class English schoolboys interested in psychedelic drugs, the Beatles, classical music, and jazz; to 1970s stadium shows marked by bedazzling stagecraft and manifold synthesizers; to later, shameful accusations of irrelevance and gimmickry. He plumbs the origin stories of meaty giants like Emerson, Lake & Palmer and Genesis without sacrificing lagniappes such as the French prog act Magma, who made up its own language and appeared on the soundtrack to Alejandro Jodorowsky's ill-fated film version of Dune. Weigel's clearly a superfan, and the book is best suited to his ilk, but there is much here for the casual progster, thanks to the author's self-awareness and the universal appeal of stories about excess.--Eugenia Williamson
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Williamson, Eugenia. "The Show That Never Ends: The Rise and Fall of Prog Rock." Booklist,
15 May 2017, p. 6. PowerSearch, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A496084681 /GPS?u=schlager&sid=GPS&xid=a601530d. Accessed 20 Dec. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A496084681
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The Show That Never Ends: The Rise and Fall of Prog Rock
Publishers Weekly.
264.15 (Apr. 10, 2017): p65. From Book Review Index Plus. COPYRIGHT 2017 PWxyz, LLC http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Full Text:
The Show That Never Ends: The Rise and Fall of Prog Rock David Weigel. Norton, $26.95 (320p)
ISBN 978-0-393-24225-6
Drawing heavily on interviews with musicians, music industry insiders, and fans, Weigel, a progressive rock enthusiast and Washington Post reporter, provides a workmanlike, sentimental, and well-researched survey of a music genre that became popular in the mid-1970s. Weigel defines three musical modes of progressive rock: retrospection, futurism, and experimentation. He then highlights the artists who led the rise of the music--- Emerson, Lake, and Palmer (ELP), Genesis, King Crimson, the Moody Blues, Procul Harum, and Yes, among others--as it developed out of psychedelic music and heavy metal. Prog rock trades in the ethereal and the spiritual; according to Robert Fripp, one of the founders of King Crimson, the music "leant over us and took us into its confidence." Weigel instructively reminds readers that some bands wove in the elements of classical music--ELP released an entire album of their version of Mussorgsky's Pictures at an Exhibition--and creatively used instruments such as the Moog synthesizer to experiment and go beyond the borders of rock. Progressive rock's popularity eventually waned in the late '70s as punk came into vogue, but Weigel wistfully reminds readers that prog rockers were once pioneers in writing "gooseflesh-raising music." (June)
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"The Show That Never Ends: The Rise and Fall of Prog Rock." Publishers Weekly, 10 Apr. 2017,
p. 65. PowerSearch, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A490319303/GPS?u=schlager& sid=GPS&xid=60d525bd. Accessed 20 Dec. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A490319303
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The Show That Never Ends
Internet Bookwatch.
(July 2017): From Book Review Index Plus. COPYRIGHT 2017 Midwest Book Review http://www.midwestbookreview.com
Full Text:
The Show That Never Ends
David Weigel
W. W. Norton & Company
500 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10110 9780393242256 $26.95 www.wwnorton.com
The Show That Never Ends: The Rise and Fall of Prog Rock tells how progressive rock developed and changed, and why it remains a vibrant force in popular music today, and offers a survey of musicians, music, and cultural trends in American rock music that led to progressive rock's development in response to 1960s pop rock tunes. Five decades of rock music history pinpoints how prog rock differs from other forms of rock, what made it popular, and how various bands came to represent the evolving style. One doesn't expect such a survey to begin with classical composers; but this narrative seeks to define prog rock's roots in historical context, and so the sweeping overview, which encompasses rock music personalities, memoirs, interviews and bands, succeeds in crafting a wider-ranging survey that is both unexpected and refreshingly well- detailed.
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"The Show That Never Ends." Internet Bookwatch, July 2017. PowerSearch,
http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A502653095/GPS?u=schlager&sid=GPS& xid=c7d7f871. Accessed 20 Dec. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A502653095
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Doherty, Brian. "The show that never ends." Reason, Oct. 2017, p. 77. Book Review Index Plus, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A506607268/GPS?u=schlager&sid=GPS&xid=f6b08333. Accessed 20 Dec. 2017. Marchese, David. "Have flute, will rock: political reporter David Weigel outs himself as a different kind of progressive." New York, 29 May 2017, p. 121. Book Review Index Plus, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A498998026/GPS?u=schlager&sid=GPS&xid=93019571. Accessed 20 Dec. 2017. "The Show That Never Ends: The Rise and Fall of Prog Rock." ProtoView, July 2017. Book Review Index Plus, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A499630870/GPS?u=schlager&sid=GPS&xid=c10ecb5b. Accessed 20 Dec. 2017. "The Show That Never Ends." The Bookwatch, July 2017. Book Review Index Plus, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A501397185/GPS?u=schlager&sid=GPS&xid=69292ad1. Accessed 20 Dec. 2017. "Weigel, David: THE SHOW THAT NEVER ENDS." Kirkus Reviews, 1 May 2017. Book Review Index Plus, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A491002766/GPS?u=schlager&sid=GPS&xid=1134cefe. Accessed 20 Dec. 2017. Williamson, Eugenia. "The Show That Never Ends: The Rise and Fall of Prog Rock." Booklist, 15 May 2017, p. 6. Book Review Index Plus, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A496084681/GPS?u=schlager&sid=GPS&xid=a601530d. Accessed 20 Dec. 2017. "The Show That Never Ends: The Rise and Fall of Prog Rock." Publishers Weekly, 10 Apr. 2017, p. 65. Book Review Index Plus, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A490319303/GPS?u=schlager&sid=GPS&xid=60d525bd. Accessed 20 Dec. 2017. "The Show That Never Ends." Internet Bookwatch, July 2017. Book Review Index Plus, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A502653095/GPS?u=schlager&sid=GPS&xid=c7d7f871. Accessed 20 Dec. 2017.

• NPR
  https://www.npr.org/2017/06/13/531929205/prog-rock-gets-some-respect-in-the-show-that-never-ends
  Word count: 816

  Prog Rock Gets Some Respect In 'The Show That Never Ends'
  June 13, 20177:00 AM ET

  Jason Heller
  The Show That Never Ends
  The Show That Never Ends

  The Rise and Fall of Prog Rock

  by David Weigel

  Hardcover, 346 pages |
  purchase

  David Weigel is known primarily as a political reporter for The Washington Post and a regular commentator on MSNBC. In 2012, though, he indulged in an entirely different passion for Slate: He wrote a five-part series of essays about progressive rock called Prog Spring, chronicling the rise and fall of prog in the '60s and '70s. Weigel focused on the genre's major players — bands like Genesis, Yes, King Crimson, Jethro Tull, and Emerson, Lake & Palmer — while giving an engrossing account of why and how a generation of rock musicians decided to ditch primal simplicity in favor of ornate, brainy compositions that owed more to classical and jazz.

  He's since fleshed out Prog Spring into a book, The Show That Never Ends, and it comes at a curious time. Prog luminaries like Roger Waters of Pink Floyd fill stadiums year after year, but the music itself is still a cult concern, mostly irrelevant to popular music in 2017. That, however, is Weigel's whole point: While prog experienced its heyday way back in the '70s, it embodies a push and pull between pop and innovation, between commerce and art, that persists today.

  [Weigel's] knack for lean, efficient music analysis is refreshing ... and his obvious passion for the music elevates the narrative without spilling over into fatuous flag-waving.

  Weigel sets the stage for this conflict by tracing the origins of heavyweights like ELP's virtuoso keyboardist Keith Emerson, who grew up as enamored of big bands in post-World War II England as he did the cruder gyrations of the rock revolution. As the '60s came to a close, the strange, swirling sounds of psychedelia emboldened Emerson, Phil Collins of Genesis, Robert Fripp of King Crimson and many others to expand rock's rudimentary template into something far more elaborate and symphonic in scope.

  The Show That Never Ends doesn't skimp on detail. The '70s saw prog become extremely popular, then swiftly drop off after the advent of punk and new wave, and Weigel weaves the stories of platinum-selling bands like Pink Floyd and Rush into a broader portrait of a rapidly shifting musical landscape. His training as a journalist is everywhere, from the crisp reporting to the deeply researched quotes. His knack for lean, efficient music analysis is refreshing — a lot of writing about prog tends to be as baroque as the music itself — and his obvious passion for the music elevates the narrative without spilling over into fatuous flag-waving.
  All The Gifts Of Life: 40 Years Of Rush's '2112'
  The Record
  All The Gifts Of Life: 40 Years Of Rush's '2112'
  Remembering Keith Emerson, A Prog-Rock Legend
  The Record
  Remembering Keith Emerson, A Prog-Rock Legend
  Peter Hammill: Prog Rock's Unsung Hero
  Music Articles
  Peter Hammill: Prog Rock's Unsung Hero

  Prog has been knocked by wave after wave of music critics from the '70s on, and it's hard not to hear a slight tone of defensiveness in Weigel's book-length argument. Prog's perceived weaknesses, he argues, are its actual strengths: Its so-called pretentiousness forced rock to evolve in the post-Beatles era, and its ambition gave many talented musicians space to write songs about far more than love or politics. Escapism was part of the appeal, but prog, Weigel argues, is just as rooted in the traditions of literature and the history of Western music as a whole. He makes a convincing case, and he's wise to balance his coverage of prog's big stars with the a careful selection of the genre's more obscure practitioners, from Soft Machine in the late '60s to Marillion in the early '80s.

  Marillion marked a small prog revival in the '80s, and the genre has never completely gone away. Today, a thriving underground exists — which Weigel discusses fairly and with just a hint of self-effacing humor, framing his story by recounting his experiences on a prog-themed ocean cruise and a present-day concert by one of prog's most beloved pioneers, Van der Graaf Generator. Weigel is an astute observer, and he knows full well how ridiculous prog can seem to anyone who doesn't regularly listen to ten-minute, orchestral rock songs about extraterrestrial travel. But he authoritatively, engagingly drives home the point that prog has never received a fair shake — and that its restless experimentation makes for both intriguing music and high art.

  Jason Heller is a senior writer at The A.V. Club, a Hugo Award-winning editor and author of the novel Taft 2012.

• LA Review of Books
  https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/desperate-straights-david-weigel-rise-fall-prog-rock/
  Word count: 1736

  Desperate Straights: David Weigel on the Rise and Fall of Prog Rock

  By Anthony Mostrom

  AUGUST 4, 2017

  WHEN I WAS in high school, spending my Saturday afternoons thumbing through the record bins at Rhino Records and dropping my entire paychecks there (paychecks I’d earned working at another record store, mind you), I remember wondering: how can you consider the drawn-out synthesizer drones and ocean-y washes of Tangerine Dream to be “rock” music? Was it only because the band was on Virgin Records, the same label as Mike Oldfield (Tubular Bells) and avant-garde rock groups like Henry Cow and Gong? By the golden mid-1970s, the rock music category was indeed being stretched — nay, liquefied — by the upsurge of bands in the “progressive” category, at that point the only kind I was collecting and enjoying (once you start out savoring early Frank Zappa and the extreme free-jazz dissonance of his friend Captain Beefheart, there is no turning back). And I never understood the jeers that came from music journalists who mocked progressive rock for its “flamboyance,” its so-called “excess.”

  My youthful record-buying habit followed the usual associative, word-of-mouth pattern: since I’d already bought all the records by the dissonant, industrial-communist, London-based band Henry Cow (a play on the name of California composer Henry Cowell), well then, obviously, I was going to love their collaborative LP with another ultra-arty British group, Slapp Happy, and their Lotte Lenya-ish singer Dagmar (this record, Desperate Straights, was released by Virgin in 1975, and is one of the best things Richard Branson ever gave to the world). My love for the first two LPs by the Canterbury-based Soft Machine led naturally to their drummer Robert Wyatt’s incredibly seductive and atmospheric solo album Rock Bottom, a masterpiece of Dadaist wordplay paired with ambient, lush melodies and oceanic sheets of sound, with organ, piano, and much squawking saxophone. It remains a transcendent record, permanently recommended.

  Nowadays, not only journalists but even some old-time fans of “prog” can be harsh about certain features of the music they loved as nerdy and/or precocious kids. “The lyrics of Emerson Lake & Palmer, at least up to 1973 […] were without redeeming merit of any kind,” Rick Moody writes (I guess he was just being moody) in a witty 2013 book of essays called Yes Is the Answer: And Other Prog Rock Tales (edited by Marc Weingarten). Moody was basically slamming ELP for their well-known “excesses,” which now tend to serve as standard talking points people hold against progressive rock in general: overblown musical pomposity and the urge toward operatic “epics,” rapid rhythmic complexity-for-its-own-sake of the classical-music-meets-rock variety, not to mention earnest, asexual lyrics (sublimated, I suppose, into all that goofy Wagnerian bombast).

  But, as David Weigel’s new book The Show That Never Ends: The Rise and Fall of Prog Rock reminds us, there were many different branches and subgenres of progressive rock. For every hippied-out group like Daevid Allen’s Gong, with its twee, gnome-friendly circus-and-costumes act, there was the muscular, violins-and-mellotron experimentalism of King Crimson, the ultimate “thinking man’s” progressive-band-only-guys-like. (Actually, you could apply that label to most prog groups; how many high school girls ever became fans of, say, Frank Zappa and the Mothers? The prog-rock resistance to love songs, well documented in Weigel’s book, is a likely cause of its highly lopsided male reception.)

  In his introduction, Weigel does what he’s supposed to do in a book about a largely critically unknown musical species: he lets the genre’s musicians more or less define the form themselves. “We just thought we were trying to combine music that hadn’t been combined before […] elements of jazz, and of classical,” says Peter Sinfield, formerly of King Crimson, which was then (and amazingly, still is) one of the most rigorously avant-garde and musically satisfying of all progressive groups. (Sinfield adds that “the P word” was coined by music journalists — but of course!) According to Steve Hackett of Genesis, prog-rock musicians differed from other rock stars of their era in a significant way: “We weren’t on acid, we weren’t on drugs; we were on beer and wine and Earl Grey.”

  One reviewer calls Weigel’s book “completist,” but it’s far from that. Indeed, there are too many pages spent on jumpy, superstar prog bands like ELP, Yes, and Genesis (and the questionably included Pink Floyd and Jethro Tull), and not enough on more enduring experimental bands like Soft Machine or even Brian Eno (surely deserving of a book all his own), not to mention that worthy constellation of German artistes collectively known as “Krautrock” (there’s no mention here of Can, or Faust, or even Kraftwerk). This equals a missed opportunity to truly scrutinize this complex and actually quite diverse musical genre. Still, Weigel’s detailed, gossipy coverage of the ongoing history of King Crimson and its chilly guitarist-founder Robert Fripp is a very good thing (there’s a full chapter on Fripp himself!). “It was felt after Sgt. Pepper anybody could do anything in music,” Weigel quotes King Crimson’s great drummer, Bill Bruford, as saying. “It seemed the wilder the idea musically, the better.” Weigel the ultra-fan sums up the situation thus: “Everybody loved the Beatles, but they [the fans of prog] loved them best when they got weird.” He describes the form’s followers as

  Fans who were sure there was something more out there. Arty types who wanted to find meaning in music, and who, rather than searching for it in short pop songs based on American blues, found it in the quirky Britishness of prog, equal parts twee and subversive.

  As for prog being twee, I can only say that my circle of teenage sophisticates was immune to the sweet, crowd-pleasing melodies of Genesis and Yes, and (yes) the one-dimensional, organ-solo-dominated noodlings of Emerson, Lake & Palmer, who always reminded me vaguely of the Who. Flutey old Jethro Tull, who probably shouldn’t even be in this volume — now that was twee. This stuff wasn’t avant-garde enough for us: no Cageian instrumental experimentation (Henry Cow), no drones (Matching Mole), no eccentrically quirky voices (Robert Wyatt, Slapp Happy), no mellotrons (King Crimson). Whenever you pair any of these things with tough, martial drum playing, it’s heaven (the ’90s band Broadcast, of Birmingham, made this point very well later on).

  My fellow fans and I had already come across the term “art rock” in the pages of the British music tabloid Melody Maker, and we were hip to the modernist, dissonant “classical” music of Stockhausen and Cage. (In very few places other than Melody Maker could we read about many of our cult heroes, from Anthony Braxton to Iannis Xenakis.) For the real rock avant-garde, you started with the stark and hard-edged music of King Crimson and worked your way “leftward,” into the more experimental (and Dada-inflected) sounds of Canterbury-based bands like Gong and Soft Machine, and from there to the offshoots and “side projects,” such as ex-Softs-drummer Robert Wyatt’s trio Matching Mole: heavy on the mellotron, with its delectable synthetic-orchestra sound (again: rock + drones = musical bliss).

  As far as Weigel’s calling prog “subversive,” well yes, it was an artistic attack on musically unadventurous pop music. One thing that solidified, to our teenage selves, the obvious superiority of this musical universe — in contrast to that silly and awful “glam rock” that was all the rage across campus — was its super-Englishness: not only did Robert Wyatt not try to sound like a black American (unlike cornball Mick Jagger) but he sounded so hyper-English (what was that accent, Isle of Man?) that it was hard to make out some of the words! (“I don’t have any affiliation with those gangs out there,” Wyatt himself told Melody Maker in 1975, addressing the music-for-teens question directly.)

  Prog seemed to be rock music for adults. “It’s an import,” we proudly told our high school friends, who didn’t really collect records the way we did. (Did anyone “collect” mass-produced albums by, say, Jethro Tull, which were sold by the millions and as common as wallpaper? Our records, with those lovely laminated British covers, had the added charm of rarity.) The grass was greener in England, in avant-garde England. At the same time, we knew these groups were fans of early Zappa (a proud product of Los Angeles) and of Captain Beefheart’s ultra-weird masterpiece Trout Mask Replica (a product of Woodland Hills!). Prog-rock was an exclusive club, our club. Maybe it was a Los Angeles–London club. Who the heck was David Bowie, anyway? A loud, showbiz-y Hollywood act. (And why was it that we knew instinctively that Bryan Ferry and Roxy Music belonged in the progressive vanguard, without being able to put our finger on precisely why? It’s just one of those mysteries …)

  I must admit to getting annoyed at Weigel’s over-generous use of musician gossip, no doubt culled from his weighty personal library of old Melody Makers and tattered issues of CREEM. I did not dig all these tedious rehearsals of ancient grudges and mutual back-stabbings. (Strangely, I can recall having that same feeling when I was about 10 and reading a tell-all paperback about the Beatles by Anthony Scaduto.) Weigel doesn’t speculate about how long the classic prog-rock albums will last (nor does he indulge in any supplementary lists of “best” records, another oversight), but the audience for this kind of stuff disappearing is about as likely as the late Arnold Schoenberg releasing a hit record. It’s silly to flat-out “hate” complexity in music, even rock: you take it or you leave it.

  “Oh, I see we have a group of intellectuals in the audience,” John Lydon snarled down from the stage at one of the first Sex Pistols concerts in London. The barbarians had come. I remember reading that quote in an issue of Melody Maker in 1977. (“He was not far wrong,” the reporter noted. “Practically the entire staff of Virgin Records was in attendance.”) A signal moment, you would think, and not in a good way.

  ¤

  Anthony Mostrom, a former Los Angeles Times columnist, is currently a book reviewer and travel writer for the L.A. Weekly.

• Houston Press
  http://www.houstonpress.com/music/the-show-that-never-ends-the-rise-and-fall-of-prog-rock-by-david-weigel-9480095
  Word count: 1246

  Detailed New History Dares to Take Prog-Rock Seriously
  Bob Ruggiero | June 9, 2017 | 4:00am
  AA

  The Show That Never Ends: The Rise and Fall of Prog Rock
  By David Weigel
  W.W. Norton, 368 pp. $26.95

  Prog Rock. The mere mention of the term will drive its proponents into sonic ecstasy waxing about tritones, offbeat time signatures, Moog keyboards, tubular bells and tales of topographic oceans. But to its detractors, prog is a pompous, bloated genre filled with excessive noodling and laughable sci-fi/Middle Earth subject matter, a relic of the ‘70s killed off by punk and disco.

  Regardless of one’s stance on Prog, the much-maligned genre gets a fine and substantive history – for both general readers and more tuned-in fans – in David Weigel's The Show That Never Ends. The author will discuss his book and sign copies at Cactus Music next Saturday, June 17, at 1 p.m.
  Detailed New History Dares to Take Prog-Rock Seriously
  Courtesy of W.W. Norton

  Weigel’s day gig is as a political reporter for The Washington Post; his writing has also appeared in Slate, Bloomberg Business Week, Reason and Politico. But his love affair with Prog predates politics.

  “When I was 15 or 16, I was into Metallica and AC/DC, but looking for different music like that. A friend introduced me to Yes, and I bought some Yes and Genesis tapes, and it all opened to me,” he says. “And then I burrowed deeper and deeper, and this type of music seemed to be hidden away from the rest of pop culture. And it was old by the time I discovered it.”

  In the book, Weigel details the stories of the genre's big names like Yes; Jethro Tull; Rush; Emerson, Lake and Palmer; King Crimson; Mike Oldfield; The Moody Blues; Pink Floyd; and Genesis. But here are also lesser-known cult faves like Gong, Gentle Giant, Van Der Graaf Generator, the Soft Machine, and Caravan. One group – French band Magma – even sang lyrics written in their self-created language, “Kobaïan.”

  The seeds of Prog began in the late ‘60s with acts like Procol Harum, the Nice, the Moody Blues, and the Soft Machine, predominantly British acts that wanted to add experimental and classical influences to their music, as well as take on grander themes and subjects often not rooted in the day. It was a direct response to the throwaway three-minute pop song, and for many the Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band opened that door.

  As laid out by Weigel, the three foundations of Prog Rock are retrospection, futurism and experimentation; having painted album-cover art by Roger Dean doesn’t hurt either. The author combined both extensive archival research and scores of new interviews with many of the musicians.

  “Researching the book, I realized how much the music press was [against] Prog, and even many in the industry. Many genres peter out after a while; this was one euthanized by outside forces,” he offers. “It’s almost as if they said ‘Okay, we’re done with this; the 20-minute instrumental solos.’”

  Ironically, one of those most content with the falling away from favor of Prog was one of its best-known practitioners and geniuses: guitarist Robert Fripp of King Crimson, who emerges as something of the narrative’s guiding conscience, albeit a cranky and unpredictable one.

  “A lot of people have written about his music, sort of academic histories, and Fripp has been one of the most generous people in writing about it as well as giving interviews. So there’s a ton of material with Fripp, especially what’s on the internet,” Weigel says.
  Procol Harum was one of Prog's earliest adherents, hitting it big with 1967's "A Whiter Shade of Pale."
  EXPAND
  Procol Harum was one of Prog's earliest adherents, hitting it big with 1967's "A Whiter Shade of Pale."
  Photo courtesy of W.W. Norton

  “And Fripp has been very eloquent and honest about the stages of this music. He wrote some very long and thoughtful pieces in the early ’80s about this music and what happened to it…he was also a critic of his own music as well as what was building up around [Prog].” Weigel adds that he found Fripp very “arch and funny” for discussing what is often thought of as “humorless” music.

  Weigel did not get a chance to speak with Fripp for the book, but he did many others, and it’s somewhat surprising how many have passed recently since their interviews: Chris Squire of Yes, Keith Emerson and Greg Lake of ELP, Daevid Allen of Gong and John Wetton of King Crimson/Asia among them.

  “[All of them] have done interviews before, but sort of about their ‘greatest hits.’ And whether I approached them through an agent or an email or whatever, I made it clear I wanted to do something deeper,” Weigel says.

  He mentions talking to John Wetton about how much he was influenced by Joni Mitchell, and Steve Hackett about the music business in the ’80s, which he hadn’t talked about a lot before. As a political reporter, Weigel says that he launched things from a different direction than perhaps a music feature writer would.

  As for the state of Prog Rock today, Weigel feels that it’s progressive metal bands like Tool, Opeth, and Coheed and Cambria who carry on that spirit of exploration and going further. Though he also notes that with Spotify, Pandora and YouTube, it’s easier than ever to be immersed the classic works of the ‘70s giants.
  Author David Weigel
  Author David Weigel
  Photo by Kate Warren
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  The book (whose title is a lyric from one of ELP’s biggest hits) opens with Weigel on a boat, attending the annual prog-themed and Yes-helmed “Cruise to the Edge” trip. Which – depending on an artist’s viewpoint – either gives him a chance to mingle with his biggest admirers, or becomes a jail on the high seas crowded with musical obsessives.

  “Working on this book while on a cruise when it’s easy to fall back in pleasure was sometimes difficult!” he laughs, adding that the free-to-the-media amenities (including a bar) reminded him of when he covered the Republican Presidential Debate at the University of Houston last year.

  “But it was a dream. These were people who were not only interested in the music, but often learned how to play it themselves, and that would come out in these informal shows at night,” he says. “They were among others who loved the music – not their friends rolling their eyes. I appreciated the fans and the artists more in that proximity.”

  David Weigel will discuss and sign copies of The Show That Never Ends at 1 p.m. Saturday, June 17, at Cactus Music, 2110 Portsmouth.

  Bob Ruggiero has been writing about music, books, and entertainment for the Houston Press since 1997, with an emphasis on classic rock. He used to have an incredible and luxurious mullet in college as well. He is the author of the band biography Slippin’ Out of Darkness: The Story of WAR.

• Vulture
  http://www.vulture.com/2017/05/david-weigel-prog-rock-book.html
  Word count: 1604

  The Washington Post’s David Weigel Makes a Case for Prog As Rock’s Greatest Rebellion
  By
  David Marchese

  Emerson, Lake & Palmer’s Keith Emerson. Photo: Larry Hulst/Getty Images

  There’s always a discussion happening somewhere about how a given genre of rock is just about ready for its comeback. That discussion rarely, if ever, involves progressive rock. It’s nearly impossible to imagine prog again attaining the massive success of its ’70s heyday. Back then prog rock, characterized by virtuosic instrumental passages, high-blown lyrics, and fantastical imagery, achieved truly popular success, as bands like Yes, King Crimson, and Jethro Tull sold millions. But by the end of the decade, the genre fell out of widespread favor — where, with scant exception, it has remained.

  In his forthcoming book, The Show That Never Ends: The Rise and Fall of Progressive Rock, David Weigel, who covers national politics for the Washington Post, recounts the history of progressive rock — and makes a compelling case for its reappraisal.

  In the book, you describe prog as rock’s “weirdest” and “best” rebellion. I’ll give you weirdest, but best?
  I don’t want to play down other movements in rock, but a lot of rock is derivative or just reassembles stuff that’s come before. What I like about progressive rock is that it was about people really innovating: using new technology like Mellotrons and Moogs, composing 20-minute suites — the music was defined by invention. I hear more newness in progressive rock than I do in anything else. When I was a teenager — I’m 35 now — I was getting into punk at the same time as I was getting into progressive rock, and I would get bored halfway through a punk album. I don’t want to say that all the progressive rock musicians were Miles Davis, but there is a parallel in how they would change their sound so they wouldn’t get bored. That desire for invention is what I love most about the genre.

  The typical narrative of prog’s downfall is that punk turned bands like Yes into dinosaurs. But you argue that the two genres have a lot more in common than people tend to think.
  I don’t think you can understand any change in the culture without understanding what it is rebelling against. Twenty-year-old punk musicians who were trying to blow up prog rock in 1977 were the same age the prog musicians were when they started out. It’s the same rebellious energy driving both genres. The difference is that when the guys in Genesis were teenagers, their way of rebelling against formulaic pop was to say, “Our album is going to be a musically complex re-creation of the Book of Revelation,” instead of “Let’s play songs that are 90 seconds long and jump into the crowd.” The same synapses were working in both cases. The rebellious thing to do in the late ’60s was to make bold, complicated music, and there hasn’t been a turn like that since. There hasn’t been anything based on technique, with the possible exception of the jam-band scene.

  So if it wasn’t punk, what turned prog into the niche thing it is today?
  It’s interesting, because if you look at rock magazines from the ’70s, progressive record labels like Harvest and Virgin were taking out full-page ads, and the sales pitch for their artists was always something like, “You’re going to expand your mind listening to this. Listen to this thing that’s never come before.” That’s just not how music is marketed now; everything is supposed to be instantly accessible. I’m not condemning all pop music — depending on how active my brain is, I might listen to the Katy Perry song about politics instead of Steve Hillage — but what’s being marketed is candy, and people are missing the really sophisticated stuff. It’s also worth remembering that the early ’70s was a period when people were buying LPs, going to massive concerts with quadrophonic sound — they were ready for big, ambitious stuff. Progressive rock could be an immersive musical experience. You had to actually sit there and do nothing else but listen to the music for 45 minutes in order to appreciate it. That’s something a lot of people used to want to do. In the age of Adderall, it’s hard to find a substantial audience that’s willing to do that. There are just so many more distractions now.

  At the risk of generalizing, why is the audience for prog almost all older white guys?
  That kind of audience homogeneity is unfortunately common to multiple strains of popular music. I think when progressive rock broke boundaries, it tended it go in European or synthetic directions. Occasionally there were bands like Jade Warrior that, in a kind of Orientalist way, tried to bring in Eastern sounds but … what I’m trying to say is that progressive rock was never very soulful. In the book I quote somebody describing [King Crimson bandleader] Robert Fripp as the whitest guy ever, and I think that’s basically accurate. When I go to a show, it’s mostly white faces and they mostly belong to people older than me. At the same time, progressive rock is very popular in Latin America and Japan, so it’s hard to say. I guess the homogeneity you’re talking about is partly due to the nature of the music and partly due to who the music is marketed to.

  What album should someone curious about prog start with?
  I’d start with King Crimson’s Red or In the Court of the Crimson King. Both of those have really accessible riffs and rock structures and then zoom into outer space. And if you listen and say, “I wish they’d just get rid of the violin and flute sections,” then maybe progressive rock is not for you.

  I always feel like The Yes Album is the easiest prog album to get into.
  Well, yeah, that album is good because it has big pop songs with elements that get a little bit more complicated. It might be my personal bias, but those two King Crimson albums I mentioned were the ones that made me realize how exciting progressive rock was. But I won’t disagree with you. Yes’s Close to the Edge was another one that unlocked the music for me. If you like Close to the Edge or [Jethro Tull’s] Thick As a Brick, you’re probably going to like progressive rock. Those are like the 101 courses. A 201 course would be Soft Machine.

  We talkin’ Third?
  Yeah, which I love. That album usually stops people unless they’re huge jazz-fusion fans.

  This is a random question brought on by the fact I was listening to all ten minutes of “Achilles’ Last Stand” today: Does Led Zeppelin count as a prog-rock band?
  I don’t think so. I think the record collections of people who have [Emerson, Lake & Palmer’s] Brain Salad Surgery also have Led Zeppelin IV nestled nearby, but without getting into it, Led Zeppelin weren’t super inventive. They were not a band that was trying to push boundaries that much. They were just a very loud rock band.

  I respectfully disagree. What’s a great prog album that even most prog rock fans haven’t heard?
  Probably the Triumvirat album, Illusions on a Double Dimple. They’re a German band, and as with many things in the ’70s, the Germans went to more interesting places than a lot of the English artists would allow themselves to go. It’s amazing just how much of this music there is. Once you dip your toe into the genre, you realize the ocean of it is vast.

  It’s hard to argue that prog was political, yet you make your living covering politics. Where’s the overlap?
  I’m attracted to outsiders and difference. The first stuff I covered in politics was the libertarian movement, something small and intense and interesting. I’m just as fascinated by those same qualities in progressive rock. In the same way that I’m not really interested in being a White House reporter, I’m far more interested in talking to someone like Steven Wilson than I am in talking to Justin Timberlake.

  I’m saying this as a fan of the music: Is there anybody in prog rock that you’d point to as being a particularly good lyricist? Aside from a very few folks, lyricists often seem like a real weakness for prog bands. The words are either too airy-fairy or portentous or obtuse.
  Lyrics are really my weakness, too. I’m much more of a melody person than a lyrics person. It took me a decade to understand simple singer-songwriter stuff. But I think John Wetton’s lyrics for King Crimson were dark and interesting. And Ian Anderson’s lyrics [for Jethro Tull] are funny, in a way that not a lot of music allows. He was taking the piss out of what his peers were doing. Progressive rock is complicated music, and maybe too ambitious for its own good, but, and this is something that often gets lost, the guys doing it were having a lot of fun.

  This interview has been edited and condensed.

• Reason
  http://reason.com/archives/2017/10/01/the-show-that-never-ends
  Word count: 235

  The Show That Never Ends

  Brian Doherty from the October 2017 issue - view article in the Digital Edition

  EMAIL PRINT

  W.W. Norton & CompanyW.W. Norton & CompanyIn The Show That Never Ends: The Rise and Fall of Prog Rock, David Weigel, a Reason contributing editor and a political reporter for The Washington Post, surveys the history of "progressive rock," a genre not beholden to American blues but relying instead on warped call-backs to European folk and the futuristic sounds of moog synthesizers.

  For a while, this beautiful and ambitious musical form enjoyed massive worldly success. But huge bands such as Yes, Jethro Tull, and Emerson, Lake and Palmer were too quickly scorned by rock's vox populi and intelligentsia alike, accused of untoward grandiosity and boring pretension. Weigel tells engaging tales from the rise and the fall of some of the genre's biggest players.

  Culture mavens of the 1970s will be reminded of disco's similar swift tumble from empyrean heights to barroom punchline. In our petty cultural high school, both the nerdy grind of prog and the flighty party girl of disco are too quickly mocked.

  That's a shame: Both genres shaped a pop decade, and each deserves more of the sort of respectful consideration Weigel gives to prog rock.

  Photo Credit: W.W. Norton & Companyhttp://reason.com/archives/2017/10/01/the-show-that-never-ends

• New Republic
  https://newrepublic.com/article/143317/beyond-dragons-nonsense-qa-david-weigel-prog-rock
  Word count: 1709

  Beyond Dragons and Nonsense: A Q&A With David Weigel About Prog Rock
  The political reporter talks to TNR about rock music's most misunderstood genre.
  By Alex Shephard
  June 15, 2017

  Perhaps no musical genre has been as maligned as progressive rock. But in The Show That Never Ends, his brisk and extremely entertaining overview of prog, Washington Post political reporter David Weigel makes the case that it was enormously innovative and influential—a link between the rebellion and creativity of the mid-1960s and punk, which eventually overthrew it. Though prog could be pretentious and overstuffed, the conventional wisdom about the genre dramatically understates how popular it was in the 1970s—and how interesting and ambitious it still is.
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  I spoke to Weigel about what it was like to work on the book while covering the presidential election and why now is the time to reappraise progressive rock. This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.

  You wrote The Show That Never Ends while covering the 2016 election. What was that like?

  It’s by far the least painful thing that happened to anyone during the election. I think it saved my sanity, quite honestly. I had been interested in progressive rock forever. I was into it before I was into politics. But once I got all the way, neck-deep into politics, I realized I needed this refuge.

  There is, as you note at the start of your book, no genre of music that is quite as uncool. Why did you decide to write this and not, say, a campaign book?

  I’ve always thought you should write about something you’re directly experiencing, or something where the people and sources you’re writing about are either newly discovered or going to die. And in this case—and I’m not trying to be light about it, it’s actually very sad—I talked to a lot of people before they died, not knowing that they were that close to [death]. Except for Daevid Allen [of Gong], who had cancer when I interviewed him.

  But that was my thought. I realize the music is esoteric, I realize that people are wondering why I didn’t just write a travelogue of the campaign. And the bet that I made, I think correctly, is that I just didn’t think people would want to live that campaign over again and that they might want to relive interesting music from the 1970s that they forgot about.

  The thing I ended up liking the most about The Show That Never Ends is how earnest it is. You don’t treat progressive rock as a goof, even if you don’t let it off the hook when it’s goofy.

  When Robert Fripp [of King Crimson] was flashing out and left music, he went into complete solitude in a spiritual retreat for years. He was experimenting with tape loops—not having ragers and throwing bottles against the wall. Where there were Spinal Tap stories I definitely wanted to tell them—and I did.

  But a band like Rush, one of the biggest bands in the world, they’re very open about the fact that nothing interesting has ever happened to them. Since Neil Peart joined the band they’ve been the same three guys for 40 years. Aside from some personal tragedies, they’ve never had, like, a cocaine blowout or anything. The kitsch came in the 1980s when they sold out. That was when the Rolex fights happened.

  “Stevie Wonder deserves a lot of credit for popularizing the Moog, but so do these guys.”

  What I liked about books like Please Kill Me and Our Band Could Be Your Life—there are these really human stories in those books. One of the through lines of Please Kill Me is Johnny Thunders fucking up his life over and over again. There’s nothing awesome about that. Being a musician is hard and unglamorous.

  Many prog rockers just didn’t have flashy downfalls. Fripp very purposefully kept changing what he was doing—same with Peter Gabriel. Some bands became corporate rock, and admitted it. Then there are guys like Bill Bruford [of Yes] who got into jazz. There just aren’t that many explosive stories. They were rock musicians who veered into progressive music—that was, on its own, interesting.

  That’s especially interesting given prog rock’s reputation for bombast and excess.

  I think a lot of the corporate rock stuff overshadowed the creative part. It’s like in The 40-Year-Old Virgin, Steve Carrell’s character has an Asia poster on the wall and it’s treated as a laugh. I laughed at it! But I wonder if that’s what people are missing—they think that this music is just dragons and nonsense. They don’t think that the people who made it took it seriously—but they took it very seriously.

  One of the implicit arguments of the book is that progressive rock is the connection between the explosion of garage and psychedelic music in the 1960s and punk and hardcore music in the late 1970s.

  Hardcore musicians get a lot of credit for the scene they created. There were very tight-knit scenes where people would give people places to stay, allowing these bands to tour around the country. These were super local scenes that were super passionate about music. I realized during my reporting that this was something that grew out of the 1960s. The scenes that eventually superseded it—new wave and punk rock—get a lot of attention. But the prog scene was always left out.

  Look at the 60s beat scene. The Who’s evolution was mirrored by some of these bands, but they took it much further. The Who wrote Tommy, the first rock opera, but it was still discrete songs that formed more of a musical. Whereas progressive musicians were creating longer and longer pieces, pieces without words, with quotes from classical music—and more electronics.

  The fact that these bands were hugely innovative on a technological level really comes through in this book.

  Progressive musicians were acquiring and experimenting with the first musical synthesizers, but they don’t get credit for it. Stevie Wonder, of course, deserves a lot of credit for popularizing the Moog, but so do these guys. A giant synthesizer on stage was like in WWE when John Cena walks on—the crowd was so excited to hear synthesizer bleeps, not just because of the technique but because of the newness of it. As someone who goes to live music a lot but got really bored with four guys in t-shirts playing songs with hooks, I thought that was really exciting. In the late 60s and 70s, as these guys were touring, if you were in college, you could hear Van der Graaf Generator, this extremely ornate pop music, coming out of the common room.

  The definition of progressive rock is contested, but you focus mostly on the British groups. Why?

  I dealt with the non-European progressive rock through covering Rush, for example—that also includes Kansas and some of the American progressive rock bands. But there wasn’t as much creativity, frankly. To me, the new directions were being taken by the people who were there at the creation: Fripp especially. Bruford, Jon Anderson, Carl Palmer, the people who ended up in Asia. The people that I found the most interesting were the ones writing stuff first, whereas I felt the American bands were very much an echo.

  “There was a reach and an ambition that pop just doesn’t have anymore.”

  American progressive rock is interesting. American progressive heavy metal is super interesting. We ended up becoming innovators in that, and I quote Steve Wilson from Porcupine Tree saying the last interesting thing in music, the last new thing, is metal. But it turns out the wellspring of this beat was extremely English. Other Europeans like Vangelis, and the Italian groups like PFM and Banco, have a sound that is a little more continental and classically influenced.

  The British groups are the most interesting though. They did it first. They come to America. New York has a cameo in the book because Daevid Allen—and this is one of the favorite albums I found while writing—came out of nowhere and released New York Gone, a No Wave album, because he was living in the city and said, “Alright, this is new too!”

  This book is a revisionist history, hitting back at the narrative that progressive rock music was bloated and pretentious. But I was surprised by the self-awareness of these bands and musicians. Ambitious, but not necessarily pretentious.

  Even at the time some critics were eye-rolling pretty hard about what they were trying to pull off. But I really wanted to convey that this was music by ambitious young people who would just pound beers and then go to the studio and create a 20-minute song with nature sounds. It wasn’t even really drug-influenced. The tension I liked was when people like Rick Wakeman would show up in a group and, for all the capes and the pomp, you could tell he was very aware that this was kind of goofy—but he still leaned in. Even when he puts people on ice performing King Arthur, for example, he knows the crowd is up for something ridiculous. Still, there was a reach and an ambition that pop just doesn’t have anymore.

  Alex Shephard is a staff writer at The New Republic.
  @alex_shephard
  Read MoreCulture, Music, Progressive rock, David Weigel

• Economist
  https://www.economist.com/blogs/prospero/2017/07/21st-century-schizoid-bands
  Word count: 985

  Why prog rock still deserves your time

  It demonstrates ambition of a kind that popular music has rarely seen since
  Prospero
  Jul 3rd 2017

  by D.H.

  DAVID WEIGEL’S “The Show That Never Ends: The Rise and Fall of Prog Rock” has an impossible job: to elucidate 20 years of musical history in 350-odd pages. To make matters worse, Mr Weigel must do this with a genre of music unfamiliar to the average reader thanks to a dearth of hit singles, radio play or cultural touchstones. Prog (progressive) rock is ambitious, difficult, long-form, often instrumental music that freely mixes high and lowbrow elements and is frequently created by musicians with long hair, tall boots and monster chops. Despite its success in the 1970s, prog rock remains trapped in amber: listening to a 20-minute song with subtitled movements is no longer the norm.

  If the fall of prog at the brass-knuckled hand of punk is well known, its beginnings are less so. Mr Weigel finds the genre’s birth in the heart of the 1960s psychedelic era: the progenitors of prog were young, talented and unsatisfied with the typical three-minute song structure. In their desire to chart new territory, they threw away the map. Labels allowed bands to experiment, and prog was lauded by critics who recognised the ambition.
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  It is a shame that Mr Weigel devotes so little time to his descriptions of the scenes at the Marquee, UFO and Middle Earth clubs in London, and his sketches of the watershed proto-prog albums by The Beatles, The Moody Blues, Procol Harum and Pink Floyd feel cursory. He is anxious to move on to the main players in the Canterbury scene that blossomed when Kevin Ayers, Daevid Allen, Richard Sinclair and Robert Wyatt, a close-knit band of hippies, collectively founded The Soft Machine, Caravan and Gong, among other outfits legendary among the prog cognoscenti.

  From this communal house, Mr Weigel pivots to his exemplar, King Crimson (in prog circles, there is King Crimson and then there is everybody else). Mr Weigel uses Robert Fripp, the band’s leader and experimental guitarist, as his Great Man of Prog—much like Ken Burns deployed Louis Armstrong to try and explain all of jazz. Mr Weigel traces Mr Fripp’s every movement and collaboration, depicting him as prog’s invisible hand, motivated by infallible intuition. It is a convenient trope, but eventually it gets tiresome.

  To round out the book, Mr Weigel outlines the careers of his other first-tier prog bands: Yes, Genesis and Emerson, Lake, & Palmer (his prog is largely an English phenomenon: no Captain Beefheart or Frank Zappa here). Along the way, the author throws in passing nods to Rush, Jethro Tull, Mike Oldfield and Van der Graaf Generator, with just the barest mentions of Magma, Gentle Giant, Hawkwind and Tangerine Dream (the pace of the material leaves the reader feeling not so much sitting in the studio as viewing it from a high-speed train). Even still, the overlooking of titles such as “Tommy” by The Who, Pink Floyd’s “Dark Side of the Moon” and Queen’s “Bohemian Rhapsody” is glaring. These are works that should be considered at the heart of prog by any criterion—unless the genre’s definition is marked by the obscure and unknown.

  But Mr Weigel’s book still succeeds as a defence of a much-maligned genre. It asks: what’s wrong with long instrumental or symphonic sections? What’s wrong with concept albums? What’s wrong with being a virtuoso? What’s wrong with making use of found sounds? Prog bands, despite any sins—real or imagined—did some brave and musically adventurous deeds. They illuminated the future by shining a light backwards onto classical, folk and jazz elements. They wrote songs that weren’t about love, but about self-discovery or communion with the divine, and couched these ideas in bizarre, dystopian Tolkien-meets-Heinlein dreamscapes. The results were something totally new.

  The hope of a book like “The Show That Never Ends” is not only to extol Keith Emerson’s hands, Peter Gabriel’s wardrobe or Jon Anderson’s elfin tenor. It works as an invitation to explore the dark corners of prog: its international reach, its cultish esotericism and its fondness for ostentatious album covers adorned with flying teapots, armadillo tanks and fantasy landscapes as detailed as the music.

  Will this book inspire a comprehensive re-evaluation of prog by critics, or win the genre legions of new fans? Will it turn readers towards the contemporary post- and neo-Prog scenes? Probably not. What is hoped for is that music fans fatigued by cut-and-paste Pro Tools songs might prick up their ears when they catch King Crimson’s “21st Century Schizoid Man” sampled by Kanye West (“POWER”), or hear Rush at a baseball game. They may even find themselves downloading an album out of curiosity. Books like these are a testament to a period of music-making that struck a chord, and serve as proof that prog didn’t die out with Moogs, mellotrons and double-necked guitars. As Mr Weigel succinctly states, this was “music that copied nothing, and could be replicated by nobody”.

• Austin Chronicle
  https://www.austinchronicle.com/music/2017-06-16/the-show-that-never-ends-the-rise-and-fall-of-prog-rock/
  Word count: 358

  Book Review: The Show That Never Ends: The Rise & Fall of Prog Rock
  David Weigel
  Reviewed by Raoul Hernandez, Fri., June 16, 2017
  The Show That Never Ends: The Rise & Fall of Prog Rock

  "I thought of it as one bar in 7/8 time and one bar in 8/8 time or 4/4; I wanted to make it different from 16/8 so I thought I'd drop a 16th beat." Given the math behind UK prodigy Mike Oldfield's Tubular Bells, forever distinguished by the appropriation of its opening piano figure for The Exorcist, who says hit-making isn't an exact science? As such, national political correspondent covering Congress at The Washington Post, David Weigel surely has a chart-topper on his hands with The Show That Never Ends: The Rise & Fall of Prog Rock. A genre almost as mocked, reviled, and shunned as neo-Nazi punk, there's an argument to be made here that prog rock and jazz are transcontinental, cross-generational, mirror image genres. Weigel minces zero syllables proclaiming Hungarian composer Franz Liszt (1811-1886) the first rock star, then diagrams the deployment of classical music in 1960s genus pioneers including Emerson, Lake & Palmer (Bach) and Yes (Stravinsky). Another British Invasion, this one populated by pretension from Soft Machine, King Crimson, Genesis, etc., seeds acolytes across Europe – Vangelis' Aphrodite's Child (Greece), Focus (Holland), Banco del Mutuo Soccorso (Italy), Magma (France) – before traversing the Atlantic into Canada (Rush) and the U.S. (Kansas). Classically complex compositions built around core improv? Sounds like Duke Ellington. Robert Fripp and Brian Eno belong in a similar category despite supergroup Asia ("inflating conventional pop songs with pseudosymphonic grandeur," wrote Jon Pareles) crowning their categorical lumping. Contemporary successors Porcupine Tree, Dream Theater, and Coheed & Cambria receive quick vetting toward the end, Marillion standing out for careful consideration, but The Show That Never Ends soars on Weigel's hardbitten reportorial approach to both narrative and musical description – lean, direct, vivid: "Critics had already bludgeoned progressive rock with a rusted shovel." (David Weigel appears at BookPeople today, Thu., June 15, 7pm.)
  The Show That Never Ends: The Rise & Fall of Prog Rock
  by David Weigel
  W.W. Norton & Company, 368 pp., $26.95

• Team Rock
  http://teamrock.com/review/2017-09-03/david-weigel-the-show-that-never-ends-the-rise-and-fall-of-prog-book-review
  Word count: 245

  David Weigel - The Show That Never Ends: The Rise And Fall Of Prog - book review

  Album Review

  Reviews / 03 Sep 2017 / by Sid Smith

  More

  Word salad surgery

  Does it matter if this book says that Bill Bruford joined Hatfield And The North? Should we care when Gentle Giant’s Ray Shulman is mentioned as being the editor of Melody Maker or that Adrian Belew was part of Peter Gabriel’s 80s reinvention? Weigel’s day job as a political correspondent in America requires him to sift through the disingenuous rhetoric and ‘fake news’ that infests much of today’s political discourse. So if facts do matter in responsible political journalism, they’re just as important in the rock journo branch of the fourth estate, no? While such inaccuracies jar and undermine the author’s credibility as a reliable guide on this subject, his admiration for the creative ambition and musical invention for some of the bands emerging in the late 60s isn’t in doubt. However, chronicling prog rock’s big beasts by threading press clippings together, along with passages from books by others on the subject, makes this a well-worn, familiar tale. Adding little in the way of new substance, Weigel’s reportage from Cruise To The Edge does at least sparkle with well-drawn portraits and waspish humour. A pity those admirable qualities don’t extend much beyond the opening chapter.

• My Dayton Daily News
  http://www.mydaytondailynews.com/entertainment/books--literature/the-book-nook-the-prog-rock-spirit-the-1970s-comes-alive-again/9uGsiqplqOUorIgEzG9CxN/
  Word count: 672

  THE BOOK NOOK: The prog rock spirit of the 1970s comes alive again
  local

  By Vick Mickunas - Contributing Writer
  0
  “The Show that Never Ends — the Rise and Fall of Prog Rock” by David Weigel (W.W. Norton, 346 pages, $26.95) CONTRIBUTED

  Posted: 12:00 a.m. Saturday, June 17, 2017

  “The Show that Never Ends — the Rise and Fall of Prog Rock” by David Weigel (W.W. Norton, 346 pages, $26.95)

  Back in the early 1970s, some of my favorite music groups were English bands that played long, complicated and sometimes eccentric songs. Bands like Genesis, Yes, Pink Floyd, King Crimson, Procol Harum, The Moody Blues and Emerson, Lake and Palmer became famous during that period.

  Decades later I found myself scanning eBay for vinyl copies of some of the records these groups had produced in their heyday. I kept finding that their albums were being categorized as “Prog,” an abbreviated term for progressive rock.

  RELATED: The day they tried to kill Bob Marley

  Back in the day I could not have imagined that my favored musicians would ever be gathered together into their own unique subset. When I began perusing “The Show That Never Ends — the Rise and Fall of Prog Rock” by David Weigel, I was filled with an exuberant nostalgia as I rediscovered some musical heroes of my youth.

  This style enjoyed a brief time in the favor of fickle music fans. Many of the groups formed in the late 1960s. The author writes: “As the reader will discover — or already knows — ‘prog’s’ reputation has never quite recovered from a series of crises in 1977 and 1978. Punk won over the critics, disco won over the teens, and the major progressive bands deflated like punctured blimps.”

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  During the mid-60s, some groups began playing what became known as “psychedelia,” a musical form inspired in large part by the illicit drug culture that flourished at that time. Prog was in some ways an outgrowth of that musical experimentation.

  Bands were incorporating elements of jazz, folk, classical and ethnic sounds into their compositions. “The Show that Never Ends” delves into piles of details on how particular songs were written. We learn that the original idea for the hit record “A Whiter Shade of Pale” by Procol Harum began at a party.

  I am not a musician, so I was baffled by obscure composition factoids that shot straight over my head: the author described how the hook in that song, “a rising C-Em-Am-G figure, was copped from Bach’s ‘Air on a G String’” and writes how in another song “the guitars are like playing in 5 over it, and the drums are like in 15….”

  RELATED: “M Train” a shining jewel of a memoir

  But we find out how bands first got together, how their music changed over time, and the interpersonal dynamics that led to shifts in line-ups. For example the late Greg Lake, the original King Crimson vocalist, went on to become front man for the super-group Emerson, Lake and Palmer.

  It was astonishing to observe how quickly it all came apart. After Peter Gabriel left Genesis the band transformed itself into commercial hit-makers. The early albums by Yes were prog masterpieces. Their later albums sound like a completely different band.

  My only quibble, if I have one, with this book is the absence of personal information about some of the best-known artists. We find out a lot about the late Keith Emerson, ELP’s keyboard wizard, but there’s very little in here about flaming geniuses like Peter Gabriel. Despite these shortcomings, his tribute really does rock.

  Vick Mickunas of Yellow Springs interviews authors every Saturday at 7 a.m. and on Sundays at 10:30 a.m. on WYSO-FM (91.3). For more information, visit www.wyso.org/programs/book-nook. Contact him at vick@vickmickunas.

• Pitchfork
  https://pitchfork.com/thepitch/making-a-serious-case-for-prog-rock-david-weigel-interview/
  Word count: 364

  Making a Serious Case for Prog Rock
  Provided photo
  Provided photo
  pitch

  by Ryan Dombal
  Senior Editor

  Rock
  Electronic
  Experimental
  Global

  July 11 2017

  The five-handed keyboard solos. The multi-part, half-hour suites with novelistic narratives. The painstakingly intricate album covers. The stupendously lofty ambitions. There’s a lot to poke fun at when it comes to prog rock. But David Weigel doesn’t chase down easy laughs in his new book, The Show That Never Ends. Instead, this diligently researched chronicle aims to grant the much-maligned genre something that has eluded it for decades: respect.

  At this point, common wisdom holds that prog’s overblown heyday was rightfully squashed in the late 1970s by the sneering attitude and unabashed amateurism of punk. But Weigel argues that prog was just as rebellious as punk in its effort to expand what rock’n’roll could be, beyond disposable three-chord trifles about cars and teen romance. “When something is critically derided, like a lot of prog is, one theory is that it must have been very prefab and fake—but that’s not true,” Weigel tells me. “These guys were really pouring their creative hearts into the music, and I felt like a lot of them weren’t getting credit.”

  A political reporter for The Washington Post by day, Weigel, 35, makes his case by telling the stories of many of prog’s biggest acts—including King Crimson, Emerson, Lake & Palmer, Genesis, Jethro Tull, Pink Floyd, and Rush—with a devoted rigorousness that feels in tune with the genre. Sure, there are asides like the one about how ELP’s Keith Emerson, buzzed on a mix of cocaine and Cognac, attempted to swim from the Bahamas to England (spoiler alert: he didn’t make it), but The Show That Never Ends doesn’t read like a salacious rock expose as much as a labor of love. It’s one man’s attempt to set the record straight about a misunderstood musical era.

  Pitchfork: Did you have a prog-rock epiphany when you were a teenager in the ’90s?

• Las Vegas Weekly
  https://lasvegasweekly.com/ae/print/2017/jul/06/political-reporter-david-weigel-progressive-rock/
  Word count: 447

  Chuck Twardy
  Thu, Jul 6, 2017 (midnight)

  Three and a half stars

  The Show That Never Ends: The Rise and Fall of Prog Rock By David Weigel, $27.

  Thanks, Dave Weigel. Now I’ve got “Owner of a Lonely Heart” pinballing in my head.

  The only Billboard No. 1 song by Yes, released in 1983, has the technical sheen of the band’s best work from the 1970s. But, as Weigel notes in his chronicle of progressive rock, The Show That Never Ends, “This was a different time; bouncing block chords no longer sounded so bad.”

  Well, to these ears they did. Raised on the sophisticated rhythms and melodies of Yes, Genesis and Emerson, Lake & Palmer—whose composition “Karn Evil 9” provided the book’s title—I was in no mood for prized idols’ pop concessions. (Eh, Phil Collins gets a pass for Face Value.) Of course, everyone has to eat, but I couldn’t help see prog rock’s descent into prog-lite as another sign of the Apotheosis of the Bean-Counters, the Reagan-era market-is-right ethic that still drives much of small- and large-C culture.

  Weigel acknowledges record company pressure for hits, but the Washington Post political reporter has little to say about the play of politics or sociology in music, such as the general atomizing of taste and identity in recent decades. Rather, a restless music press enamored of punk and New Wave combined with progressive musicians’ own pretentiousness to raze the house that Procol Harum and Soft Machine built.

  That ostentation might have proved a handy foil for punks, but it grew from an elevated sense of taste. As Weigel notes, British prog pioneers like Keith Emerson, Robert Fripp and Peter Gabriel sought to push rock past its American blues and R&B beginnings by absorbing European classical and folk influences. The Moog synthesizer helped, too, and even drummers like Bill Bruford loaded up on arcane percussion instruments and top-heavy time signatures.

  Weigel says the book began in 2012 when he worked for Slate, which asked reporters to take a month covering something outside their beats, so maybe cultural fracturing seemed too much the busman’s holiday. But he brought his notable skills as a reporter to the project, interviewing scores of musicians and deeply researching the archives of music journalism. So if his book isn’t a social history, it’s certainly a music wonk’s delight, full of anecdotes about how egos puffed and bruised; how bands formed, fell apart and regrouped; and how the band that brought us “Yours Is No Disgrace” found some with “Owner of a Lonely Heart.”

• NPR
  https://www.npr.org/2017/07/18/534577902/can-t-prog-rock-get-any-respect-around-here
  Word count: 884

  Music Interviews
  Can't Prog Rock Get Any Respect Around Here?
  7:13

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  Transcript

  July 18, 20174:42 AM ET
  Heard on Morning Edition

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  Keith Emerson of Emerson, Lake & Palmer, an essential prog-rock band derided in the 1970s by critic Lester Bangs.
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  "Here is musical sterility at its pinnacle. A band that has absolutely no soul, no feeling in the music," critic Lester Bangs declared in 1975. The target of his derision? The British progressive-rock group Emerson, Lake & Palmer. Bangs disdained the band's objective, as he saw it, "to play pre-set solos as fast as you possibly can, [at] breakneck speed, and do it for about five hours."

  That critical contempt of prog rock as a bloated, pompous genre was one thing that prompted David Weigel to write his new book The Show That Never Ends: The Rise And Fall Of Prog Rock. By day, Weigel reports on politics for The Washington Post. But he used to write for Slate, which encouraged staffers once a year to write about something off their usual beat for a feature called "The Fresca." That's where Weigel pitched stories about prog rock — the complex, polyrhythmic province of bands like King Crimson, Yes, Asia and Genesis.
  Prog Rock Gets Some Respect In 'The Show That Never Ends'
  Book Reviews
  Prog Rock Gets Some Respect In 'The Show That Never Ends'

  "I've always liked this progressive rock that is not critically respected or has been written out of rock history — not completely, but written as sort of a hilarious little hurdle for real musicians to get over," Weigel tells NPR's David Greene.

  Pop culture at large has enjoyed mocking prog obsession via negative portrayals of prog-rock fans (see: the weird misfit characters of The 40-Year-Old Virgin and Buffalo '66, for example). But, Weigel argues, the genre doesn't get enough credit for its dynamism and inventiveness.

  Prog rock's open admission that it was "smarter" music often prompted accusations of pretentiousness, but those accusers failed to recognize that the musicians were often in on the joke, Weigel says. For instance, the rock press branded Emerson, Lake & Palmer "The Band That Took Rock 'N' Roll to College," but the band embraced the title, openly talking about introducing fresh influences to rock 'n' roll and making music that was "frankly, more intellectual than clunky riff-rock," as Weigel puts it.

  "If it was pretentious, it was because they were having fun with it," Weigel says. "They were adapting classical music and writing 20-minute pieces because they were men in their 20s who thought this was fun and radical."
  The Show That Never Ends
  The Show That Never Ends

  The Rise and Fall of Prog Rock

  by David Weigel

  Hardcover, 346 pages
  purchase

  Nevertheless, there have been moments in the history of prog rock where the genre did lapse into self-parody and hilarious indulgence. Take the French band Magma, whose music featured hypnotic melodies and a language its singers invented: Kobaïan, the only language that would fit "this really rhythmically confusing but exciting, very percussion-heavy music that they [were] making," Weigel says. Then there was the time Yes keyboard player Rick Wakeman ordered curry midway through a concert, to snack on during the long stretches when he wasn't playing.

  The era of prog came to an end in the late 1970s, as the story often goes, due to the emergence of punk. "[Punk] absolutely diverted rock press, the A&R men and radio. ... They diverted the channels of how you heard about music," Weigel says. But when speaking to progressive musicians about the rise of punk, Weigel found that there were two schools of thought.

  On one hand, he says, "there were people like Greg Lake from King Crimson and Emerson, Lake & Palmer, who remained extremely bitter that the record industry turned to punk — which was never that popular — and ditched what was working for people."

  "And then there were people like Robert Fripp, also from King Crimson, who thought, 'Well, fantastic! It needed to be blown up!' " Weigel also points to Peter Gabriel, who left Genesis to start a solo career, embraced New York punk and returned a different musician.

  Although prog rock imploded in the late '70s, the genre's influence on contemporary music is undeniable. "Heavy metal, several generations down from progressive rock — it is all over the place," Weigel says. "The harmonics, the songwriting, the loud-quiet-loud dynamics were done by progressives long before metal."

  Electronic music, too, owes a debt to prog. "The Mellotrons, the Moogs and then the Yamahas and stuff they were using later — making that the grounding of a song, hooking the melody to an organ, making it clear that could carry a song on it," Weigel says. "I think that is progressive rock's influence as well."

  Dive into the genre of prog rock with this Spotify playlist of essential recordings curated by David Weigel:

  Web intern Karen Gwee contributed to this story.

• Washington Times
  https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2017/jun/28/book-review-the-show-that-never-ends-the-rise-and-/
  Word count: 1077

  When rock was (musically) progressive
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  By Michael Taube - - Wednesday, June 28, 2017

  ANALYSIS/OPINION:

  Progressive rock, or “prog rock,” was a unique, almost revolutionary form of modern music during the 1960s and 1970s. Its early adherents, including Emerson, Lake and Palmer, King Crimson and Yes, emphasized the desire to create an intellectually stimulating musical experience that was artistic, lyrical, creative and memorable.

  Yet, prog rock’s first wave had a remarkably short life span in the grand scheme of things. Even more astonishing, this musical style was, and still is, reviled by many popular artists rather than revered for its groundbreaking sound and influence.

  David Weigel examines the period when rock was (musically) progressive in his intriguing book, “The Show That Never Ends: The Rise and Fall of Prog Rock.”

  A national reporter for The Washington Post, who has also written about politics for Slate and Bloomberg Politics, he defends “progressive rock as a grand cultural detour that invented much of the music that’s popular now.” It was “supposed to be rebellious music,” was “fabulously popular for years,” and “emerged as a direct response to the throwaway three-minute pop song, the format everyone was trying to emulate after the Beatles perfected it.”

  It’s fair to say the “Louis XVI of the time was the standard pop song structure.” Or, as Mr. Weigel amusingly calls it, “creative kryptonite.” Fortunately, the musical Superman known as prog rock was, unlike the Superman of DC Comics, able to conquer this particular type of kryptonite.

  “The roots of progressive rock,” notes the author, “went into the nineteenth century” with classical music composers whose work “echoed especially loudly in the progressive era,” such as Liszt and Berlioz. Other composers like Mussorgsky, who combined elements of classical and folk music, was described as “cultural poison” by music historian C. Hubert H. Parry — and “music I send to the devil” by, of all people, Tchaikovsky.

  In Mr. Weigel’s view, “Progressive rock, which would not come into existence for more than fifty years, grew up in Stravinsky’s shadow.” He notes that “the prog rockers came to see ‘The Rite of Spring,’” one of the composer’s masterpieces, “as proof of experimentation’s fruits.” While this avant-garde composition is an acquired taste for some audiences, it had a strong influence on various 20th-century musicians.

  As other musical styles gradually incorporated progressive sounds, including jazz, the rock sound moved into worlds like pop, bubble gum and psychedelia. Prog rock eventually “grew out of the counterculture” in the 1960s that included raves and reached London. Ultimately, it was “inspired by American rock ‘n’ roll and by the roiling scenes of Europe” and began to take “new forms when it returned to those countries.”

  Influential British bands like Soft Machine, Van der Graaf Generator, Genesis and Jethro Tull began to experiment with new sounds, riffs and intense (and exceedingly long) guitar and drum solos. Many great albums, including King Crimson’s “In the Court of the Crimson King,” Yes’ “Fragile,” Pink Floyd’s “The Dark Side of the Moon,” Mike Oldfield’s “Tubular Bells” and Emerson, Lake and Palmer’s “Brain Salad Surgery,” were released in the first wave. The rise of second wave groups like Supertramp, U.K., Rush and Asia was just around the corner. And the progressive bands, “as the music papers persisted in calling them, absolutely dominated the rock charts and the tour circuit.”

  For a spell, it seemed like the world was their progressive oyster. Then it all collapsed.

  What happened? Mr. Weigel notes the “downfall of progressive rock happened quickly, with an entire critical establishment seemingly rooting for its demise.” The old powerhouses “moved away from the complicated songwriting that had defined them,” including notable outfits like Genesis and Yes. Even worse, “the labels were dumping progressive music as fast as they could.”

  Combined with the fact that prog rock’s reputation “never quite recovered from a series of crises in 1977 and 1978,” many progressive bands “deflated like punctured blimps” during the punk and disco eras. Fortunately, prog rock lived on in different forms, including neo-progressive rock, progressive metal and new prog. New bands like Marillion, Saga, The Mars Volta and Porcupine Tree helped fill the void left behind by the prog-pop revolt.

  Prog rock, which “had not seemed to survive the 1980s,” was in the midst of “a curious half-life.” It continues to this day, something Mr. Weigel describes as progressive music receiving “occasional love letters from the pop world.” If that’s the best way to revive this musical tsunami of art, intelligence and creativity, may the letters never stop.

  • Michael Taube is a contributor to The Washington Times.

  • • •

  THE SHOW THAT NEVER ENDS: THE RISE AND FALL OF PROG ROCK
  By David Weigel
  W.W. Norton & Company, $26.95, 368 pages

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