eclecticity

on the music I love most, & most unaccountably

This is one of the most personal things I’ve ever written — so of course I’m going to open by posing a broad question about writing itself. But stay with me, maybe?

1.

The essence of criticism (it’s an age where we writing it feel called upon to defend it) is separating the subjective from the objective. An acknowledgement of how inexorably personal, and thus innately various, any given experience is, balanced by a belief that that can still be translated into common language, and quantified into useful, public data. The choicest critics spend their lives trying to transcend themselves, while also coming to terms with the truth of that self. It’s a tricky and exhausting balancing act, but the assumption of authority demands as its foremost justification strenuous self-examination: self-criticism. A degree of the personal is necessary context, and I don’t think reading about a personal journey with art has too much less value than reading about the art itself. The critic showing her cards is a useful tool for the common goal: to figure out what It is, and what It might mean to most people, or to different kinds.

In ideal situations, the critic is compelled to dance about architecture (or whatever) by an authoritatively validated, healthily managed conviction that they have a real gift for interpreting the subject at hand, more skeptically and more generously than the norm. Squaring this with the critic’s typical inability to actually do the thing being critiqued, at least at the level which merits widely disseminated criticism, is a whole other kettle of 🐟. Elements of both interest and disinterest are necessary — part of why the critic often sticks to one field. And maybe this critic, who on this ‘stack is more of a diarist anyway, is failing to tell you anything you don’t already know, though the working it out on the page is fun. This critic has always been insufficiently skeptical of his own predilection for Many Large Words, fearful in a lazily reflective rather than solution-oriented way of certain excessive tendencies not aided by a lack of formal education. :(

Now for the point, though we’ll return to that unchecked taste for excess. I began this piece by suggesting that the separation of the objective and subjective was the key to good criticism, and also that the personal wasn’t exclusively something to sift out and quarantine. But love, which is quite subjective and also quite universal, is also crucial to the whole thing, and has yet gone unmentioned. Critics are accused of being haters — arbitrary haters at that — perhaps more than in any other profession besides actual cops. Some, indeed, curdle into this, from being jaded by overwork or undersinging or just age and unexplored toxicities, while some perhaps miss the point and launch into it spitting venom because they’re no physical fit for the force (though I will bet money that there’s 0% overlap between cops and critics, successful or not). But almost always, a love of the thing the critic critiques motivated their choice to become a critic at all.

And while you learn by a certain age that love is not just patient and kind and a many splendored thing but a verb, love the feeling, that wondrously overwhelming state of being, is something you learn young. Like fear, joy or sadness, it starts by happening to you without you asking for it, which is one of the beautiful things about being alive — feelings may not be “facts”, but they are data, they are tangible, they aren’t just some phantom in your head. They’re you, and like the critic, it’s your job to make sense of what you are telling you. Here’s the thing you maybe knew that I’m getting at: odds are, most music critics have loved music since they were young. For, yes, most people have loved music since they were young. So bias aside, I believe the music critic is a beautiful thing, their life in service of a love instilled early and perfectly inescapable. They adore music so much they want to make sense of it, and of their devotion to it.

Even Fantano, you ask? and for the purposes of preserving argument and moving on quickly I’ll ignore the question (but yes, with reservations yes). There is a conundrum in what I’ve laid out so far. I referred to emotional responses, in all their involuntary organicity, as data; i.e., something of which one can ultimately make sense. But I’m not always sure. Because the music that reaches you as a very young person predates your critical acumen. The way you can get fond and homesick for a stupid town you were born to escape, just because things were simpler and lovelier then, and things were simpler and lovelier then because you were a child and had no sense of the world’s conflict or complexity and were as protected as you’ll ever be — or weren’t protected, making the treasures that shone through permanent lifesavers. These things can be embarrassing in the harsh light of adulthood; what kind of conflict does that create?

And what kind of responsibility does a critic — normal people just like what they like — have toward reconciling that? Sure, what you do at home isn’t what you do in print, but I imagine we want to trust that our critics believe in the values they subject their subjects to enough to actually live them. I love Billy Joel dearly; Billy Joel was, in fact, my gateway to pop music, with the Beatles the wonderful premise on which he based his own artistic arguments. And enough people detest Billy Joel with such intensity it makes me wonder why McCartney gets such a pass (we feel bad about our forefathers shitting on Ram I guess). Yet when I engage with Billy Joel critically, I feel a tendency I’m not sure is shrewd or sheepish to look down on his errors of judgment, which are not dissimilar to my own (awkwardness with vocabulary, insensitivity about women). And because his great merit is killer hooks, it’s harder to quantify Joel’s significance.

Don’t let me get away with calling a killer hook, a great melodic line perfectly welded to a piece of language that won’t leave your head, insignificant. Music is the most and least communicative medium, smashing linguistic barriers but not always genuinely saying something. How you put great jazz into words is no easy feat, right? But there’s something in the sheer intellect and invention jazz requires that lessens the need for verbal cues, and you can hear the dearth of those qualities when the jazz is not good. And while the music I first exhibited a largely secondhand fondness for was classical music, whose formality I can now hear as oppressive while still hearing its content as beautiful (depending, always depending), I can deal with and explain what I got wrong as a kid there, valorizing the most elitist genre of all. But how do I explain my Chicago phase, Blue Öyster Cult phase, or Phish phase, except by saying “ha, kids are dumb?”

2.

Well, now it can be told — I know exactly what I was doing there. Though I’ve never been diagnosed with anything, there are traces of OCD in some of how I move about. I love the lists involved in loving music, the discographies, the narratives sequences of albums (and I may yet live to see the death of the album) represent along the course of a career or life. Don’t forget, as well, that a musician is not an actor or novelist — the assumption of autobiography, of the life itself being the art, is fairer game. There are few moments I recall as fondly in my whole life as that long season when every week or so I would get a new Billy Joel album, in order. My love and faith was solidified, and each new installment was a new dimension, new set of thrills, new part of his story. It wasn’t all joy — his late ‘80s work lacked any of what originally enticed me. But it was an educational, enriching experience I was eager to repeat, as I am all of my pleasures.

Little squares by little squares — as I favored records from the forever-unfashionable ‘70s, by young men enthusiastically making every incorrect style choice — became my drug of choice. And it consumes my life: albums, and their relationship to one another.

With the crucial aid of the All-Music Guide: 3rd Edition — a piece of work in more than one sense, to which I admit I owe a great deal — I was on two missions when feeling around for another artist to fall for. The less healthy one was chasing the thrill; I still haven’t really learned that that’s a fool’s errand, and I’ll never not sympathize with it. But I was also learning the map of a pop history that in the late 20th century was still compact enough to digest wholesale, and being resurrected en masse in clear-case CD reissues. There were more efficient methods I didn’t take, which I was also learning is very me. Though it predated streaming, my dad had a big collection, but he also kind of spoiled me at record stores, which replaced toy stores early on for me — you get so much more out of an album than an action figure. I went entirely on whims and faith. Unaware I’d want to be a critic, I led with appreciation, even with the shittiest artists.

Undeveloped acumen and all, being indiscriminate meant appreciating what’s most elementally satisfying about pop — wonderful melodies or hooks or arrangements, the things that make up one’s love for, for instance, Billy Joel. Phish, whose following is so ardent it’s its own kind of purely beautiful, is much harder to musically defend (their chops aside, and if you think that means anything you’re on the wrong Substack). But I can point out four or five dumb and lovely songs whose errant earworms I don’t mind. And while the merits of early, ironic-metallic Blue Öyster Cult went over my head, I know the prizes on their worst albums too. I spent too much time trying to crack act after act, to repeat my old Billy Joel experience, rather than sampling, branching out, treating the Guide as a guide. But if something stuck, it’s because it really struck me.

When this led to the really valuable discoveries, I got to marvel at the instantly erected pillar of a personal philosophy. Pet Shop Boys and Stephin Merritt’s bands, in sonically distinct ways, taught me how much I favor synthetic instrumentation and assertively tongue-in-cheek lyrics; I already knew about popform. That they’re both gay — I’m technically not, but there’s a big glittering asterisk — dovetails with the permission I heard in David Bowie’s voice to embrace a gendersmashing way of coming on. It was the same thing in Lennon, when he’d really lean into the brittleness of his voice, the explosion of an aggression that somehow had no room for macho, not to mention the spectral dandy barely bothering with melody moaning off a Mancunian stage in 1966. Or Prince, fuck. Beefheart abjuring sense and making me crave it; Can and Yoko and Bitches Brew followed. & Eno and Roxy Music appeared to bridge all of these things.

We’re talking about real subjective stuff here, hints of which slip out every time I tap a keyboard. But this is where I’ve meant to land, 1800 fucking words in. Sure, there was some objective merit in all these artists, and that hit me too. But the way they spoke to me personally was often different than how I’d instinctively unpack what I perceive as their value for everyone. I needed these artists as a kid, the way others needed harder, punker, less synthetic and formal music. That fact of my existence is confused by how young I was. It’s not just what did it mean — it’s did it mean anything communicable at all? How do you explain, as a critic, the most purely subjective love you’ve ever felt? And is it even explicable as just a person? Especially when it’s an artist you regard in a more complete form as a bit embarrassing? The best critics dismiss “guilty pleasures”, but can’t you love a thing and recognize its flaws? Isn’t that what loving people is like?

See, and that’s the other thing. I didn’t actually need all the artists I loved, who spoke to me, whom I can still cue up and feel all of the things I used to. But most of them that stick with me reflect something about me, to me. Before you’re a participant in the world enough to need to figure out how to refine or adapt your real self for greater goods (and young and tight with/afraid of some kinda God enough not to have to worry about the social utility of the self you’re learning), the affirmation in any reflection of yourself you discover is beautiful. Narcissus took it too far. But the kiddo learning and knowing and owning themself is doing the work they’ll need to stay strong in the face of challenges. You want to be able to meet yourself like an old friend in the thick of it all; you want to be able to love what’s so totally unique about yourself it defies words. And I’m still looking for language for a personal essence I hear in a kind of ‘70s band.

3.

Without knowing he was doing me a favor, John Rockwell (a brilliant, accomplished critic who nevertheless seems like a nerdier person than I’m glad I turned out) culled ten bands from the “Art Rock” subgenre he drew the short straw for, back when they were putting the Rolling Stone Illustrated History of Rock & Roll together. As a longtime classical critic, Rockwell is actually more predisposed than most (not Jon Pareles) to appreciate “art rock”, which though I need a whole other article to unpack this really meant, at the time (1976), prog. I will now try to sum up prog with ironic economy — since post-rocknroll pop was so formalistic and didn’t aim highbrow, its forms cried out to be smashed, as forms do, and elevated, which was less necessary. The Beatles, with others, made refining and expanding these forms attractive, with success and drugs. Class and race questions bled, half covertly half not, into this state of affairs.

Already there’s too much to unpack, see? Conflation of gentility or refinement with a “better” art, when classical was so far overthrown Sinatra was the standard for those qualities. What being white and British might have had to do with perusing the stack of 45s in the attic and rejecting Muddy Waters but loving Vivaldi. How the Fab Four’s success (both artistic, which is exciting and inspiring, and financial, which is another kind of exciting and inspiring) and drug use (both the horizon expansion, which alerts you to a better way that demands agape, and the addiction, which keeps you pursuing it while that better way reveals itself to be a mirage) helped make their “art rock”, as in Sgt. Pepper’s eclectic pop hybrid, the flavor of a moment when their industry had more money in it than ever. That moment is long gone, and now we know that not just Joni Mitchell and Stevie Wonder are “art rock”, so is De La Soul (et al), and prog is a fossil.

Helpfully, Rockwell deals with this all quite well in his essay — there may have been a weird moment when Yes and Pink Floyd and Jethro Tull were atop the charts, but “art rock” as it was defined in the ‘70s was always furrowing higher brows. We can — well, could — appreciate Phil Spector because he wielded his orchestral flourishes with all the grace and subtlety of the Pistols. Rock ‘n’ roll, which pop now descends from, was beloved for its defiance, its rejection of refinement, its embrace of mess, etc. Yet punk happened because, for a moment the Beatles created, artists got all too hopped up on rock sounding good. While Motown teams and expats, Philadelphia International, and others embraced this (contra Sly and Hi and Stevie) — inventing a Black art pop that was dismissed in its time as the most insidious product going (and also disco, which etc.) — UK art rockers had the wildest visions of all*, and fucked up the transcripts.

There are exceptions to every rule, but prog is now mostly defined by those bands — like ELP, who were a model for many of the many who soon sprung up, especially in continental Europe. ELP’s mission was, evidently, flash and complexity for flash and complexity’s sake. Because the early art rock bands didn’t have Beatle money, a lot of ca. 1967 art rock does, indeed, have a satisfying scruffiness about it: Barrett-led Pink Floyd, who were more like San Francisco acid rock and whom Ken Emerson dubbed “an eldritch assault”; Soft Machine, a tricksy power trio (at first) whose verbal content belied any too-lofty goals (and whose impish drummer Robert Wyatt balanced out the never-smiling organ-molester Mike Ratledge); the sodden Procol Harum and blessed Move, who furnished ‘60s popforms with cannily moderated instincts; and the Nice, who caged the E of ELP’s classical savvy and lack of restraint in a scrungy pop-rock.

But though prog wouldn’t be a commonly recognized concept until the early ‘70s, the various infections were spreading, even as the Band got everyone high on bringing it all back home. By 1968, both Procol Harum and the Nice had made LPs built around long suites which didn’t justify their groove space, while the Moody Blues, a lovable kitsch singles band whom I didn’t mention above, had already made the “orchestral” affectations of Sgt. Pepper flesh with their spiffy Days of Future Passed. Guitarist Davy O’List had bugged out of the Nice, returning to pop only rarely. When Keith Emerson began eyeing next moves, he entertained another guitarist — there’s a rumor ELP was supposed to be HELP, H for Hendrix. However false that is, H’s death left the throne for art rock leaders open, as did McCartney’s Beatle dissolution and Barrett’s mental health battle. Its kings would be guys like Emerson, who (not Ken) had no good ideas.

Horniness for virtuosity was a part of it, though listen to Emerson flail around trying to play rock ‘n’ roll on “Are You Ready Eddy” (or don’t). But the millions of people who began to prefer extended track lengths, adventurous time signatures, aimless solos by people who’d really practiced their scales, and artwork and lyrics that channeled sci-fi and fantasy (both still evolving) often didn’t know their why behind these preferences. They just thought it was cool. And because drugs were such an admitted part of this subculture, you can figure it was cool like drugs are cool — the illusion of intensified vividity, complexity, profundity. What you often don’t hear on ELP albums are good songs or melodies, or even good sounds most of the time. You hear these things on Yes albums, but they’re still overloaded with arbitrary effects and bogged down by stupid lyrics. As Rockwell notes, the proggers were factitious, elephantine, and “appalling”.

(Yeah I failed to “sum up prog with ironic economy.”)

*this isn’t true

4.

Ahh, but those exceptions I was talking about three paragraphs ago, which is maybe the textual equivalent of a 10-minute runtime (I dunno, how long has this read taken you so far?). Rockwell’s own picks for art rock’s founders, both Yanks, are intriguing but plausible choices: Frank Zappa, who concealed his absolutely elitist preference for deliberately impenetrable modern classical music behind an ‘immature’ contempt for elites, and Lou Reed, who invented the Ramones as much as he invented Roxy Music. Ex-Velvet John Cale and Patti Smith make appearances, as do the German art groups, who by Tangerine Dream and Kraftwerk hitting the charts were much smoother and less strange than in their heyday. I’m not totally sure if a critic whose late ‘70s idea of high art was Linda Ronstadt made it to hip-hop, but Rockwell isn’t the worst date you could take to the symphony. Healthy skepticism; I’ve been on about it this whole time.

As for those ten bands I referred to seven paragraphs ago — the textual equivalent of “Supper’s Ready” — Rockwell classes these acts simply as “the eclectic art rock camp”. He elaborates: “[the] use of classical and other nonrock styles and formal ideas blends imperceptibly into all-purpose stylistic eclecticism — free and often febrile switching among different styles within the same piece. Eclecticism has been more prominent in London than anywhere else, and, at its best, it stops being lamely imitative and enters the realm of creativity.” He proceeds to cite Genesis, King Crimson, the Electric Light Orchestra, Queen, Supertramp, Sparks (not British but too newly successful for that to be widely known), 10cc, Gentle Giant, Be-Bop Deluxe, and Roxy Music. In 1975 or ‘76, these bands were actually at wildly different career points. But for a representation of a sensibility that was as singular as any could be, that list doesn’t really miss anybody.

What exactly was that sensibility? What unites these bands? Besides that they’re, as far as Rockwell knows, British? (In the original edition, he tacks on Kansas, who made one annoying great hit, and Focus, who made one great annoying hit.) For one thing, that touch of queer is not absent. Let’s not shit ourselves — the seventies were the peak of fashionable genderfluidity. We may not have had the language or politics worked out, but we sure had the hair and clothes. The “femininity” is embodied by many of these bands’ sounds as well as their images. There’s no bruising blues, no macho aggro, no normal lust to speak of, nothing butch or brutal. Sugary melodies, helium harmonies, buttercream-piping arrangements, and the general sense of a rather Romantic urge to swoon at any moment. It’s no free gay glam, an ironically more brutal music — when these groups sing of love, they sound like incels, before the cliff-dive into bitterness. You see, it was a white, straight male chauvinist genderfluidity — and that’s also, alas, a part of why it was the only time a boygirl like me could’ve become a pop superstar.

Frills. Bombast. Anglophilia. Scary words like “rococo” and “baroque” and everyone’s favorite dart for your career fancylads: “pretentious”. And here, I finally arrive at the hardest part of this essay. How many American kids in the late ‘90s found their first idea of ideal fashion sense in 18th century Europe? Powdered wigs, stockings, and an almost forbidden not just fluidity but opulence? This, alas, was the costume I wished had been assigned me. And it’s multiple things. I can pride myself on the gay part of it, the signals I had no taste for what society deemed “masculine”, but less the over-the-topness of it all, which extended to the kind of overwrought, ornate language that out of its moment just sounds arch (hm hm hm). Why did I like classical music, want to brush up my Shakespeare, or covet those wigs at age 9? It certainly wasn’t racist or classist; I was a child, born to lower-station liberals. Why did that feel so liberating?

[Coz these things shattered boundaries once upon a time, and called on you later on]

I know some of it was pretentious. Early on I found more favor with adults than fellow kids, noted the aspirational nature of assimilating the Western canon, was fascinated with history for no better reason than it was old and not around anymore. So there’s an escapist aspect. But some of this art, these styles, illuminated something that not only felt true about me, but still feels true. Now I know how key the genderfluidity of it all was. But some of it was that I found sumptuous, indulgent language kind of tasty, the kind of thing you can end up having too much of — a bag of Dove chocolates, I dunno. Moreover!, my introductions to that kind of language weren’t deathly serious — they were iconoclasts like Dickens, who played with the formality of their language like a joke. Lewis Carroll was another, the king of expanding a kid’s sense of waking wonder no matter what he’s in Hell for. And as for classical, I favored the stormy Romantics, but also the dreamy impressionists and the most angelic melodic feats of baroque. And jazz, which is crucially not classical but also not a different thing, music just the same.

So that’s basically the deal. I knew I was weird, and knew that weirdness had a certain flavor to it, and the why was not the point — the identification was. The other side of the argument that some art is objectively good or bad is, indeed, the flavor question. I really like coconut; some despise it; neither is wrong, but both takes are individually important. I found my tastes echoed, in a strange way I no longer completely stand by — self-improvement and all — in prissy weirdos like, well, Genesis or King Crimson or ELO or Queen or Supertramp or Sparks or 10cc or Gentle Giant or Be-Bop Deluxe or Roxy Music. And Here Come the Warm Jets, a touchstone that among all great albums speaks better to my peculiar favorite flavor of idiosyncrasy than any other. It is, after all, the thrills beneath the frills I’m in it for: the rebellious, self-delighted strangeness.

But all of these bands hold a different piece of the stylistic elephantiasis. So we’ll go down the list, and I’ll tell you how I relate to them all, and then we can wrap up here.

5.

I didn’t actually find my way to Genesis as a youngster. But I loved the first three Peter Gabriel albums. Gabriel has his own limitations, which I didn’t notice — I was told I was smart since childhood, as you might’ve picked up on, but really wasn’t until about the same time I discovered hair product, a tragic 26, and I’ve been an idiot as recently as yesterday. Peter is also not super smart, and while the lyrics betray this, they aren’t the point on records that compellingly challenged prevailing sonic trends. He lost his verve around LP 4, but I still prefer Security to any Genesis LP. Though lovable blokes, Genesis was commandeered by boys who gave off a sense that they never left private school — stuffy yet jejune. My brand of nerdy is not that strong; the line “erogenous zones, I love you, without you what would a poor boy do?” makes me wince. But their singers were defiant and a little sexy, at least in context, with Phil a classic pop fluke.

Of all these groups, Genesis is my least favorite. Yet Gabriel really meant something to me, especially in that brief spell of my life when multitrack recording was my favorite pastime. In his inquisitiveness if not intelligence, his talent for atmosphere-building if not writing, he was my #1 fave for a minute — and in the ‘70s, a refreshing avatar for a distressing subgenre. I can never know how jazzed or bored by The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway, which I’ve never been all the way through, I’d have been if I’d heard it when I was twelve. I might have liked the sweet melody and stiff upper lip of “Time Table”, plus Pete’s costumes (theatre kids 4 life). But “Supper’s Ready” is the best prog track in excess of nine minutes ever recorded: gorgeous, hilarious, dynamic, dramatic, moving, gripping, ridiculous, dead serious and still convincing, high art and kitsch at once. My late buddy, who loved the Carpenters, knew prog was bullshit. But he loved that track.

My choice prog band was always King Crimson. But my gateway was of course In the Court of the Crimson King, a record every 11-year-old should hear, which depends a lot on future Foreigner Ian McDonald’s conventionally sweet contributions. It’s true that KC’s original lyricist (and, um, lighting designer) Pete Sinfield more or less epitomizes everything wrongheaded about the genre, down to his sexism — which hey, maybe he learned from Paul Kantner. It’s also true that, even if you can imagine him personally clearing any room even if it’s the room he’s playing D&D in, Robert Fripp is a sharper mind and ten fingers than many of his peers. He knew by ‘71 that Sinfield was full of shit; he knew by ‘74 that the style he basically started was played out, cutting the most badass prog album of all before moving to Hell’s Kitchen and diving into new waves. Roger Dean covers may be cool kitsch, but King Crimson covers are museum kitsch.

Still, Crimson couldn’t sell me on prog. At their worst, they boast all the blemishes of a subgenre which trades in tiresome complications without compensating with qualities like cogency or wit. But they were the keenest attempt within the style to show that its pretensions, as Robert Christgau wrote, “could be earned”. Rather than insisting they were conjuring magic at you, the starship at full throttle, Crimson used subtlety and fearsome mystery to actually draw you into a dreamlike different world. Their close association with Roxy Music, via E’G Management, makes a lot of sense: neither band is fooling you or itself (mostly). There are echoes of my surreal self in their vibe. But prog isn’t my answer; it’s asking a self-ordained guru for the meaning of life, illusory as drugs. Ergo, the dotty, knotty Gentle Giant, whose vocalists are possibly the worst I’ve ever heard, do little for me, bar bursts of Canterburian humor and bizarre pizazz*.

The cream of Rockwell’s list are the bands who circumvented prog’s requirements and pitfalls, which were often the same thing — groups open to expanding popforms and scaling down the hifalutin. Between Sparks, 10cc, and Queen, in mid-’70s UK, Queen seemed like the least likely to be taken seriously, as derivative as Mud but not yet the champion singles band they’d turn out to be. Now, Queen belongs to everybody, their bad Hollywood biopic on the books. But you really can’t understate the effect Freddie Mercury has on young queer kids everywhere, boys especially — unlike Bowie, he lost neither the glam slam nor his voice. When I was looking for that raw dose of fop and getting stuck in the art rock slop, “Killer Queen” was what I was after. They wouldn’t be so big if they weren’t open to vulgarity, and not even their best writer was a genius, but they rivaled ABBA for hooks and arrangements. Sheer Heart Attack is where it’s at.

Talking of the fop of it all, the anachronistic dandy, one might think Sparks was made for me. In tandem, the two Maels (vocalist Russell and pianist/writer Ron, in case you haven’t seen the charming Edgar Wright movie) tried to render that in pop-rock paint. Russell’s way of singing remains naggingly affected and irretrievably airborne, leaping wide intervals in madcap gravity defiance, engineered by a brother for whom sibling sadism must play at least a part. They were never better than on Top of the Pops in ‘74, holding down both ends of a gamut I cherish, frigid deadpan to flamboyant abandon. Like any of these bands that survived, they shook it up a bit — at times to great effect. But at their worst they’re insufferable, turning a way of being that wakes me up into a nightmare. Their Muff Winwood LPs are full of great ideas and free of empty spaces. When Tony Visconti cleaned and spruced them up, they became instantly wretched.

What would’ve happened if, instead of Winwood (brother of Stevie and ex-Spencer Davis Groupie), whose best production instincts weren’t about technical skill, they’d gone another way? Sparks’ first choice was Roy Wood, whose own tech sense wasn’t about cleanliness and separation, but whose genius was at one point (then) a thing to behold. If one figure in this entire diaspora embodies the thing I’m trying to convey, it’s Wood. No artist in post-Beatles British pop was nearer to a freak hybrid of John and Paul. A deeply awkward man in person, on stage and in business, Wood had the terrorizing, lunatic force of Lennon, the intuitional musical fluency of McCartney, and a voice like something more otherworldly, a banshee-wail blade that at peak rev is for me the most captivating noise I’ve ever heard. He really was qualified to pick up where “I Am the Walrus” left off; all his LPs until his ‘76 flameout glimmer with wild ideas.

Jeff Lynne, a plucky tryhard from thirsty Beatle imitators the Idle Race, was at one point Wood’s ideal candidate for a second-in-command. They dicked out not one but two contractual obligation albums for Wood’s band the Move, one of them excellent, while spending years overdubbing themselves into their dream group, Electric Light Orchestra. I would recap the story here if it wasn’t one I’ve longed to write, and will in this space. But suffice it to say, somewhere along the line, Wood lost his nerve and the showdown. It doesn’t sound like he had a talent for democracy, but he needed a friend who could meet him halfway, and after Lynne, he never found one. The novelties and indulgences of Wizzard were a dead end, and while Lynne wasn’t his rival as a writer, he learned how to produce, and eventually to write fabulous singles whose cherry on top was always those strings — which begged to be played as hard as Wood would.

10cc are once more a different beast in the same genus. All gifted writers and players, they were at one point to Queen what Elliott Murphy was to Bruce Springsteen — and as with Murphy, it’s not not their fault that the more sincere contender prevailed. But when these four pop-machine veterans first converged at the studio (Strawberry) they conveniently owned, turning out bubblegum nuggets and backing up Neil Sedaka, the dream was still to be the next Beatles; in 1972 that was an open call, as it was for the New Dylans. For a hot minute, they were such a sublime singles band — an apex of four-person interplay, a marvel between headphones — they might’ve made it, even though it was a far more spiritually deficient time. The surfaces on 10cc LPs are spit-shined, the abundant humor stone-faced and mordant. Their downfall was in their obsessive preference for technical perfection, and a collective fear of the open heart.

Of course, their most famous and successful song, released just as they were splitting apart (“The Things We Do For Love” is a mere 5cc), was their sincerest and simplest: “I’m Not in Love”, a production miracle that testifies to their talents for collaboration and innovation. Too few of these bands let the emotional air in, and even less seemed interested in writing about the kinds of interpersonal interactions life itself turns on and opens up over — the subjects the Beatles (and, in fact, most pop acts) built their empire on. Groupies aside, the likelihood is that few of these folks were any better at enticing people into relationships than they looked or sounded. Moreover, they were all on their way out by the time they were in; by ‘75 the entire early 70s were seen as a kind of failed experiment. When I time travel, I find the sadness inescapable. None of these band saw 1980 coming, or entered it the same thing they were when they began.

Even 1975 was an inflection point for all of them. Gabriel left Genesis in 1974, giving way to the Phil Collins era that wouldn’t properly break pop for at least half a decade. Crimson and Roxy folded in ‘75, to return refurbished after long gaps. ELO figured it out, after five albums waterlogged by bullshit, around 1976, though ‘75 saw the “Evil Woman” breakthrough (ugh, but also, turn it up!). Queen broke pop in ‘75, and were a juggernaut by 1980’s The Game. 10cc split in two in ‘76; Sparks were a novelty band for good by then. Gentle Giant flirted with pop† before fizzling out — no true “prog” band survived the decade change. And right at that decade midpoint, Be Bop Deluxe sprung up — at first a lyrical, lordly glam band, then a pop band built from prog material. Bill Nelson played guitar too well to write off, and his singles were surefire too: “Maid in Heaven” (wakachckawakachcka), “Ships in the Night”, “Forbidden Lovers”, and so on.

What you heard in Be Bop, regardless of how alien or nerdy or prim or standoffish or straight-up pretentious the vocal presence Nelson concocted was, was a beating heart; a human who cared about others, enough to think about how to communicate. For too many of these bands, fitful musical brilliance was undercut by some form of stupidity — change that line, reorient that worldview, undo that knot! I crowed at the top about the beauties of childhood self-discovery, but really, the obligation to learn how to live with other people can only truly be tackled thereafter; in fact, that’s where the actual becoming a person occurs. That in a moment when rock stars were the god-kings of the world and anyone (white and male) could be one, self-reflection was at a low and arrested development at a high, well, that figures. That the Beatles set precedents that made it a long open season for fey weirdos after contracts was only so revolutionary.

*and this song
†and punk!

6.

Let’s steal a glance at the only one of these ten bands who wasn’t its own worst enemy. Not only critics can tell the difference between art that’s insisting how great it is and art that’s proving it. Eschewing the self-serving spectacles of Bowie and Bolan, Bryan Ferry’s project was worthy of the degree that got him that art teacher gig — worthy of what that degree symbolized, even. The manner in which Roxy refashioned pop music in their homeland, even more than the groundbreaking new pop (or post-disco) moves of their last three albums, is indescribably visionary and rewarding. There we have it, words failing me, but this was a truly adult and objective victory. The oblique poetry rewarded concentration. The music reconstituted and modernized old forms with the audacity of punk and the grace of the best Motown. And Ferry actually knew how to approach women, though he was only ever manic or depressive about the end results.

A genuinely peerless band, Roxy is a strange case on the sincerity-irony spectrum. In image and pose, Ferry traded in distance, and his band’s irony levels would be lethal in normal people. But although he rarely bared his soul like on The Bride Stripped Bare, it was always evident that he honestly did believe in love. The fond resignation of “Just Another High” and the unslayable tenderness of “Sentimental Fool”, not to mention the this-is-real cynic’s surrender of “Love is the Drug”, are presaged by the ecstasy of “Street Life” and “The Thrill of It All”, the exaggerated sweetness of “Just Like You”, the actually-it’s-all-gold of “Mother of Pearl” and “A Really Good Time” and “Prairie Rose”. Yet something in Ferry’s concept of cool forbade total vulnerability — it had to be calculated. It’s not a far way down, or sideways, to being a kind of lounge cartoon with shitty politics and flawless hair. Ferry lost his fangs in someone’s neck long ago.

It’s obviously significant that Ferry didn’t really come into his own until he’d crowded out the only other personality in Roxy strong enough to threaten his. In so many ways, Eno was everything Ferry wasn’t — chaotic rather than controlled, genderfluid rather than male matinee idol, balding rather than the follicular gold standard. Yet Eno was equally a genius, in an equally sui generis way — and though some of his quotes from the time are beyond the pale, equally skillful at the art of seduction. BF wouldn’t have it, as the legend goes. While the difference in pre- and post-Eno Roxy LPs is minimal if crucial, the difference in the solo albums is seismic. Ferry sets to refining conventions, infusing them with his own weird energy, the weirdness reliably in disguise. But Eno ensures every sound you hear has never been heard before; he makes new forms, and fills them with a weirdness that’s reliably, er, bald (up until he gave in to Lanois. Or…).

Like his old partner, Eno is something of an easy listening icon now, if you’re viewing it unfairly — the most abundant result of his inventing “ambient music” is new age garbage. Something quickly scared him away from how much he was putting himself out there on Here Come the Warm Jets and Taking Tiger Mountain (By Strategy) — with not one provably personal lyric between the two of them, you still feel in the presence of someone a hell of a lot less guarded than Ferry. But that mad wizard is the one, of all these arty boys, at whose feet I bow as I visit this strange historical juncture. There is something in the kaleidoscope of willfully livewire ideas in those two albums that for me hits like a cosmic epiphany. The second I heard that bleat of a voice doubled and fighting through a wall of guitars on “Needles in the Camel’s Eye”, its melody the only non-ugly thing about it, something in my teenage soul said YES, and never stopped.

This has to do with one of many riddles littered through Here Come the Warm Jets, this one in the title. The music is gorgeous and audacious as only modern art rocknroll can be. But it’s also taking the piss — not the ambiguous reverence of Ferry’s scare-quoted “These Foolish Things”, but an urge to disrupt, a sense you have to sign up for a vaguely psychotic idea of a good time. Of all the principles/values/whatever I’ve discovered in myself over time, that’s the one I cherish the most: that even the most arbitrary burst of rebelliousness is life-affirming, and when you channel it into art you kill the chance of really hurting someone with it. Respect nature, but fuck with every barrier nature never put up for us. Rocknroll doesn’t have to sound like Elvis, or even Little Richard, to set your soul on fire. Some of us need it even stranger than “Blue Moon”, even more androgynous than “Oooh! My Soul” — less human than any of that to really feel alive.

Don’t get me wrong — I’m not advocating for cold and alienated. Like I said, it’s how on display Eno sounds that really turns me on. But those sounds are all his; all Eno. And he’s a riot! That’s the thing about this pretentious bitch. I don’t prefer it sincere.

But when I do…

7.

You may have noticed that the one band of the ten I haven’t mentioned yet is the one responsible for the image up top (well OK, that’s artist Paul Wakefield, but you know what I mean). In fact, that’s the band — the album — that I came here to write about. Supertramp’s Rick Davies, one of their two lead songwriters from its inception, died earlier this month. Everybody from that time in pop is dying now, because everybody from that time in pop is pushing or past eighty. I always preferred Roger Hodgson — as I described it on All-Music Guide’s kingpin Tom Erlewine’s FB page, “the yelpy guy” to Davies’ “growly guy”. But Davies was unique among proggers in his fondness for jazz and blues. And though the famous rift between he and his partner — one more pop music love story — came from his stodgy refusal to try LSD, his songs had more liveliness, and a touch of humor rare in the milieu even as silliness is in abundance.

Supertramp were put together by a millionaire, hoping to hop on 1970’s progressive bandwagon. The first two albums are middling prog and middling prog with doses of blues and pop, respectively. The millionaire withdrew, but Supertramp were ready to meet their moment. After a three-year silence, Crime of the Century appeared on A&M, masterminded by Bowie producer Ken Scott, who knew exactly how to record string- laden, cabaret-tinged art pop. The songs are evenly divided between the two writers, their lyrics color-coded to account for moments one cameos on the other’s number. Hodgson was a consummate hippie guitarist, but Davies’ keyboards were the band’s signature; his riffs on piano, organ and whatever kind of electric piano are highlights. Yet Hodgson, who sounded like Geddy Lee with no training but overstimulated with constant glee (or mid-cry, it was the same sound), had a gift for the fantastic chorus.

They released a good greatest hits’ worth of solid tracks over four LPs. The last, 1979’s Breakfast in America (you’ve seen the cover and heard at least half its hits), was — haha — the 5th best selling album in the titular country for its year of release. Those songs are their most vivacious: Davies’ “Goodbye Stranger”, Hodgson’s batshit “The Logical Song”. But though the 1975 and 1977 albums have their share of great sleepers (“Ain’t Nobody But Me”, “Babaji”) and bullshit, the crown jewel is Crime. It’s also straightest — though the overall concept is no clearer than “life is dark and difficult, with laughs and wonder woven in (but not much)”, there’s a suggestion of concept in its symphonic comportment, its casual grandiosity. It begins by making grade school sound like life or death — they’re British, after all, and it does suck — and ends with its title track, an alluring doomy mystery, the crime unspecified but the criminal fingered: you and me.

This is heavy stuff, but like so much art rock, it’s also meaningless. Roxy Music say a great deal more about the human condition in their evasive, synthetic music, in part because they sound a lot more like they leave the house. But Crime’s bag is perfect for a moody kid: one just on the cusp of puberty’s beating, who has a wild load of feelings but no idea where to put them. I’ll never forget that morning, waking up to “School” — I’d played my Classics, Vol. 9 CD so much I could tell that it was them, but the song was unfamiliar — and making my way to the boom box at the other end of my room, the source of so many profound childhood experiences*, unfolding the shrunk-down CD booklet like it was Christmas morning. I was so excited to play it I forgot for a second that it was Friday, and I actually had to go to school. It became my favorite album for years. And after all this, I’m still not super sure I could properly explain to you why.

But I can feel around it, like the disembodied hands gripping those bars in hope and defeat (you can see both somehow). Supertramp was sincere, but they were also silly; they were prog, but they were also pop. Something about how they manage to bridge these things hit a prepubescent sweet spot. But. When you’re a moody kid, everything is elevated to peak drama. And side A of Crime has two six-minute climaxes — one by each principal, back to back, and as perfect a complement as Davies’ flippant, groovy “Bloody Well Right” is to Hodgson’s “School”, whose outsized agony it wipes away.

“Hide in Your Shell” and “Asylum”. Pocket extravaganzas about the top two struggles for moody kids: “I have a crush on you” and “I might be insane”, respectively. They’re gorgeous — unwittingly silly, deadly serious, and absolutely gorgeous. After years of knowing better, they still hit me, if I turn them up and let them pull me back in time.

I spent a lot of time as a kid, I confess, lying in bed and yearning. I was a world-class piner. That was my method, and it took a while to understand why it was bullshit. I think I did take a kind of solace in disconsolate feelings. Maybe I liked the intensity, maybe they made me feel heroic or tragic, maybe I was actually thrilling to the glow on the other side of the inflated conflict. Maybe self-pity was my original addiction. Or maybe I do, in fact, have a mood disorder that makes me melancholy as a default, and it’s better (well) to treat it like art than like a disease. “Hide in Your Shell” didn’t catch me on Classics. It felt a little meandering, which it sort of is. Then one night I noticed the eerie whistle of that saw — yes, that’s a saw, played by some guy off the street, so they say — and the whole song opened up for me. That sole sound was my gateway to an epic, in which a girl not liking Roger back is the most cinematic thing in the world.

I, as a boy, I believed the saying ‘the cure for pain was [sic] love’
how would it be, if you could see the world through my eyes?

He spends the verses pleading, his concern so heightened and urgent you’re not sure if this girl really is in danger, some other danger than not being in love with him. Several lines aren’t just obtuse but nonsensical: “what do you need? A secondhand movie star to tend you?” But the sweet chorus — hitting you like a surge of relief, a storm after a drought — is all benevolent care: “so let me show you the nearest signpost, to get your heart back and on the road… if I can help you, just let me know.” We all know the beta sadboys who fancy themselves saviors and miss that they’re nuisances. But this is just a song, and Roger has been married (I assume) for decades. After the low simmer of a pressure-building interlude, the final surge is a monsoon, a doo-wop opera, with the band’s secret weapon, John Anthony Helliwell’s sax, an angel on Roger’s shoulder. “So what’s [sic?] she gonna take him to? So what’s she gonna make him do? So what’s he gonna… so what’s he gonna… so what’s he gonna do?” the Greek chorus wonders. This affair is a movie, one-sided or not. It fades out before you get to find out if the curse is lifted.

And shall I paint “Asylum” for you, or shall you play it? It’s bombastic, it goes on, it’s so serious it’s comic. It yearns like crazy, its “not quite right” feeling so metastasized it’s a threat to everything Rick knows. It’s madness rendered far more humanely and less portentously than Dark Side of the Moon. Once again, an all-stops coda is the prize, boiling over with bleak loneliness, a heart-exploding spectacle. My late friend knew all about it. Meanwhile, Davies sells every line, flashing corners of a strange and moving pain too few prog singers were deep or intuitive enough to know how to mine, or even evoke. Which isn’t to suggest that it isn’t, as with so much of this pop, fully accidental.

I asked for so much of your time here because I love that record, especially those two songs, so much. I just didn’t know if I could explain to you why this time. And it’s not that I feel my childhood slipping away — I don’t miss the ignorance + wouldn’t trade the experiences — as that I feel it linger, and still don’t know precisely what sense to make of it. Criticism schmiticism, communication schmommunication. Maybe the consolation is, whatever it is, we can both experience it as long as we’re both around. And as long as I’m around, there’s nowhere I’d rather be living than in my eclecticity.

*thanks Dad