Book 25 - David Weigel "The Show That Never Ends: The Rise and Fall of Prog Rock"

David Weigel "The Show That Never Ends: The Rise and Fall of Prog Rock" (W.W Norton & Co.)



This book is simultaneously filled with too much detail and not enough. Long descriptions of the time signatures of individual songs, while whole albums are mentioned in a single sentence. As others have noted, many bands given short mentions. The book is really about the overlapping history of 4 bands: Yes, Genesis, King Crimson and Emerson, Lake and Palmer. Granted these were the most popular of the prog bands but long-lived groups like Procol Harum and Moody Blues deserved more mention.

Where prog rock came from, its decline and what it left behind are the subject of David Weigel's The Show That Never Ends: The Rise and Fall of Prog Rock. As Weigel notes, The Rock Snob's Dictionary describes prog rock as "the single most deplored genre of postwar pop." And it was only in 1984 when This is Spinal Tap, a peerless send-up of "prog rock" and some of the metal bands it influenced, was released. The book, the title of which comes from a 1973 Emerson Lake and Palmer album, is a thoroughly researched and entertaining look at the genre. Yet the nature and history of prog rock is such as to create difficulty for any writer and, as a result, The Show That Never Ends stumbles with a couple of unavoidable hurdles.

One confounding factor is the seemingly continuous changes in band personnel. Take drummer Bill Bruford, for example. In addition to forming two bands of his own, he was with Yes for its first five albums (1968-72) and part of a reconstituted Yes in 1991-92, part of two different incarnations of King Crimson (1972-74, 1981-84), the drummer for Genesis on its 1976 tour, and part of a band with three other original members of Yes in 1989. Or consider King Crimson. While its 1969 In the Court of the Crimson King is generally viewed as one of prog rock's best albums, it came and went for decades with 21 different musicians in its various formations.

Despite that, Weigel, a national political correspondent for The Washington Post, seems at his best in delving into the origins and early development of prog rock, following a handful of its preeminent artists and showing the music it spawned. It also reflects the heavily British source of musicians.

The biggest challenge in examining prog-rock is the music itself. The musicians not only aimed at creating complex music with unusual time signatures they sought new sounds, largely through the use of synthesizers and polyphonic keyboards. Yes even bought Slinkys, put microphones on them, and threw them downstairs. "If you put a lot of reverb on it, it sounds great," said Yes guitarist Steve Howe. Moreover, Weigel notes, many lyrics "had as much or as little meaning as the listener wanted from them."

The reasons for the precipitous decline of prog rock are harder to define than the factors that gave rise to it. Declining record sales and Changes in the music industry led to labels dumping progressive rock bands. Yet listeners also abandoned the genre in droves, perhaps in response to the music's complexity. Or perhaps it is just as simple as the fact the bands and the music tended toward bombast, pretension, and self-indulgence. I know that was what pushed me away. Still, Weigel makes a good case for prog rock's role in shaping rock music and what would come.