The Who, Jethro Tull, King Crimson & Rick Wakeman – The History Of Punk
The Who
Rock operas….f***ing hell the term is enough to give me the shivers. And what did The Who give us? Tommy! Without doubt the most singularly pernicious and damaging influence on the shape and future direction of pop since Sgt Pepper. Tommy was the final betrayal of the three minute single. After Tommy no one wanted to say in 3 minutes what they could drag out over as many hours.
What makes it worse is The Who in their early days were fucking awe-inspiring proto-punk mod guitar-smashing hooligan force of nature and then it all went wrong after The Who Sell Out.
Tommy introduced the era of the rock opera and the concept album, the most celebrated vehicle of prog rocks demented pretensions. Fuelled by vaguely visionary ideals, Townsend shared the Beatles’ craving for artistic legitimacy and wanted to bring pop to some sort of maturity. He has forgotten of course that pop should always be young.
At the same time as espousing this maturity he and the band acted like juvenile pricks on tour and when his own life hit the rocks mister maturity armed with evangelical zeal tuned to a needle and drink. Wow some hero! So with Tommy The Who sacrificed the incendiary dynamics of My Generation and I Can See For Miles. Townsend conscientious but intellectually gullible didn’t anticipate the demon spawn from his tale of a deaf dumb blind boy but that doesn’t excuse him. In fact when you consider the legacy of Tommy that glut of rock operas and concept albums that deluged the early amid mid-seventies, the atrocities foisted upon us by Jethro Tull, Yes, Genesis, War Of The Worlds and even up to those bores in disguise Radiohead… Townsend should have been lynched. A travesty of a legend.
Jethro Tull
Even the most hardened nostalgic will wince at memories of Jethro Tull. They started out as a blues group but quickly developed a taste for the theatrical and portentous at which point the group’s megalomaniac leader Ian Anderson started dressing up in riding breeches, hair like catweazle, sporting cod pieces standing on one leg while puffing into a flute and conducting the group through the hard labors of ever-increasing concept albums and pieces like Thick As A Brick, Aqualung, The Story of A Hare Who Lost His Spectacles and Passion Play. What these were all about was anyone’s guess. A mystery to me.
Rick Wakeman
Genesis had Phil Collins. Yes had Rick ( with a silent capital ‘P’) Wakeman. Rick couldn’t tread a book without wanting to turn it into a musical. Not content with the cosmic indignities heaped on man by Yes, he embarked on a series of solo projects whose tastelessness and stupidity have since become legendary.
The most outlandish presentation in a career that specialized in the comprehensively stupid as “Myths and legends of King Arthur and The Knights Of The Round Table“, an elaborate piece of crass symphonic absurdity written originally for rock group and orchestra.
Rick had the bright idea of staging this at Wembley and as an Ice spectacular. I think it will be very tasteful Rick told the MM
“We’ve had a complete castle built with with turrets…and ice ballet can be so beautiful, I think. There are so many different time changes that even s single skater on the ice will enhance the music with out being outrageous”
What a load of bollocks !
King Crimson
We can only suppose that it was Robert Fripp used to sit on a stool and refused to indulge in the usual guitar histrionics while the rest of the group always looked vaguely like students at the local polytechnic that the Ghastly King Crimson managed for so long to be thought academically respectable. Their admirers would never concede that the lyrics were ranked among the most preposterous of prog rock poeticisms or that Fripps conceptual blatherings were as vacuously daft as anything muttered by Jon Anderson or Peter Gabriel.
Fripp seemed to induce an unwarranted awe among his critics. Listen to this piece of bilge
“…listening to an early test pressing round Bob Fripps flat the other day it was impossible not to be awed by the sheer scope and size of the music. It has scale and grandeur unparalleled in rock, and its inner complexities rival those of the great classical composers. You get the feeling that if Wagner were alive today he would be working with King Crimson.”
What a load of tosh! However he did see the light and was responsible for that extraordinary guitar playing on Bowie’s Heroes.
He also married Toyah and to prove that old age mellows the pompous his interesting lockdown renditions of songs with Toyah were certainly interesting to say the least!
That’s it! – you probably need a little lie down now!
TalkPunk
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