Prog Rock '72: Seven Mind-Blowing Albums from The Dalenberg Library

Prog Rock = Progressive Rock = a musical aberration from the 1970’s that is either loved or despised.  What was it? Prog rock is simply a musical style that is what it is when you point at it and call it prog.  It’s that sort of thing.  You can’t define it, but you know it when you hear it.  There a few defining characteristics.  First, you usually can’t dance to it.  Second, there might be a symphony, but if there isn’t, there is still a sense of symphonic pomposity.  Third, there usually aren’t hit songs, but there might be.  Fourth, be prepared for gnarly, prolonged guitar or keyboard solos, and failing that, there will at least be jaw-dropping displays of musical virtuosity.   Fifth, grandiose literary (or quasi-literary) lyrics are a lot more common than love ballads.  Sixth, it is more likely to be a studio-based album (often with lots of production and special effects) than live concert material, although many prog bands were also awesome in concert.  And seventh, it’s usually not rock’n’roll, but instead it’s rock’n’something-else, often a rock-classical hydrid or rock-jazz hydrid, but always rock plus something else.  

Prog grew out of late 60’s rock.  The studio-based experimentations of The Beach Boys’ “Pet Sounds” and The Beatles’ “Sergeant Pepper” are often cited.  I personally think Moody Blues’ “Days of Future Passed” is a prototype.  Frank Zappa gets mentioned.  There is a heavy dose of mostly-British psychedelia in its origins.  Somebody said it all started with Chuck Berry singing “Roll Over Beethoven,” but that’s stupid.  That song was all about how rock’n’roll was banishing classical music.  Rather, prog was all about how rock was inviting classical music to join back in the game. 

Conventional wisdom is that prog died with the advent of punk rock in the late 1970’s.  Fact is, it never really went away. But its greatest flowering was from about 1969-1975.  The critics never really completely embraced it.  It took a lot of lumps for being bloated, pretentious, and nerdy.  But a lot of that is what makes it so wonderful to revisit today. 

A few hit songs are still in everybody’s repertoire of downloads that are reminiscent of the prog era.  Some late prog entries from Styx and the band Kansas.  Some Electric Light Orchestra.  A little Pink Floyd.  And of course, Queen’s “Bohemian Rhapsody,” which is totally prog.  But prog was at its greatest in entire albums (especially concept albums), not just individual songs.

Here are 7 important albums from the Dalenberg Library collection which exemplify progressive rock at its peak in 1972. 

Yes.  Close to the Edge. 

Guitar, bass, drum, and keyboard pyrotechnics from Bruford, Howe, Squire, and Wakeman, with Jon Anderson’s signature rock soprano occasionally warbling over the top of it all.  Word of warning: Whatever you do, don’t read the lyrics.  There is an occasional clever nugget like “A dewdrop can exalt us like the music of the sun,” but mostly bad junior high poetry is to be had here, with meanings mostly undiscoverable.  The awesome music elevates the words and creates the illusion that they are profound.  There is a moment when the whole affair expands into a pipe organ interlude and then morphs back into a rock beat.  Such moments transport you.  Rick Wakeman’s pipe organ is from the Church of Prog.  Mind-blowing. 

Gentle Giant.  Octopus.

Almost forgotten today, this is the band that (for me) most plumbs the soul of the prog movement.  Gentle Giant made every effort to fuse rock’n’roll with a kind of quasi-medieval minstrelsy. Some of their experiments are top-heavy with oh-so-seriousness, but they are endlessly fascinating nonetheless.  Octopus is arguably their masterpiece.  At 34 minutes, it does not wear out its welcome.  Gentle Giant draws effortlessly on classical and jazz fusion. While the tracks may not exactly be constructed on the principles of counterpoint and polyphony, they give that illusion.  And when the Giant drops all the classical pretenses and does a straight-ahead rocker like “A Cry for Everyone,” lo and behold!, it’s based on concepts from Albert Camus. 

Emerson, Lake & Palmer.  Trilogy. 

The closest thing to a “pop” prog band on this list, ELP is a strange mix of really great music and musicality with really embarrassing awfulness.  Trilogy is kind of like a rock’n’roll pops concert, replete with a reworking of Aaron Copland’s ballet “Rodeo” and Maurice Ravel’s “Bolero.”  When ELP turns off the prog bombast, you get by far the best track on this album, a song called “Living Sin” that was not a hit and which nobody remembers, but which has a wonderfully infectious groove.  That one track demonstrates what a great band ELP could have been if they hadn’t gotten stuck on trying to be progressive.  Most of this album is nauseatingly overblown, from the ooh-so-profound title “The Endless Enigma” to titling a track “Fugue” when it isn’t even a fugue. (I guess they just wanted you to know that they knew the word “fugue.”)  ELP eventually collapsed under the weight of their exaggerated self-importance when they started putting out double albums that took up entire sides with mediocre piano concertos and whatnot.  

Genesis.  Foxtrot. 

Peter Gabriel was the best thing about Genesis in 1972 (Phil Collins was still behind the drum kit). But we had to wait almost another decade before Gabriel was in full flower as an elder statesman of the New Wave, fulfilling a similar role as David Bowie, both veterans of the 1970’s leading the charge as art rockers of the 1980’s.  I keep on trying to mine the Peter Gabriel years with Genesis for some undiscovered gem that prefigures the great genius he was to become, but it just isn’t there. Foxtrot is an absolute mess.   The highlight is a garbled, undecipherable 23-minute epic called “Supper’s Ready” that takes up most of Side 2.  This is the sort of thing Ian Anderson was parodying in Thick as a Brick.  But Anderson did it so well, his parody became the template. 

Renaissance.  Prologue.

Shot through with a thread of Romantic era piano and Annie Haslam’s Joan-Baez-on-Steroids vocals,  grand without being grandiose, full of pomp without being pompous, Renaissance is at the symphonic rock end of the prog spectrum.  Prologue is, quite simply, beautiful music.  It’s too short.  Put it on repeat. 

Jethro Tull.  Thick as a Brick. 

Ostensibly intended as a parody of concept albums, Ian Anderson’s album-length rock cantata is now remembered as one of the greatest of all concept albums. It so epitomizes the form that it is difficult to understand these days how it ever could have been conceived as a parody.  Unlike some other albums on this list, you can actually follow the story, the lyrics make sense (and are even good), and the sense of the sublime in this music is genuine, rather than just offering up the bells and whistles with no underlying substance that you get from the Yes and Genesis efforts.   “Thick as a Brick” is the rock’n’roll equivalent of “Death of a Salesman” on the stage, a story about a rise and fall, about disappointment in the middle years, about the arc of life. 

Can. Ege Bamyasi. 

Most prog rock was symphonic prog or jazz fusion prog.  But Can was progressive in an entirely different way.  In much the same way that Karlheinz Stockhausen and John Cage were pushing classical music to the extremes of experimentalism, Can set out to do the same thing with a rock band.  The way they did it was to do a kind of group improvisation that was somewhat akin to free jazz, although you might call it “free rock,” and then distill the recording into a finished track in the editing room.  While the music is decidedly weird, it is more accessible than you might think (at times.)  Interestingly, while Can at first inspection would seem to represent the ultimate devolution of rock music into experimentation, Can was also incubating a lot that came after, such as ambient music, electronica, and world music. 

From a vantage point of 44 years later, distilling my above reviews into a conclusion about the prog rock scene of 1972, there are three albums worth wearing out on the turntable:  the Tull, the Gentle Giant, and the Renaissance.  A nod to Yes, because the music is like “WOW!” (but don’t read the lyrics.)  ELP has not aged well.  The Genesis is forgettable.  And the Can is for historical interest only. 

Flies on a Wall: Two Kennedy Documentaries by Robert Drew & Associates

The pioneers of Direct Cinema are about gone.  D. A. Pennebaker hangs on at 91 years of age, looking remarkably spry.  But Robert Drew, Albert Maysles, and Richard Leacock have all passed on.  There was a time in the early 1960’s when these men, along with a stable of others known as Robert Drew & Associates, were at the cutting edge of a new kind of documentary film-making, Direct Cinema, an American version of cinéma vérité, which purported to show people and events as they were, as if the camera were not present, as it the camera were a “fly on the wall.”  This movement preserved two remarkable films about John (and Robert) Kennedy, Primary (1960) and Crisis: Behind a Presidential Commitment (1963). 

The language of Direct Cinema is something that we all take for granted today.  To fully appreciate how different it was from what came before, one must go back to old movie newsreels and compare.  The old newsreels have an often propagandistic voice-over narrative, bombastic music, and a sense of everything being directed and choreographed.  Direct Cinema purports to show things as they are without the camera crew intervening in events, minimal (if any) voice-over narration focusing on the facts without editorialization, and usually ambient sound.  One can debate how effectively the main players can ignore the camera, but Robert Drew maintained in his interviews that he was able to achieve that.  Drew talks about JFK being comfortably unaware of the camera until the conversation drifted to sensitive topics and his staffers having to remind him to send the cameras out of the room for a spell.  Drew’s goal was to have the principle players in the events he was recording tell their own stories by their own unscripted words and actions. 

Primary (1960) follows John F. Kennedy and his opponent Hubert Humphrey during several days leading up to the Wisconsin Democratic primary election of 1960.  The film is not very interested in fleshing out the politics of each candidate and their differences.  Instead, the film is about the day-to-day mechanics of one stage in the long slog to the White House.  Even though Kennedy won the primary election in Wisconsin, the film portrays the result as a draw which was less than a decisive victory for either candidate.  The message is just to witness the chronicle of how two men go hard at work to get votes. Some of the shots in this film are iconic, and have been widely imitated by other films, both fictional and non-fictional, in the years since. 

Crisis (1963) is arguably the greater of the two films, but it raises more questions than it answers about the validity of the “fly on the wall” philosophy behind Direct Cinema. You have to ask how much the editing becomes the film-maker’s way of injecting himself into the reportage.  Crisis chronicles the “stand-off at the schoolhouse door,” when Governor George Wallace of Alabama defied the federal court order demanding him to allow two black students to matriculate at the University of Alabama.  While you sense that the film-makers are trying very hard to remain objective, Wallace clearly comes off as the villain and John & Robert Kennedy are the good guys.  Perhaps that impression only comes about because Wallace really was the villain, and so his own portrayal of himself leads the viewer to that conclusion.  On the other hand, maybe the editing has conned us into arriving at the conclusion that Wallace is the villain in the film.  It is a point worth debating. 

Early in the film, Robert Kennedy is enjoying breakfast at home surrounded by his children in an obviously loving family environment.  In stark contrast, George Wallace is seen in a vast, austere mansion clumsily trying to play with a child, as if he was just doing it for the camera, and then he shows off portraits of dead southern civil war heroes, which is even more off-putting to the audience.  Did they edit the film and play off those two scenes as foils to each other in order to highlight the warm Kennedy against the cold, harsh Wallace?  Or is that just the way those two men happened to be in reality, and the film-makers, totally objective, just captured that reality? 

Still, the film does maintain a certain objectivity about the events by letting each side tell its own story.  And, even though you know the outcome (the two black students were ultimately allowed to enroll), the film builds up a lot of suspense.  It is not what happens that really matters as you watch Crisis—instead, it is how it happens, and the way in which the characters involved get through what happens.  George Wallace turns the events into a last-ditch stand on states’ rights vs. the evil behemoth of federal tyranny, as if it were the last battle of the Civil War.  Listening to Wallace in this film, you get a capsule civics lesson in all the arguments that died with the Old South about states’ rights and “separate but equal” with regards to blacks and whites.  Robert Kennedy in this film is just trying to uphold the rule of law without starting a riot or a race war.  John Kennedy, the President, is portraying the crisis to the American people in a TV announcement as an issue of morality, harking back to Jefferson’s maxim that “all men are created equal.”  The two black kids are just trying to enroll in college, but they are keenly aware that they are pawns in a bigger battle.  The come off as heroic, rehearsing their roles on camera, rising to the challenge of all the weight that is being thrust on their shoulders.   

When Robert Drew and his colleagues decided to film the Kennedy White House in a crisis, they did not know it was going to be this particular crisis.  In interviews, Drew talked about several crises that they had to pass on, usually because they involved sensitive international events where this type of cinéma vérité (literally “cinema of truth”) might be too revealing of confidential information or even embarrassing to another country.  The Alabama crisis, being a domestic crisis, was therefore perfect for the film.  The way that they surround the crisis on all sides, with cameras on George Wallace, Robert Kennedy, Kennedy’s deputy secretary, the President, the two would-be college enrollees, is inspired. 

There is a sense of honesty that comes out of these films, despite our latter day analysis of how the camera may have influenced events, or how the editing may have helped shade the audience’s view of the players.  Frankly, I suspect that Drew & Associates did not intend to use the editing of the film to reflect poorly on Wallace. It just worked out that way, because Wallace was just on the wrong side of history, espousing an antiquated point of view (even in his day), so Wallace ended up looking bad on his own merits.  I truly believe that Drew & Associates were trying to deliver an objectively neutral piece of film.  Their interest in editing was more an interest in the art of documentary, patching seemingly unrelated “slice of life” moments on snippets of film into a coherent narrative.

Check out FilmStruck, the new streaming service from the Criterion Collection, and also the Criterion Channel, which just premiered this month.  The Kennedy Films from Robert Drew & Associates are available for streaming, plus a panel discussion paying homage to these great departed documentarians. 

The Drew & Associates Kennedy films are memorable for the many great, candid, live close-ups of these iconic historical figures from the early 1960's.

Primary and Crisis were both admitted to the American Film Registry of the Library of Congress in the early 1990’s, which should guarantee their preservation for future generations of Americans.  This is some of the best close-up footage available of JFK and RFK, and it is fascinating to watch them go about their daily but rather extraordinary lives. 

In Defense of Dylan's Nobel

And the 2016 Nobel Prize in Literature goes to. . . Bob Dylan!  What?!  Why not?!

No question that this was a controversial award.  There are many who have applauded it, but there are a vocal few who feel that giving this award to a white, American song-writer who has gained fame and fortune by setting his accessible, quotable lyrics to music has cheapened the Nobel. The most quoted tweet of dissent has come from Scottish novelist Irvine Welsh (author of “Trainspotting”), who wrote “this is an ill-conceived nostalgia award wrenched from the rancid prostates of senile, gibbering hippies.”  Unfortunately for Welsh, this one tweet may become the most famous thing he ever wrote, and he will live to regret it.  What people aren’t remembering is that the Nobel in Literature has always been fraught with controversy.  There has always been a rarefied elite-ness about the Nobel Prize, and when it has been given in the past to a populist author, it has usually been met with some kind of dissent or other.  It is as if you can only win the Nobel Prize if nobody reads your work, at least nobody looking for a good summer beach book. 

In my lifetime, I recall the controversy that tainted William Golding’s win in 1983.  Golding was chiefly remembered for “Lord of the Flies,” a book that most literate people encounter in junior high or high school.  While the Nobel is awarded for a lifetime body of work (unlike most literary awards), Golding’s Nobel was inevitably perceived as being awarded for “Lord of the Flies”--which some literary snobs considered to be a novel for juveniles--if only because it towered over all his other novels in terms of popularity and sales.  In a shocking breach of etiquette, Swedish Academy member and poet Artur Lundkvist declared that Golding was “a small British phenomenon of no importance” and that he was “decent but hardly in the Nobel class.”  Knowing that he had violated the code of secrecy about the Nobel voting process by publicly discussing the dissension over the choice of Golding, he clumsily tried to soften his stance by stating “I simply don’t consider Golding to possess the international weight needed to win the prize, but that doesn’t mean I am against him.  He is a good author.”  I tremble to think what Lundkvist (who died in 1991) would have had to say about Bob Dylan. 

The Nobel Prize was created upon the death of Swedish chemist Alfred Nobel, inventor of dynamite, in his last will and testament.  For the literary prize, he specified that it should be given to “the most outstanding work in an ideal direction.” The term “work” has been taken to mean the entire body of an author’s work as a whole, although sometimes the Swedish Academy mentions a particular work in their citation of the Nobel award.  The Swedish word idealisk has been given a shifting interpretation over the years by the Academy.  In the early years, the idealism that was awarded had more to do with literary style, so that grittily realistic authors (such as Tolstoy or Chekhov) or more avant-garde authors (such as Joyce or Proust) were rejected.  Later, the idealism had more to do with championing causes, or human rights, or just reaching an ideal pinnacle of literary achievement. 

While the Swedish Academy is very secretive about the nomination and voting process for the Nobel, not even releasing the short list of “also rans” for 50 years after each year’s award, one can sense a bit of their rationale by reading the citation for the award. Bob Dylan’s citation says he was given the award “for having created new poetic expressions within the great American song tradition.”  A Nobel spokesperson points out that Bob Dylan has handled lyrical material in an absolutely original way that draws on English poetic tradition all the way back to Milton, that he has assimilated both the “high” literary tradition and the “low” folk tradition, and that he has appropriated elements of everything ranging from folk song to delta blues to Rimbaud. 

Perhaps the dissenters are thinking only of “Blowin’ in the Wind” and “Masters of War,” both of which Dylan wrote when he was still a teenager.  Those songs have very simple lyrics, but they have endured because they sound like traditional folk songs that pre-existed the young man who wrote them by generations.  Yet there is a lot more to Dylan, and his dissenters need to read (and listen) deeper.  The 1975 album “Blood on the Tracks,” for instance, offers a mini-course in Dylan as poet with the psychedelic “Tangled Up in Blue,” the long-form song-epic “Hurricane,” and Dylan’s prescient answer to his Nobel critics “Idiot Wind.”  Over a lifetime, Dylan has become a walking encyclopedia of American popular music and he has distilled all the major elements of the art form (with the exception of rap & hip-hop) into his art.  His influence has been vast. Even if you hate his voice or his stage presence (or lack thereof), you cannot deny his pervasive influence as a songwriter.  Unlike all but a handful of artists, he has remained relevant in six separate decades.  If anyone has achieved Nobel’s ideal, if idealisk has anything to do with arriving at the pinnacle of one’s art, I submit that Dylan deserves the Nobel according to its original author’s definition. 

Much of the difficulty the snobs will have with Dylan will come with their insistence on evaluating his literary skill by reading his words on a page with the music detached from the words, as if he were a poet in the traditional sense. Dylan himself knows that he does not excel at that sort of writing, which is probably, at least in part, why he abandoned his unfinished poetic novel “Tarantula” in the 1960’s (although it was later published--due to the fact that it had become legendary in manuscript.)   A snob will think Dylan’s song lyrics to be doggerel because they aren’t always that obtuse or lofty, and because his lines sometimes end with simple rhymes.  But pop song lyrics are not meant to be divorced from their music.  The best music has a way of turning a clever phrase into something much more meaningful or memorable or profound.  To dismiss Dylan because he reads like doggerel when his words are shorn of the music is to declare that opera is bad because a lot of the stories are silly. The stories of most operas, taken alone as synopsis on paper, don’t spell great art.  But combined with powerful voices, a fine orchestra, sumptuous music, and a grand hall, an opera becomes something much greater than its story.   So it goes with a Bob Dylan song. 

Those who think that the Nobel Prize should go only to novelists, dramatists, and poets need also to examine the history of the prize.  Out of 113 recipients since 1901, the Literature prize has gone to three authors who wrote mostly history and three other authors who wrote mostly philosophy. Some of the winners who were primarily novelists or poets have also been more notable as essayists or memoirists.  So there is no precedent that the prize belongs only to novelists, poets, and dramatists--and there is nothing in Nobel’s instructions that says the prize cannot go to a songwriter.  

So kudos to Bob Dylan, who to my mind completely fulfills Nobel’s conception of an artist whose entire body of work translates into an ideal.  There is no other musician alive in America today whose work has been so literate and who so thoroughly embodies a coalescence of almost all that is the American musical tradition in the corpus of one artist’s life’s work.   

--Dale D. Dalenberg MD

Treasures from The Dalenberg Library

If you love musical theater, sooner or later you have to come to a reckoning with Paul Simon’s unjustly maligned masterwork “The Capeman,” which had a brief, tumultuous run on Broadway in 1998.  I count myself lucky to have attended one of those preciously rare 68 performances.  If “The Capeman” is remembered at all today, it is usually remembered as a flop.  But the truth is something much different.  You had to be there to feel the electricity—reading the reviews that were written by unimaginative New York critics does not capture the essence of this show.  “The Capeman” was a show which crossed cultural boundaries and mashed up musical styles with a freedom and excitement not seen again until “Hamilton.” Perhaps “The Capeman” was ahead of its time.

Original program from a magical night on Broadway in March, 1998.  

Back in 1998, it seemed that everyone wanted to see “The Capeman” fail.  Broadway insiders were skeptical of this outsider, Paul Simon, horning in on their act, displaying with chutzpah that he could rewrite their idiom and infuse it with the unique blend of rock’n’roll, pop music, and world music that had made his album “Graceland” such an enduring masterpiece.  Latinos were skeptical, because the show was portraying Puerto Ricans once again as gang bangers, a la “West Side Story.”  Critics and audiences reeled at the notion of making the protagonist of a major Broadway musical a convicted murderer who had served time on death row.  Victims’ families cried foul as their wounds were re-opened at seeing the victims peripheral to the story and the killers brought to front and center.  Even Simon’s choice of author for the book & lyrics became a source of controversy, as Derek Walcott, for all his credentials (Nobel Prize in literature among them) was Saint Lucian and not Puerto Rican.  Here was a white man telling a Latino story using a writer from the wrong island! 

So the bad reviews poured in on “The Capeman,” judgement having been passed before anyone saw the show, and the underwriters pulled the plug and killed it after only 68 performances.  Paul Simon’s 1997 album “Songs from the Capeman” never got higher than #42 on the charts and went down as the worst-selling album of his career.  The planned Broadway cast album and touring production never happened. 

If the shows had been actually bad, that would have been the end of it.  However, the show was arguably a masterwork.  I sat in the Marquis Theatre in New York City one Saturday night in March, 1998, enthralled at how a white man had turned out an audience of Latinos to see a groundbreaking production that put a marginalized ethnic group at the forefront of a major Broadway play and gave real Latino stars (Marc Anthony, Ruben Blades, Ednita Nazario) their first crack at Broadway stardom.  The theater was sold out and the audience on that Saturday night was pumped!   The Latinos embraced this show.  Its failure on Broadway was not a referendum on a bad musical—it was mostly just Broadway fighting change, resisting a rock’n’roll outsider, railing against the uncomfortable subject matter, not ready yet for the culture-bending hip-hop mashup that would be such a hit 20 years later with “Hamilton.” 

Paul Simon took a risk with this material.  Many questioned his choice of story, making a convicted murderer the protagonist of a musical.  Salvador Agron (“The Capeman”) was a Puerto Rican immigrant boy who was a brief media sensation in 1959 when he was apprehended after killing two youths in a playground incident.  He famously and defiantly blurted out to the media that he didn’t care if he died for his act and that his mother could watch him burn.  He served 16 years in various prisons, had his death row sentence commuted by the governor, won early release after becoming literate and obtaining a college education behind bars, and lived quietly after release, dying of a heart attack a couple days before his 43rd birthday.  The story is about the internal odyssey of a killer, as he moves from defiant youth to mature adult, from denial of his crime to acceptance of what he has done (the emotional odyssey of the killer in the “The Capeman” is not unlike that depicted in “Dead Man Walking”--interestingly, in the days since “Capeman” briefly graced Broadway, “Dead Man Walking” has become an opera.)  The Capeman story is also about how a murder is not only a tragedy for the victim’s family but also for the murderer’s family—Salvador’s mother, Esmeralda, sung exquisitely by Ednita Nazario, moves the audience to tears at least twice in this production—more than the Capeman himself, she is the focal point of the show. 

Simon and Walcott’s story is powerful as a commentary on the immigrant experience in America.  In 1998, I attended the show with a naturalized American citizen who had experienced some of the same barriers and jumped some of the same hurdles as the characters in this play.  After the show was over, it was obvious that this play had touched a nerve and spoken in a way that no stodgy white critic was going to be able to discern.  Paul Simon’s “Songs from the Capeman” album got played a lot in our house after that. 

The album “Songs from the Capeman” was a nice taste in 1997 of what the show would be, and in fact the album is what made me buy the show tickets and travel to New York City, but it always seemed vaguely disappointing, more like it was just the demo tapes for a far bigger concept.  For years, I labored under the misconception that the Broadway cast album had never been recorded because the show had flopped.  Only recently did I discover that the album had already been in the can before the show was cancelled, and it was actually released on iTunes in 2006.  You can find it today on Spotify and iTunes. 

Giving this show a second listening after almost 20 years, I find that it is greater even than I remember.  Paul Simon as a composer (and ardent student of world music) is totally into the Latin music idiom. He draws on the various Latin styles (son, guajira, bomba, plena, aguinaldo) to create a musical that real Latino stars didn’t have any qualms about singing.  He adds in American pop music, such as doo-wop, to root the story to the years in which it was happening.  And finally, Simon has his finger on the pulse of New York City.  This story fascinated him in his youth, and he has turned it into a musical that is a grand melting pot of music in the same way that the City is a melting pot of humanity. 

While production values are uniformly high, and shows are always slick and professional, there is a lot of forgettable music on Broadway.  Some of the greatest scores enjoy the shortest runs.  Alongside “The Capeman” in this regard, I would put another favorite of mine: Benny Andersson and Bjorn Ulvaeus’s score for “Chess” (lyrics by Tim Rice), which played for less than 2 months on Broadway in 1988.  These shows both live on as original cast recordings.  Well worth a listen. 

--D. Dalenberg MD

Treasures from The Dalenberg Library

Here is our time-worn copy of the The Kinks’ album Arthur from 1969, released in the US on Reprise Records division of what was then called Warner Bros-Seven Arts Records.  Cover rubbed from years of being repeatedly taken on and off the shelf for a listen, but the record inside is still graded Very Good +.  Had to rehab it a bit with the Record Doctor system and a little scrubbing to get rid of the skips.  Cleaned up quite nicely.  This item can sell for $99 these days in more pristine condition, but we have appraised ours at $9.00 due to the worn jacket and some surface noise on the disc. 

Arthur (or the decline and fall of the British Empire)—the complete title--was not a hit when it was released. It did not chart in the UK, and it only reached #105 in the US.  It’s highest charting single, “Victoria,” only reached #33 in the UK and #62 in the US, and “Victoria” is in no way even the best song on the album.  Nevertheless, this album is far greater than any of these statistics would imply.  Listening to it today evokes a nostalgia trip about the sound and ethos of the British Invasion, and reinforces why The Kinks should be considered patron saints of later British punk rock and modern Britpop. 

When people think these days of the legacy of the British Invasion, they tend to think of the lasting influence of The Beatles, The Rolling Stones, and maybe The Who.  Paul McCartney, the Stones, and the last gasping remnants of The Who are still selling out concerts.  It is easy to overlook The Kinks, because even their greatest albums never sold that well, and they are chiefly remembered for a handful of singles.  If you ask most serious music fans these days to name some Kinks songs, they will likely come up with “You Really Got Me” (a cover version of which kick-started Van Halen’s career) and “Lola.” However, the Kinks did have 14 top 10 singles in America, and unlike most 1- or 2-hit wonder bands, a lot of their greatest music comes from the same awesome sound universe that produced the two songs everybody remembers.  So, the wonderful thing about the Kinks is that they might well be the greatest band you never really listened to.  There is a wealth of good material to be discovered in their discography.

Arthur is the kind of album that plays from beginning to end without any detectable weak spots you want to skip over when you go back for a second listen.  It is not quite a concept album, because each song is a distinct piece, but it has a “concept” feel.  It was actually written as a soundtrack to a planned TV drama, but the show was cancelled and never produced, so the sense of a conceptual unity persists in the final record.  There is a kind of flouting of staid British tradition that gives it a rebellious character, so it is a little bit proto-punk in its sensibility.  That aspect of the album comes out in its alternate title and songs like “Victoria,” “Mr. Churchill Says,” and “She Bought a Hat Like Princess Marina.”  The song “Australia” mockingly depicts how moving to Australia might be a sought-after way to escape from the UK, but you get the sense that it is probably just a false promise.  The very British-ness of all these songs may have limited the album’s appeal in the US in 1969, but it is all that much more evocative of the British Invasion today.  Likewise, songs like “Yes Sir, No Sir” and “Some Mother’s Son” should have fit right in with the anti-Vietnam War sentiment of pop music in 1969, but they are so British-sounding that they make you think more of World War I when you hear them.

The Kinks excel at mashing up a parody of old-fashioned British music hall tunes with hard-driving rock’n’roll in a way that no other band achieved.  Much more than the Beatles, the Stones, or The Who, the Kinks are the spiritual grandfathers of the succession of British pop music that has occurred in the years since 1964 as we saw the British Invasion yield to punk & new wave, indie pop of the ‘80s, Britpop in the ‘90s, and more contemporary British bands (such as the Kaiser Chiefs and Franz Ferdinand.) 

Arthur represents a case study in all that was great about The Kinks and all that made The Kinks the “also-ran” band of the British Invasion.  It was the last album recorded before the end of the Kinks US touring ban, and it was the soundtrack to a TV show that never happened.  The American Federation of Musicians (the major professional musicians’ union) had much more power in those days of the early 1960’s, and they refused to certify The Kinks as professionals for touring in the US for four years after 1964 because of the rowdiness, fights, and riots that had occurred at some of their British shows.  The ban ended in 1969, but it had the effect of keeping The Kinks on the sidelines during the peak years of The British Invasion when all their compatriots were making a killing touring and appearing on TV in America.  We were lucky enough to see The Kinks in 1980 at the Arizona Veterans Memorial Coliseum (on a double bill with The Ramones). They were slick showmen, and there were no riots.