Mountains Come Out of the Sky

by Will Romano

  Greenslade and Bedside Manners Are Extra are simply archetypal prog rock records. While this may be an ignoble prize, at least the guys were around before and while this music was becoming a so-called genre. For all intents and purposes, Germany’s Triumvirat were as much a “British” progressive rock band as ELP and Jethro Tull.

  The band’s debut as well as Bedside Manners Are Extra (both released in 1973) presented a number of unforgettable and definitive tracks that delve into sci-fi concepts, inject a bit of tongue-in-cheek humor, and mix musical styles. The albums were even packaged with the requisite Roger Dean album covers (featuring a green-skinned, crimson-eyed, multiarmed humanoid creature, part extraterrestrial, part Hindu avatar). “I worked with Roger Dean at one of our rehearsals,” says Greenslade. “On the back of a menu at a local pub, I sketched out an idea for a symbol, and that became the first cover. I wish I still had [the menu]. It was so popular, that cover, that I thought, ‘Well, we have ourselves a brand image.’ I’ve used it on everything after that.”

  By 1974’s Spyglass Guest, the band had added Colosseum alumnus Clempson (the guitarist joined Greenslade, as he did Colosseum, for the band’s third studio record).

  Those Who Are About to Die Salute You (1969)

  Valentyne Suite (1969)

  Live (1970)

  Greenslade (1973)

  Bedside Manners Are Extra (1973)

  Spyglass Guest (1974)

  Drummer McCulloch, with rolling fills up the yin-yang, simply plays like a muthafucka on the record, delivering arguably his greatest recorded performances this side of Crimson’s Lizard.

  Thanks in part to McCulloch’s command and kick-ass rhythmic approach, Spyglass Guest pushes Greenslade into similar jazz-rock fusion territory explored by, say, drummer/bandleader Billy Cobham and guitar master Jeff Beck. It suits Greenslade, as if this were the true reason the band had come into being.

  While debate rages as to whether Greenslade was merely created in the mold of established rock bands such as Genesis, Yes, and Emerson Lake and Palmer, Spyglass Guest is the record—for better or worse—on which the band grew into its sound.

  The one problem that plagued Greenslade was raising enough money on tour to become a viable unit. As well as the band got along—their courtesy for one another is almost boring—they weren’t drawing the huge crowds of rivals and contemporaries Jethro Tull and Floyd.

  “Running a band is expensive,” says McCulloch. “It doesn’t make money as it is, unless it is hugely successful.”

  Despite having a Top 40 record in Spyglass Guest in Britain (it hit number 34 in September ’74), the band was toughing it out on the road come spring of 1975. They released one more studio record, Time and Tide, but the end was near. “The band was going through the point where Greenslade was off to do his own thing, and we had finished our contract with Warner Brothers, and we really didn’t want to do that again,” says McCulloch. “We really didn’t think we would go any further than we had already gone. We asked, ‘How is it going to get any better if we sign on for another five years?’ Dave Greenslade was trying to get more into films, and Dave Lawson was not a great traveler—he didn’t like being away a lot. We all had our reasons.”

  Through the end of the 1970s, Dave Greenslade went on to release solo records, including Cactus Choir (featuring Reeves) and the double album The Pentateuch of the Cosmogony, a collaboration with fantasy illustrator /arranger/keyboardist Patrick Woodroffe (Phil Collins makes an appearance). The latter was a cross-media affair (it was both a book and double album), and its story about the creation and destruction of a planet has relevance for the twenty-first century.

  After Greenslade, bassist Tony Reeves joined the progressive rock band Curved Air, fronted by sex symbol/vocalist Sonja Kristina. (Erica Echenberg/Getty Images)

  After Greenslade split, many of the members found work in diverse musical fields. Greenslade stayed busy doing TV work (“I was working for the BBC, doing three series at a time,” he says) and returned to recording rock music in the 1990s, looking to literature as inspiration, once again, when he recorded 1994’s Terry Pratchett’s From the Discworld, based on Pratchett’s fiction novel series.

  After his stints with Greenslade, Roy Harper, and Stackridge, Dave Lawson found his way to film work, most notably playing on composer John Williams’s scores for the original Superman and Star Wars films (that’s Lawson on ARP 2600 conjuring the sounds of an “electric tuba” for the famous Tatooine cantina scene). He became one of the leading authorities on synthesizers in the U.K. session scene and appears as a programmer on Yes’s 1983 comeback record, 90125.

  Reeves, the perennial musical Renaissance man, surprisingly, found himself out of work after Greenslade split, but soon recovered. “I got to call for an audition for Curved Air,” he says. “I passed.”

  THE CANTERBURY SCENE

  In the Land of Grey and Pink

  THE CANTERBURY SCENE BRIDGED psychedelia, British jazz, and what would become known as “progressive rock” through absurdist humor, healthy doses of virtuosic interplay, equal reverence for James Brown and Ornette Coleman, and a fearless sense of musical exploration.

  Since the list of available musicians willing to play an often uncompromising jazz-based, avant-progressive style was relatively short, many alternatively minded artists of this Kent-based scene gravitated toward one another, establishing legendary branches of the Canterbury sound’s musical family tree.

  “The people who played at Canterbury made this particular noise and had a particular brain pattern, I think,” adds bassist/vocalist Richard Sinclair, who was born in Canterbury but, as of this writing, lives Italy, and formed the Wilde Flowers and Caravan. “Parts of England created different styles of music. [Canterbury] is the major religious center and is the [home of] the Church of England . . . and because of that there exist certain harmonics that make a certain noise.”

  Ground zero for the Canterbury Scene, the Wilde Flowers (formed in 1963) culled (at various times) the talents of drummer and future cult figure Robert Wyatt, rhythm guitarist Richard Sinclair, vocalist Kevin Ayers, bassist Hugh Hopper and brother saxophonist /guitarist Brian Hopper, guitarist Pye Hastings, and drummer Richard Coughlan.

  The Wilde Flowers gave rise to perhaps the most important Canterbury scene bands: the Soft Machine and Caravan, who in turn spawned such notable groups as Gong and Matching Mole.

  Rampant inbreeding led to a kind of hothouse artistic weirdness, initially. But as scene musicians began to branch out to work with others, the music press (and the artists themselves, in some cases) tagged anyone involved with one of the original groups as belonging to the Canterbury scene simply by association.

  “Of course, the term Canterbury ... encompasses musicians who have never been near Canterbury in their lives, or ever been in England,” bassist Hugh Hopper told the author in an interview before his death in 2009. “In fact, there was never very much happening in Canterbury itself—it was, and still is, a small conservative town. We had to leave it and move to London to make it.”

  “The Soft Machine was more jazzy and out there,” adds Steve Hillage (Gong, Arzachel, Khan). “Gong were song-oriented. But some of the use of chords and melodies were quite similar. You’d hear the influence of early twentieth century French classical music, like Debussy. And, for myself, having gone to Canterbury University, it was a kind of real thing to me.”

  SOFT MACHINE

  One of the most important bands of the Canterbury progressive music scene was the Soft Machine, formed by Wyatt, Australian guitarist Daevid Allen (who had lived with Wyatt and his mother, Honor, in Kent), Ayers, and organist Mike Ratledge.

  Having taken its name from a 1966 William Burroughs novel, The Soft Machine (though they also performed under the moniker Mister Head), the Softs pushed their music toward the experimental and improvisational, shared bills with Pink Floyd, and created the psychedelic sound tracks to locked-door LSD parties (or “happenings”) at London’s Marquee Club, s
ecuring their status as one of the more innovative underground bands of the day (and even gaining a following in France).

  In 1967, the band released its first single, “Love Makes Sweet Music,” backed with “Feelin’, Reelin’, Squealin’.’” But before the Softs could even record a full-length, changes (a constant of Soft Machine’s history) were occurring. Allen, whose visa to remain in the U.K. had expired, was denied reentry to Britain and was forced to remain in France.

  The guitarist, of course, would go on to form the internationally and intergalactically known Gong, as Wyatt, Ratledge, and Ayers (then managed by the Animals’ Chas Chandler, who was also looking after Jimi Hendrix) pressed on, recording Soft Machine’s debut for ABC/Probe (a U.S.-only release), boasting such weird and wonderful tracks as “So Boot if at All,” “Joy of a Toy,” “Hope for Happiness,” “Why Are We Sleeping?” “We Did It Again,” and “Lullabye Letter.”

  The band’s early music is unlike anything else in the Soft Machine catalog. Inventive and organic experimentation is expressed in hypnotic minimalism, incessant, cathartic clouds of cymbal crashes, backward sound effects, blue-eyed soul, Indian spiritual chant, blues, penetrating (and even horrifying) early proto-prog fuzz organ solos (Ratledge’s Lowrey organ pumped through guitar amplification), a hint of jazz-rock fusion, and psychedelic/avant pop.

  “When I was roadieing for the Soft Machine in ’67, while Kevin was still on bass, the first few live gigs I heard I was knocked out,” said Hugh Hopper. “The band was seriously loud, and Ratledge’s fuzz organ solos could take the skin off your head. They sounded like a trapped wasp.”

  Growing tensions and creative differences split the band (a situation which may have been instigated by the appearance of future Police guitarist Andy Summers), and Ayers left to pursue a solo career, one that has been full of musical eccentricities, beginning with Joy of a Toy in 1969.

  Ayers was replaced by bassist Hopper, who contributed significantly to the band’s sophomore effort, Volume Two, which underscores the band’s absurdist bent while boasting a grittier, jazz-rock pastiche compositional style, as displayed in “Pataphysical Introduction (Pt. 1)” (inspired by the French surrealist writer Alfred Jarry’s concept of “the science of imaginary solutions”), “Dedicated to You, but You Weren’t Listening,” “Hibou, Anemone and Bear,” “Dada Was Here,” “Fire Engine Passing with Bells Clanging,” and “Thank You, Pierrot Lunaire.”

  Hopper collaborated closely with Wyatt, who wrote many of the lyrics to the bassist’s music. “Mainly, my joining meant that [Mike] Ratledge had more say in the music,” Hopper said in 2007. “He was not a psychedelic rocker/poet like Daevid Allen or Kevin Ayers, and [he] saw his chance to move the music more to jazz/experimental and contemporary classical, his own fields of interest.”

  As the title of the song “A Concise British Alphabet” suggests, the Soft Machine were intent on rewriting or reinventing the very language of rock music—and, specifically, British rock music—by fusing sweet pop (and often dissonant) melodies, Indian-style chants, free sonic expression, and polyrhythmic meters.

  “Well, we were definitely not trying to sound like everyone else,” Hopper said. “There were a million guitar bands doing all the usual covers, and we had wider interests than just rock or just jazz.”

  “FACELIFT” & ROCK BOTTOM

  By 1969, Soft Machine had expanded its lineup to include Lyn Dobson on soprano sax and flute as well as most of the front line of the British jazz pianist Keith Tippett’s band: cornet/trumpet player Mark Charig, trombonist Nick Evans, and alto saxophonist Elton Dean, who’d become one of the most beloved members of the Softs.

  “Elton was, at heart, a jazzer,” said Hopper, “and deep down a free jazzer. We had already been involved in stuff like that several yeas earlier, before Soft Machine—the trio Robert and I played in with Daevid Allen in 1963 had a lot of free playing. So Elton probably nudged us in that direction a bit.”

  What could be the band’s crowning achievement, Third—a double album with one song per side—blurs the lines between composition, production, and improvisation. The opening track, “Facelift,” composed by Hopper, was spliced together from performances the band gave at shows in Birmingham and Croydon in early 1970, and features Ratledge’s most disturbing organ solo caught on tape to date.

  Third also features “Slightly All the Time” written by Ratledge, Wyatt’s “Moon in June” (which Wyatt performed virtually alone), and Ratledge’s “Out-Bloody-Rageous,” the opening for which was created via backward tape loops of organ and electric piano. (Third, like the work of the author that inspired the band’s name, plays with narrative flow, cutting up the body, or bodies, of work to create a collage of sound and vision.)

  After winning critical praise and scoring a Top 20 British hit in July 1970 with Third, Wyatt, Dean, Ratledge, and Hopper recorded Four in the autumn of 1970 in Olympic Studios in London, moving further from psychedelic pop and headlong into horn-drenched jazz and organ-based jazz rock with the addition of former Delivery band member Roy Babbington on double bass. (Swinging, simultaneous, and knotty melodic lines intertwine in songs such as “Teeth,” “Kings and Queens,” and Hopper’s four-part suite “Virtually.”)

  Despite the record going Top 40 in the U.K., and the band’s musical direction becoming more defined, Wyatt sensed that the Softs were no longer headed down the path on which they’d started. He exited, not having written a single song on Four.

  Like Ayers before him, Wyatt would have a long career as a quirky prog-pop songwriter, one that he had already undertaken as a member of Soft Machine. (Wyatt had recorded his first solo album, End of an Ear, for CBS in summer 1970.)

  However, after appearing on Keith Tippett’s Centipede’s Septober Energy in 1971, Ayers’s Whatevershebringswesing (in the same year), and his own band Matching Mole’s 1972 self-titled debut and Little Red Record (which took its name from the English pronunciation of the French translation for Soft Machine), Wyatt fell out a third-story window (in an alcohol-induced stupor at a party in London in 1973) and was paralyzed from the waist down. His 1974 album, Rock Bottom, recorded in the wake of the accident, is regarded as a classic of the progressive pop and rock genres.

  Wyatt, now something of a cult hero, continues to write, perform, and record his own material to this day. “I’ve always felt that Robert was my intellectual superior,” says Daevid Allen. “Robert loves the feeling of something at the point of dropping, like a tree that had been chopped but has yet to fall. He loved the feeling of the tipping point, because of the tension, and captured that feeling in his drumming as well. Robert simply was the most original, powerful influence in Soft Machine.”

  “DARK SWING”

  With Wyatt’s exit, Soft Machine moved further left of center with the addition of Aussie drummer Phil Howard, a free jazzer with the intensity of Elvin Jones and aggressiveness of Tony Williams.

  Despite the undeniable brutality of Howard’s bashing and the detectable glee in Dean’s lyrical sax playing, Hopper and Ratledge were not altogether keen on the band’s new direction and wished to return to a more structured musical repertoire.

  Inevitably, Howard was given the axe, but not before he completed tracks for the band’s next studio record, Fifth. (You can hear the Howard version of Soft Machine in all its fury performing renditions of “All White,” “As If,” “Out-Bloody-Rageous,” and the Howard drum feature “Dark Swing” on live recordings from 1971, compiled for the Moonjune Records 2009 release, Drop.)

  Nucleus drummer John Marshall, who had initially been asked to replace Wyatt (but was busy with Jack Bruce), was tapped. This time Marshall accepted, finishing the remaining drum tracks for Fifth.

  But the personnel change, which proved too much for Dean (he left), presented an opportunity for keyboardist /saxophonist/oboist Karl Jenkins, who joined. However, because of Jenkins’s authoritative and compositional style, Hopper began to regret bringing him in. After recording 1973’s Six, Hopper, too, le
ft, and the following album, 1974’s Seven, features yet another lineup boasting bassist Roy Babbington, Ratledge, Marshall, and Jenkins.

  BUNDLES

  After being dropped by CBS, Soft Machine regrouped and hooked up with Allan Holdsworth (Tempest, Nucleus), one of the most talked-about young guitarists in England. The band signed to EMI’s Harvest label and released Bundles, a true departure from the previous few records.

  “The music was entirely a reflection of the people involved,” said John Marshall in a 2006 interview with the author. “We wanted someone who would bring his own approach to the music, and the hope was that it would perhaps take the music in different directions. Whoever joined was not expected to conform to a strict template or replicate what had gone before. The most extreme example of that was when Allan Holdsworth joined—we completely changed the repertoire and ditched practically all the previous stuff.”

  But before Bundles was even released, Holdsworth accepted an offer to play with New Tony Williams Lifetime, and recommended guitarist John Etheridge as his replacement.

  “Things were quite different in those days, and the guys they tried out were just not suitable for Soft Machine,” says Etheridge. “I felt quite strongly that I could do it. If not for Allan, they wouldn’t have known me, and they would have gotten a saxophonist, not a guitarist, I’m sure. Luckily, thank God, Allan left my number and they got in touch with me.”