by Will Romano
Inspired by H. G. Wells’s riveting sci-fi classic, The Time Machine, Eloy’s band name was, itself, a kind of backhanded homage to the German scene. 1
“The name spoke to the situation of the music business in Germany in the late ’60s,” says Eloy guitarist/vocalist producer Frank Bornemann, who founded the band in 1969. “Most German bands performed the well-known hits of artists from the U.K. and USA. We were a nation of cover bands, really. I thought that by naming the band Eloy, in a strange way, maybe I could change things and build a more promising future.”
After releasing their independently produced first single, “Walk Alone/Day Break,” in 1970, Eloy offered its full-length, self-titled debut in 1971—a heady mixture of psychedelic blues-rock grunge à la Black Sabbath and Deep Purple (the song “Today” is a close cousin to “Hush”), followed by 1973’s Inside, a creative touchstone in the band’s early career.
While urban American blues and psychedelia still accounted for much of the band’s output, Eloy ventured into long-form composition and traditional European influences to achieve a similar musical amalgam brewed by Procol Harum.
“The time was right to start playing a brand of progressive rock that was German,” says Bornemann.
A NEW DAWN
Inside attracted the attention of EMI Germany, and Eloy eventually signed to its progressive music sub, Harvest, home of their musical forefathers, Floyd.
“We changed a lot at that time: our rhythm guitar player, Manfred Wieczorke, started playing keyboards; Fritz Randow replaced Helmut Draht on drums; and I became lead vocalist,” says Bornemann.
These personnel shifts set in motion a series of events that would forever shape Eloy’s musical direction. Though a 1973 single, the (largely) instrumental “Daybreak” (different from the song appearing on the band’s debut) failed to find an audience, and 1974’s Floating was a lateral artistic move, each successive record steeled the band’s commitment to progressive rock.
By 1975, having acquired bass player Luitjen Jansen, Eloy gathered enough creative courage to compose the Moog-laden concept album Power and the Passion (originally slated to be a double record), which told the tale of time travel and social intolerance in the Middle Ages—a cinematic story befitting the majestic, “big sky” LP cover photograph.
Through live performances and German radio airplay, Eloy generated a buzz, but growing tensions threatened to destroy the band. Not long after the release of Power and the Passion, Bornemann was Eloy’s only remaining member.
Instead of folding up the band, the guitarist guided the ship through a turbulent period by recruiting fretted /fretless bass player Klaus-Peter Matziol, drummer/lyricist Jürgen Rosenthal, and keyboardist Detlev Schmidtchen—generally recognized as Eloy’s most creative lineup.
The quartet banged out 1976’s symphonic Dawn, centered on the concept of a spiritual entity’s attempt to contact the living. With roaring sound effects, soaring orchestral strings, and Schmidtchen’s sonically saturating Moog and Mellotron work, the album recalls many of the British prog milestones from the early ’70s. The band even cheekily references Yes’s “Ritual: Nous Sommes du Soleil” in the lyrics of the life-affirming “The Sun Song.”
“We were four totally different characters, but still able to create music and to play together,” says Bornemann
OCEANIC ELOY
Eloy were on the verge of commercial breakthrough—one radio-friendly single away from changing their world—but didn’t give into the temptation of scoring a hit record. Instead, the band devised, of all things, yet another concept record, the four-track Ocean, hatched from the fertile mind of Rosenthal.
Nektar: A Tab in the Ocean (1972)
Nektar: Remember the Future (1973)
Can: Tago Mago (1971)
Amon Düül II: Yeti (1971)
Henry Cow and Slapp Happy: In Praise of Learning (1975)
Eloy: Colours (1980)
Ash Ra Tempel: Schwingungen (1972)
Tangerine Dream: Rubycon (1975)
Grobschnitt: Rockpommel’s Land (1977)
Based on the myths and legends of Atlantis, Ocean possesses many of Eloy’s musical hallmarks: bombastic drumming (a tradition begun by dynamic player Fritz Randow), Gilmour-esque bluesy guitar solos, and sweeping, ethereal synth passages.
“Ocean was the record that really solidified our reputation as a serious recording band,” Bornemann says.
It also flew in the face of convention. While the Sex Pistols and British punk bands were conquering the world, 1977’s Ocean became the band’s best-selling record to date (and remains so, as of this writing), moving hundreds of thousands of vinyl platters with its escapist morality tale.
“Ocean struck a chord, I think, because it taps that feeling in us that there’s still much to explore and discover about the world,” says Bornemann. “But it also sought to make predictions about the future.”
SILENT CRIES
Eloy followed up Ocean with 1979’s Silent Cries and Might Echoes, which continued in the band’s epic-opus compositional approach, but creative difference split the band (Rosenthal and Schmidtchen quit).
Eloy pressed on with the addition of guitarist Hannes Arkona (who joined the band for dates on the Silent Cries European tour) and keyboardist Hannes Folberth, a lineup that helped the band greet the 1980s with a new outlook, a slightly different sound, and a new record—the muscular Colours.
Though Eloy consciously curbed some of their progressive tendencies throughout the 1980s, they retained a sense of their conceptual glory days throughout the decade and into 1990s with releases such as 1981’s Planets, ’82’s Time to Turn, ’83’s Performance, ’84’s Metromania, and 1998’s Ocean 2: The Answer, which Bornemann asserts is the positive flip side to 1977’s Ocean.
“Everything that I wrote was, in a way, a reflection of my soul and my senses,” says Bornemann. “I’ve been completely honest with everything I’ve ever done.”
MIGHTY ECHOES
While it is true that Eloy’s recorded output has been spotty over the last two decades, the band have been resuscitated back to life by their first release in twelve years—2010s Visionary, a seven-track, symphonic effort featuring bassist Klaus-Peter Matziol and keyboardist Hannes Folberth.
“If music is played well and has the ability to touch people’s hearts,” says Bornemann, “then it doesn’t matter what you call it: progressive or not. The label is meaningless at that point. It’s just music.”
ASH RA TEMPEL
Formed in 1970 by legendary synthesizer player (then-drummer) Klaus Schulze, guitarist/bassist Hartmut Enke, and guitarist/synth player Manuel Göttsching (who later recorded Terry Riley—influenced, synth- and guitar-based electronica heard on 1976’s New Age of Earth and 1984’s E2-E4), Ash Ra Tempel may be Germany’s greatest jam band.
“I almost compare Ash Ra Tempel to Cream and even Jimi Hendrix,” says Göttsching. “We weren’t Cream or Hendrix, but we played freely, touching upon a theme, as those artists often did when they performed live.”
AMON DÜÜL
With releases such as 1969’s Phallus Dei, 1970’s Yeti, and 1971’s Tanz der Lemminge, Amon Düül nurtured their music as it sprang from assorted vamps, chordal drones, and guitar/bass riffs. Rife with feedback and studio and guitar effects, the band’s music was so visual and trippy, it was once believed to have been conceived on LSD. (This is untrue.)
Much of what we hear on the band’s early efforts came directly from jams. The double record Yeti, for instance, is a shining example of the band’s boundless musicality, as if a single album format couldn’t contain their creativity.
GERMAN SPACE ROCK: WHAT IF?
As Pink Floyd, Hawkwind, and, to a degree, the Moody Blues were creating theatrical fantasy trips in the U.K., dubbed “space rock,” Germans such as Amon Düül (later renamed Amon Düül II) on their artists’ commune twenty kilometers outside Munich, Berlin’s Ash Ra Tempel, and the Darmstadt-based Englishmen Nektar explored both the inne
r and outer cosmos, in some cases, asking profound questions.
One of the more trance-inducing German bands of the subgenre, Popol Vuh, formed in Munich in 1969, and initially experimented with electronics and synthesizers. By the early 1970s, the band had begun incorporating acoustic instruments such as the harpsichord/cembalo, sitar, and oboe on 1971’s In den Gärten Pharaos, 1973’s Seligpreisung, and 1974’s Einsjäger & Siebenjäger, creating something akin to classical /world/electronica rock.
Amon Düül II: Tanz der Lemmingei (1971)
Throughout the 1970s and 1980s, keyboardist Florian Fricke worked closely with celebrated German film director Werner Herzog on sound tracks for movies such as 1973’s Aguirre, the Wrath of God, 1979’s Nosferatu, and 1982’s Fitzcarraldo.
Eloy’s 1979 record, Silent Cries and Mighty Echoes (left) followed in the creative footprints of 1977’s breakthrough concept album, Ocean.
“When we were doing Yeti, we were interested in using a real multitrack machine,” says Amon Düül’s guitarist/bassist John Weinzierl. “But for some reason, our engineer recorded it on two-track. We freaked out because we went into the studio wanting to use the technology. That’s why Yeti became a double album. We did one album on two-track again and the other with sixteen with some improvisations, including ‘Yeti Talks to Yogi.’”
While some of the band’s music is arguably more accessible on later records (e.g., 1973’s Vive La Trance contains nods to Eastern European, cabaret, glam, world, and classical music in “Fly United,” “Ladies Mimicry,” “Im Krater Blühn Wieder Die Baüme,” and the seven-plus-minute anti-Western rant “Mozambique”), one would be hard-pressed to call the band conformists. That is, at least until the late 1970s and early 1980s, which yielded 1978’s new-wavish Only Human—for all intents and purposes a guitarist/violinist/saxophonist Chris Karrer solo record—and 1981’s Vortex.
NEKTAR
Signed to the Bellaphon label in 1970 and bolstered by moving melodies and funky, fast-paced extended psychedelic blues-centric jams, Nektar created classics of the prog and space rock genre: 1972’s Journey to the Center of the Eye; 1973’s Remember the Future (a thirty-six-minute suite spanning both sides of the original LP); and perhaps their best-known effort, 1972’s A Tab in the Ocean, the title track of which asked the musical question, What would happen to global politics and everyday life if the entire planet were spiked with LSD?
“We were all on the same wavelength,” says Nektar guitarist/lead vocalist Roye Albrighton. “All we wanted to do back then was create music. People say we were prophesizing, but that wasn’t it at all. It had nothing to do with that. We weren’t prophets. We simply asked, What if? through our music.”
(Waring Abbott/Getty Images)
SONG FOR AMERICA
Can the U.S. Export Prog?
A FUNNY AND PARADOXICAL THING about America: It was ahead of the curve on so many musical forms, from blues to jazz to hip-hop, yet when it came to “progressive” rock, it wasn’t until the mid-1970s that U.S. bands began making any noticeable commercial impact. And when ELP were fading, when Yes were floundering with Tormato, when King Crimson hadn’t released a studio record in four years and Genesis had move, with each studio record, away from their more expressive and arty past and more toward a straightforward, hard-driving rock and pop style, bands like Kansas and Styx were carrying the flag in the mainstream in a high-profile way.
By 1980, Kansas’s Leftoverture, Point of Know Return, Masque, Song for America, Monolith, Audio-Visions, and Two for the Show (a live double LP) had achieved precious-metal status in the U.S. alone, while containing some of the band’s most epic rock recordings.
Similarly, Styx performed a hybrid form of pop and progressive rock that was, in part, inspired by the first wave of British bands. “When I wrote ‘Lady,’ I was listening to ‘The Court of the Crimson King,’” admits Dennis DeYoung, the classic voice of Styx.
KANSAS
Kansas have caused so much controversy simply for being who they are. Rarely has a band inspired such division among fans and critics alike.
Some have said that Kansas, almost impossible to categorize, wound up in the progressive bin by default: Straddling the line between progressive and radio-friendly rock, they possess qualities of the great British progressive rock bands, from Yes to Gentle Giant, while incorporating homegrown influences such as American folk, Native American, and country and western motifs and imagery—a virtual grab bag of musical goods.
One can point out the blues influence of the band’s early bar days in songs such as “Stay of Trouble” and “Two Cents Worth.” But what would we call “Angels Have Fallen,” which gleans elements of folk, Americana, and classical? “Roots rock”? This definition and description conjures a whole other scene.
Then we come to songs such as the orchestral and often quaint “Lamplight Symphony” and the multi-tempos and European-church counterpoint melodies of “Hopelessly Human.” The latter makes a very peculiar mess: Drummer Phil Ehart’s rhythmic punctuations and patterns—specific “notes” struck on toms and rototoms—mesh well with the countermelodies spun by the band. Yet throughout the song, straightforward blues-informed rock guitar and basic syncopated patterns are continually reprised (mostly during vocalist Steve Walsh’s philosiphical monologues).
Ehart literally plays nothing more than “one” and “three” on the hi-hat and “two” and “four” on a tom, yet the song doesn’t seem to follow a simple pop or straightforward rock structure. For instance, the chorus is very nearly tucked into the violinist/vocalist Robby Steinhardt–sung “verses,” rendering Walsh’s “verses” de facto choruses (though there’s no repetition of lyrics in Walsh’s “choruses,” as is generally the case with rock songs). It’s all a bit confusing, contradictory, and odd. And none of it makes the picture any clearer or brings us closer to the answer to the question: What the hell kind of music does Kansas make? Some experts weigh in:
“I think Kansas is more of a progressive rock band than [Styx],” says DeYoung. “I always thought that. I always thought that we were a song-based pop-rock band with progressive rock overtones. That’s what I always thought we were. I always thought song first, not arrangement. I think a lot of prog bands, they were more about the musicality and musicianship and the technical aspects of playing and the virtuosity, more like what I would call faux-classical musicians in rock.”
“Kansas was even weirder because they had a violin,” says Utopia bassist Kasim Sulton. “It was like, ‘Who puts a violinist in a rock band?’”
“Here’s a question for you,” says Saga vocalist Mike Sadler. “I would ask people who had been listening to Kansas prior to their commercial success if they would continue call them prog? To me, it’s the other way around: They got introduced to the prog community through success on the radio.”
“We just made no sense to anyone, and we made no sense to ourselves,” says Ehart. “There was just something about when the six of us started playing. The problem was, there really were . . . not many committed, full-time musicians in Topeka, so you had to pull from wherever to make a band. That’s what made Kansas so freaking odd. We weren’t a group of guys that shared musical tastes and we all came up in bands together. We really didn’t. We had kind of gotten to a point in our lives when we were all that was left. Everybody else had gotten real jobs or gotten married. That was where the original six came from. It was kind of an attrition, survival of the fittest. We had formed White Clover, the five of us, with me and Dave [Hope, bassist] and Rich [Williams, guitarist] and Robby and Steve. We hadn’t even added Kerry [Livgren] to the band yet.”
“Kansas were signed with Rich as the only guitar player,” says producer Jeff Glixman, who was a member of Ehart’s pre-Kansas band White Clover with Williams, Walsh, and Hope. “Phil thought they needed strength in song-writing, so they brought in Kerry.”
“I had a vision for this band as far as who I wanted to be in it,” says Ehart. “I want to make this clear: Kansas c
ame from all of us. But as far as who I wanted in the band, I remember starting with Dave and Rich because I had played with them in White Clover. I remember telling Rich, ‘I want to go full time with this’, and Rich says, ‘I’m in.’ Steve was washing windows in St. Joe, Missouri, and I had called him and he said, ‘Yeah. Let’s do it.’ I had seen Robby, and I had never played with Robby in a band before, but I had seen him in a band in Lawrence, Kansas, and I had play violin and thought, ‘He has got to be in this band.’ The five of us started playing as White Clover and we recorded, down in Liberal, Kansas, and sent our reel-to-reel tapes to Don Kirshner.”
“I remember wanting Steve to sing Kerry’s songs,” Ehart continues. “I had already played in a band with Kerry, an earlier formation of Kansas. I always told Kerry, ‘Steve needs to sing your stuff.’ He said, ‘Really?’ I said, ‘This is the perfect combination.’ It was just something I always heard in my head.”
“The first time I met Steve, he drove up in . . . a car, and he had just been in a motorcycle wreck,” says Glixman. “His arm and leg were sanded down to the bone and he was cut up. When he sat down and started playing Hammond organ and singing, I said, ‘God, this is the most amazing guy I’ve ever heard.’ He was nineteen, twenty years old.”
