Prog Blog: Book of Knots at the Blender Theater

Lately the musical Monk and his friends have been exchanging views on the meaning of "progressive rock". The importance of this sub-genre of rock is adequately demonstrated by the fact that of all the uses of "progressive", only this one gets to be called just "prog", as if the social force of the music trapped the term and held it up as a prize. And the philosophical interest it has is like a model of the problem in philosophy of art in general: everyone thinks they know how to use it, but nobody knows how to define it. Which leads to the occasional battle of words: "that's not prog!". "Yes it is!". That's not art. Yes it is. You get the picture.

One thing most people agree on is that certain groups, or should I say groups of groups, constitute the paradigm or core cases of prog. Most of these bands hail from the early 1970's, though many can trace their origins as far back as the mid-60's. One contingent consists of groups which delighted the college crowd in the 70's, like Yes, King Crimson, the Moody Blues, Jethro Tull, Genesis, Pink Floyd, ELP, Nektar, Klaatu and Gentle Giant. Then there is a frankly eclectic gang of lesser lights (including the so-called "Canterbury" groups) consisting of such names as Caravan, Hatfield and the North, Van der Graf Generator, Soft Machine, Tangerine Dream and several others known mainly to connoisseurs. And there are the contemporary "prog" (or "neo-prog") groups like Dream Theatre, Porcupine Tree, Marillion and a number of Italian groups.

Yet even this - a mere sprinkling of the names who have been mentioned by one expert source or another as prog groups - overstates the amount of agreement. For example, in The Billboard Guide to Progressive Music, Bradley Smith offers numerous other names in his "canonic" top 100 prog recordings, but does not include a single album by Gentle Giant (most prog fans would stop speaking to him), ELP (most prog fans would have him drawn and quartered) or Nektar (which personally irritates me more than the other omissions). Genesis, and another leading light of prog, Renaissance, are represented only by live albums (what was he thinking/drinking? prog is the paradigmatic studio music). And the fights go way beyond this: Is Supertramp a prog or merely a pop group? How about David Bowie? What is Led Zeppelin's relationship to prog? What about Rush (I shudder, but some people consider them an essential prog band)? How important/influential are the numerous proggish bands from Germany, Italy and other non-English-speaking countries? Is Frank Zappa a prog artist or merely a quirky composer with as many different styles as albums? Is the contmporary prog-metal scene really prog or just very technical noise? Is psychedelic rock a form of prog, or prog a form of psych, or neither? Is prog a classification of bands, albums, songs, styles, or all or none of the above? The issues go on and on. And to judge from the literature on prog, of which there is a substantial amount (of extremely uneven quality) most participants are talking right past each other. Definitions of the genre fly through the air with the greatest of ease, all subject to easy refutation by simply pointing to a generally recognized prog group that doesn't clearly meet it, or a bunch of clearly non-prog groups that do. The various talking heads (not the group, who are not prog, but someone will mention them eventually...) do not usually address one another's opinions or engage philosophically with other views, but merely offer their personal visions of the genre. (For one very sane definition and list of key recordings see this article. Full disclosure: the author of the article, Ian Alterman, is not unrelated to one of parrot's cousin's grandmother's children, and the site is operated by our frequent musical correspondent and acquaintance, Dusty Wright. Anyway I don't completely agree with the definition or album selections, but I think they capture a standard and venerable view of the nature of prog.)

Rest assured, I am not going to settle any of this here. But the context is important, for on Friday night, a parrot looking for some spontaneous solution to the what-do-I-do-tonight dilemma was faced with at least two choices for delving into the music and escaping the email debates. Ozric Tentacles, a beknighted neo-prog group that has been doing its multimedia thing for a couple of decades, was scheduled to play at the Highline Ballroom; and across town, a new group of self-consciously arty rockers who call themselves Book of Knots was on the bill at the Blender Theater at Gramercy, a venue which (as the Gramercy Theater) recently did service as the film archive of the Museum of Modern Art. Eeny meeny miney mo.... not having enough toes, Parrot called his sibling, a parakeet who has written for ProgArchives.Com, one of the main prog rock sites in cyberspace. Parakeet was familiar with one highly rated Ozric album, which he considered unimpressive; and alerted me to the fact that they are almost completely instrumental, which is not bad, but I was not in the mood for a post-Tangerine Dream experience. Besides the buzz around Book of Knots was much more interesting: possibly a one-time-only performance by a collection of art rock types who were members of other bands, (Sleepytime Gorrila Museum, Pere Ubu, Skeleton Key, etc.) Moreover they were to be joined by various other known entities such as John Langford of The Mekons, who played an opening set, as did Carla Bozulich, who also appeared as lead vocalist in Book of Knots opening number. The group has just released its second album, Traineater, and may or may not continue as an ongoing entity, as the mood strikes them.

Now I will admit the parrot squawcked a bit when, after buying a ticket for an alleged 8:00 p.m. show, I discovered that Book of Knots was not going on until 11:00. (No warmup bands were listed in any of the announcements.) Bad as this was, what really infuriated me was the club policy of not allowing anyone to leave and come back. They give you a wristband if you want to order a drink, but they can't stamp your hand or something so you can re-enter? Obnoxious. I actually went to the ticket window and asked for my $22 back, to no avail. A chipmunk-faced young fan behind me chirped profoundly "Haven't you ever been to a rock concert before?" Hmmmm... haven't I seen Led Zeppelin four times? Haven't I played at CBGB's twice? Well, yes. Not to mention been to most of the major rock clubs in NYC several times. Mr. Monk Parrot reminded Mr. Chipmunk that he had had some 3 extra decades to collect nuts and seeds on the rock concert scene, but thanks for the input. (See, once in a while it helps to be older and wiser... like Owl, except she's not older...) But time went by rather quickly, with the warm-up sets and lots of newpapers to read. Before the Book of Knots went on I bought a can of Guinness. A sign above each of the three (3) bars at the Gramercy announces "one alcoholic drink per wristband". Does that mean one per bar? But I didn't notice anyone enforcing this by removing the wristbands after selling a drink. I can somewhat understand the sentiment, for I have seen a drunken Irishman pissing across the walls and sinks of a club bathroom like an out of control firehose (this at a Luka Bloom concert at Acme Underground, about when Chipmunk was learning to write) and have encountered a variety of unpleasantly inebriated individuals. I could maybe see a two drink limit, but one is a little ridiculous. Anyway, this can of Guinness ($7 with the tip) was completely flat, with an obviously broken carbonation device bouncing around at the bottom of the can. Parrot was not in a good mood. The place also had one 200-pound security guard to every five patrons, and closed off the entire balcony (the only available seating) for "VIP's and friends of the performers". They do have a kick-ass sound system and a pleasant lounge downstairs, which might or might not be enough to drag me back to this otherwise unfriendly venue.

Back to prog. Or are we? This is the question I was alluding to at the beginning. Here are a bunch of musicians who look and sound like artrock specialists. ProgArchives has an Artrock genre, but their top 100 albums of this genre include lots of Moody Blues, not to mention Rush, the former being as tonal and accessible as one can imagine, and the latter being merely annoying. Sleepytime Gorilla Museum's Of Natural History is listed as one of the most popular albums on ProgArchives, but not as an artrock album. Prog is quintessentially the medium which allegedly lifted rock out of its dogmatic slumbers as a a mere form of entertainment and made it a genuine art form. Perhaps there are a hundred reasons to question this narrative, but it is a typical one, and it sometimes leads to prog being simply equated with artistic rock and roll. Prog is not written for dance halls; prog does not maintain standard beats or stick to basic blues progressions; prog often introduces unusual instruments, utilizes extended compositional forms, limits the use of improvisation with through-composed pieces or else extends it way beyond the confines of blues-based guitar breaks, and extensively manipulates sounds electronically. Prog was suppose to prove that rock is a form of art not inherently less complex or creative than classical music. All of which gives it a claim to being art rock pure and simple. In addition, prog lyrics are often as indecipherable as a Wallace Stevens poem, and the visions it produces, from apparently utopian to diabolically dystopian, are at least in some sense at odds with the contemporary social status quo, giving it some connection to not only modern poetry but progressive political views.

Nevertheless, the sounds which emerged from Book of Knots could arguably be called art rock, but not prog. Why? That is what is hard to say. When I got out of the concert I eventually ended up in a subway station, where I naturally applied the headphones and turned on my CD player (yes, I am one of the last people on earth without an iPod, though my CD player does do mp3's). By coincidence, or maybe not, the disk was a live Gentle Giant album. By even better coincidence, the next song up was A Free Hand. Had I recorded part of the concert by mistake? Well, not exactly, but all the elements seemed to be there: technically complex and well-orchestrated lines that sometimes touched on atonality, noises of various sorts (electronic or otherwise), rhythms dissociated from their metrical foundation, and vocals integrated as one more instrument in the mix. The lyrics are slightly offbeat, with meanings hinted at rather than spelled out. How different was this from the concert?

Well, a little. Book of Knots utilizes prerecorded soundtracks and in general uses the spoken word to great effect; their compositions are powerful but sometimes schizophrenic, with the quiet tinkling of plucked autoharps and guitars strummed below the bridge suddenly interrupted by tritonal outbursts from the entire group. Various string instruments are pulled in, more for their ability to produce a Webernesque texture than for melodic or harmonic uses. There was great beauty in many of these textures, and indeed in the unpredictable but usually very convincing vocal lines of these compositions (or dare I say "songs"?). All of this seemed to go beyond what Gentle Giant was doing, but not by much. Could it be that Gentle Giant is misclassified as a prog group and really belongs to a separate genre of art rock? I don't know. If you go this route you could end up casting early Pink Floyd and late King Crimson out of prog. Or, if you take the opposite tack, you could end up baptizing Zappa as a prog icon. I think what we have here is just a choice of linguistic paths: either you build out the artrock strands of prog and draw in groups like Book of Knots, which sound nothing remotely like Yes or later Pink Floyd, and call them prog; or you cut the thread where the symphonic aspects of prog trail off into noise and punk and atonality, and the textures go from the expansive synth/mellotron sound to industrial, aleatoric and elecronic. Either will do. Definitions merely reflect existing usage, as W.V.O. Quine pointed out long ago; they do not give you any sort of new information about a term, though they can serve as norms for using it once they are offered.

A few years ago I went to a "prog" concert at the Knitting Factory. There were three bands, can't remember their names unfortunately. One of them was not so different from Book of Knots, though not nearly as good. They seemed to mix aleatoric moments with more traditional ones, not unappealing but kind of an unnatural cross between the Paul Winter Consort and Jethro Tull. Another was so loud I had to leave - basically an extremely technical guitar player, backed by a bass as I recall. Other than the possibility of ear damage and another name on the Extremely Technical Guitar Player list I got nothing out of this set, but it did remind me that a great many heavy metal bands of the Metallica sort feature very technically accomplished players who seem to think that having the faculty of taste is a defect. Book of Knots loses little in volume compared to most of these bands, but to my ears
they are actually about music and not showmanship. Between their four or five guitarists, two fiddlers, numerous vocalists and percussionists, they manage to more or less consistently keep the attention on musical form and content and on the social content of the lyrics, and hardly even present technique for its own sake. Perhaps this should be part of the definition of prog, if definitions were at all useful here. Even with the guitar pyrotechnics of a Steve Howe or the drumming of a Phil Collins of the Shulman brothers' extraordinary technical facility, prog is decidely about the music.

What I could gather from most of the lyrics suggests that Book of Knots is currently oriented toward the industrial, with a number of them sporting suits and hair styles that brought to mind the bourgeoisie of the 1930's. In an equally outrageous suggestion of civilization and etiquette, a program was produced for the concert, in which they indicate that their second album was intended as "a tribute to the American rust belt". It seemed oddly fitting for this collaboration of otherwise musically employed musicians that after their hour-long gig they thanked the audience, and excused themselves from doing any encores with the polite admission that "we don't know any more songs"! Not even a cover of Free Bird?

I do hope the group stays together, and does more concerts. While I did not find every moment of it pleasant, I could see this as a direction of sorts for rock that means something. I am not into noise. I do not like to attacked or annoyed, I like to be challenged. This was challenging but for the most part very enjoyable. I don't know how it translates to the recording, but I'm somewhat sorry I didn't buy a CD. From the experimental psychedelia of the 60's to My Bloody Valentine to contemporary art rock, some musicians have managed to tread a perilous course between complete alienation and pandering to popular taste. The best rock manages to push the boundaries while remaining enjoyable. Book of Knots pushes them very far but does not fall off the listening spectrum. That is an accomplishment, whether you call them prog, art, industrial, or something else.

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I think it is safe to reveal that there was another reason I chose to see Book of Knots rather than Ozric Tentacles. The reason's name is Frank, and the Frank who is the reason is (I suppose) the person who runs Frank's Pizza. A shop you can miss if you blink on a slow walk, it is located right next to the Blender (or Gramercy), at 23rd and Lexington Ave. For something like 15 years it has been recognized as the real deal when it comes to New York pizza. I've been to dozens (at least) of pizza parlors. (Ever been to a pizza parlor, Chipmunk?) I've been to Di Fara's, the best pizza this side of the local pig sty (finally shut down by the Health Department, thank god, but the pizza was in a class by itself: a gooey mix of buffalo milk mozarella and homemade tomato sauce on a thin crust). Frank's I discovered about 8 years ago. They almost never reheat a slice: the slices fly out the door faster than he can cook 'em. You don't order toppings at Frank's; you can, of course, if you want to ruin the best slice of pizza south of Central Park, but restrain yourself. Your body will survive a day without broccoli, and besides, tomato sauce is supposed to be good for your prostate - if you have a prostate, that is. The sauce is the best, with a bit of a Latin twist; the cheese fresh and generous, the crust just thick enough. Do I sound like a commercial? Okay, then here goes: Frank's is the best candidate I know for successor to (the real, original) Ray's Pizza. Grab a slice or eight and tell me you disagree.

Weick in Marx in Soho at Vox Pop in Brooklyn

That's a lot of nesting up there; but this is a Parrot's hangout after all!

Speaking of hangouts, where might a couple of feathered friends bide their time on a Saturday night (or just about any other) without straying too far from the nest? The local Dunkin Donuts? Unfortunately, in this neck of the woods, in can come to that. You see, this is the heart of Multicultural Brooklyn, where speaking Parrotese does not necessarily put you in the minority. Indeed, most businesses around here shut up as tight as a vulture's... err... grip, come sundown on Friday, and stay that way until pretty late Saturday night at the earliest. Though the Parrot shares some DNA with these folks, we do not appreciate the Friday/Sat night morgue routine (we could always touch down in Greenwood Cemetery if we were into that), so we are apt to take wing and find more welcoming venues.

And venue is just what we find when we drop in to Vox Pop, the only place this side of Park Slope that qualifies as a genuine Coffeehouse. Only this is not your run-of-the-mill yuppie joint with the $2.50 cup of coffee or hot chocolate. Well, okay - I guess it is about that much for a cup of coffee or hot chocolate. That's the funny thing about Vox Pop, the name of which is short for "vox populi", the Voice of the People. I know, it sounds like a leftie tabloid from the '30's (or '60's). Which is, roughly what it is - updated a bit. The place was started a couple of years ago by Sander Hicks and some friends, though Sander is definitely the main presence there. Nothing if not a risk taker, Sander took over a small storefront on Cortelyou Road, a commercial strip that had all but faded into oblivion; where the one bookstore in the entire neighborhood could not make it, where you could count at one point 12 hair salons, 4 dry cleaners, and not one restaurant you'd want to stick your beak into. Now, I don't want to use a hysterical term like "renaissance", but there has been a noticeable pickup of commercial activity on this strip, which sits smack in the middle of a neighborhood full of expensive Victorian homes and not a few large apartment buildings. You'd think somebody would figure out that this is a potential goldmine - at least, it would be, if there were enough going on there to deter the locals from heading to Park Slope every time they need a toy for their kids or a Fine Dining Experience.

If it is headed towards "renaiassance" (or, ironically, gentrification), Vox Pop will have had a lot to do with it. To start with, they did an amazing, and amazingly quick, job of turning the space into a warm, welcoming little java joint - not crowded or cramped but a real homey feel, helped along by lots of natural wood grains. Kids dig Vox Pop (there's a play area); so do adults. So do parrots. But this is not yer ordinary Starbucks wannabe. They sell books, which seem to have 2 main themes: radical rock music, and radical politics. They have readings (by, you guessed it, radical writers), and they do self-publishing. They have music in the evenings, not all radical, but much of it inspired by either the Clash or Pete Seeger, depending on which night you happen to walk in. And they sell food. None of it cheap. They do have "free wifi" - the scare quotes indicating that "free" is to be interpreted here as meaning "please spend $6 an hour or else..." Or else what? Who knows, I guess you become a Vox Populi Persona Non Grata, at least if you speak Latin. The Open Mike is also free, but the 2 beers to cover the minimum will cost you $10. (Pay to Play, is that what it's called?) Well, let's put it this way - if you are already one of the converted, consider it a contribution, to whatever cause Sander happens to be promoting at the moment. And if you are not, I don't think you could stand the heat for very long. The Parrot long thought he was redder than a scarlet tanager, but at Vox Pop we have to perch in the loft to avoid getting into a harangue with some "9/11 Truth" type (a cause Sander actively promotes), or someone who wants Ralph Nader to run again. All the same, better this than listening to the discourse on the other side of the fence. (Question regarding evolution and Sam Brownback: does the evidence suggest that he more likely evolved from Neanderthals or Cretins? Could it be his ancestors were the evolutionary fork that leads to both? This would explain his position on Darwinism.)

So where was I? Vox Pop, the radical coffeehouse that is going to revive Cortelyou Road, expand into all major U.S cities within two years, and capture 10% of the multibillion dollar coffee market by selling Fair Trade coffee and locally brewed beer... Or not, but I am damn glad they started here. And one of the latest reasons I'm glad - I was starting to talk about what I did last Saturday night, wasn't I? - is Marx in Soho, the one-man, one-act play by Howard (A People's History of the United States) ZInn. Incidentally, he's the guy who wrote A People's History of the United States. Like Vox Pop, Zinn dared to tread where few had gone before, writing a lengthy, detailed account of U.S. history as seen not from the vantage point of the elite few who directed the show but the dispossessed, disenfranchised many who actually (come to think of it) built this country. And interestingly enough, he also wrote some plays, including this one. It has not been produced very often, at least until Robert Weick took it upon himself to learn the demanding solo part and promote the show to college campuses, small theatres, and radical coffeehouses like Vox Pop (possibly a class of one).

So what is it? Alright, I'm going to tell you, but you have to promise one thing - you won't like tune out, log off, turn on the parrot filter, etc., until you give the idea a chance. Okay, ready? Here it is: Marx comes back from the dead to deliver a critique of contemporary Western society. All right, are you still with me? Good, because it's not quite like what it sounds. A little, but not cloyingly so. Marx comes back, for sure, granted a one hour reprieve by the Opiate of the People (Opius Populi?). And he does give us plenty of reason to believe that were he alive today he would bore us with what we already know if we are not comatose, that profits mean more than people under capitalism, that the Imperialist West supports its standard of living with wars to keep the Oppressed Nations down, that we stole half the country from Mexico, that America was built by immigrant labor who we repay with racism and immigration quotas, and other true clichés. (Dear Mr. Sarkozy, friend of the U.S., enemy of all that post-colonial riffraff that is filtering into your country, please focus on the "true" (vrai)", not the "cliché (cliché)".) But luckily for us, and for the possibility of this play getting performed without coming off preachier than an Easter sermon by Cardinal Egan, this is not what Mr. Weick spends the hour or so talking about.

In fact. Marx seems to have more to say about his boils than about politics, and even more to say about his wife Jenny and their daughters (mainly Elizabeth, though I think he had about 11 in all) than about his boils. He spends several amusing minutes discussing the slovenly persona of Mikhail Bakunin, the Godfather (ooh, would he hate that!) of anarchism. And he talks about the Paris Commune in terms that still manage to be moving 135 years later. There is a lot of history going on, good for the classroom crowd - especially today, when you can't assume that the average, educated 19 year old has the faintest idea what Marxism, communism, socialism, or just about anything else (other than iPodism) means. Marx of course decries the distortion of his views in the hands of the Soviet regime. He lambasts Stalinism (not necessarily by name) and declares (as did the historical Marx) that "I am not a Marxist" (though I can't say that Zinn's script brings out the meaning of this utterance very clearly).

In the end one is glad to have happened to be in Soho (sort of) when Marx dropped in. The performance alone was well worth the price of admission, which included, for $23, a politically correct burger, a small salad, and a damn good pint of some dark amber Dogfish Ale, which I must admit may have enhanced the play without any extra work on Zinn's or Weick's part. Typical Vox Popitis - Sander managed to get an article about the event published in the Times, emailed his constituency, and then had a line of patrons waiting for that PC burger, forcing them to start the play about 40 minutes late. When I came to buy a ticket a few days earlier the only staff person at the store had no idea there was a play, how to buy a ticket for it, how to handle the various discounts, or what the price of coffee is in Nicaragua. (Okay, I didn't ask that - maybe she did know.) Considering they run a printing press and have done performances before I thought it was a little odd that they didn't just print up some tickets. Oh well, organizing the revo takes a lot of energy; ditto organizing to become the third biggest brewed coffee retailer in the U.S. Anyway, what do I care - I'd ten times rather have Vox Pop with all their little quirks and growing pains that Barstucks with their dirty bathrooms and overpriced pastries. More than that, it is the fact that they never uses their spaces, of which they have sometimes three or four within a few blocks, for anything like a musical presentation or a reading or just about anything other than pulling in every possible yuppie, not to mention the occasional emerald-plumed biped in search of an oatmeal cracker. Suggested corporate slogan: "Not A Coffeehouse (Just a "¢offee Hou$e)". Vox Pop fills a cultural vacuum created by the demise of the coffeehouse, be it a folk club, a chess bar or a poetry salon. They've become a neighborhood cultural institution in a little over a year, and I daresay it is awfully refreshing to sometimes find oneself politically to the right of a small business owner. It ain't no Utopia, or they'd give me that pot of fresh brewed tea for being a nice guy. But it's way cool, I mean awesome, groovy, whatever.

Now, to get back to the Marx-Zinn-Weick connection, though the play was definitely entertaining, and Weick's performance top notch, there were things I missed. In the brief discussion session afterward, my question was: when do we get the second act, in which he tells us how socialism is really supposed to work? Aside from that, I was kind of surprised that the only references to 20th century socialism were some digs at the easiest target, the Soviet empire. What about China, Cuba, or Yugoslavia? What about Chile under Allende, Grenada under Bishop, the Prague Spring - are there no models worth praising? If not, then that is a bigger problem for Marx than boils or Bakunin: it's like, you all screwed up, if you had only done it the way I said... And what way is that? Zinn's Marx tells us very little about socialism "as it was supposed to be", actually. You would think this Marx would have a thing or two to say about his vision, even if it were straight out of what the historical Marx said in his Critique of the Gotha Programme and a few other works. Because it is fine and dandy to say, "You see, capitalism still stinks!", but if every attempt to institute socialism since the Paris Commune stinks too, you need a little more than that or you're just getting a stream of hot air. Which is fine for a parrot, but the flight-challenged spectator might not be so thrilled.

I'm dead serious (so is Marx, for that matter, but nevermind) - I think Zinn should write a second act. The play is far from losing our attention by the end, at least with Weick's capable handling of the part. And now that he's memorized all that.... a second act, in which we actually get a sense of the man's vision, seems like it's waiting to be written. Aside from that, I was a little surprised that this Marx, who shows up clutching a wad of contemporary newspapers, has so very little to say about contemporary social problems. Other than one or two passing gestures about the environment there is nothing about this most urgent of political issues. What would Marx think of a European Union? Computers? The Internet? Okay, maybe it is safer not to weigh him down with ad hoc advice on every issue under the sun. And the focus on his own time and immediate surroundings seemed appropriate. As a historical play with a few passes at contemporary updating, it works fine. Be that as it may, having gone this far, I would have donned my Dialectical Materialism Thinking Cap and given my audience a more robust sense of the man's continued relevance.

But all of our Avian Advice aside, this was a surprisingly enjoyable theatrical experience, supported by an excellent one-man perofrmance and I'm guessing a wee bit more than a pint of Dogfish Ale. And now that we know about the ale, the old Wingtipped Minstrel just might pop in to the Open Mike pretty soon. Better plan to walk home, can't afford to get points on my flying license.