You can divide the classic era of British progressive rock into two basic camps—well, to be fair, you can divide it into a lot of different camps, but here's one division that's relatively cut-and-dried: in 1960s and '70s prog, there were classicists and there were avant-gardists. On prog's more classicist end, you have bands like Yes, Genesis, and Emerson, Lake & Palmer, whose primary ambitions laid in lending a classical-music-esque grandiosity to the realm of rock music, while with prog's avant-garde, you have the likes of King Crimson and Van der Graaf Generator, whose fractured, dissonant sounds are much more akin to the angularity of 20th-century classical and post-bop jazz.
I don't want to oversimplify stuff here; there's a lot of crossover between these two prog impulses—for example, King Crimson's '60s output has about as much classicist material as avant-garde, and Yes has a very clear avant-garde edge to its early '70s work; honestly, the entirely project of prog itself, even at its poppiest, is nothing if not experimental and semi-dissonant, at least when compared to some of the more populist genres at the time. But generally speaking, these are the two broad ethoses at work in the early goings of prog.
Which then makes it interesting to look at Soft Machine's first album right on the heels of the Moody Blues' Days of Future Past from last time, as these two debuts do a pretty great job of contrasting the two main directions prog would go in the following decade, the Moodies embodying the classicist impulses while the Soft Machine heads up more avant-garde propensities. As with Days of Future Passed, I'm not sure that The Soft Machine[1] is a full-blooded prog album, at least not by the standards set by the most famous examples of the genre—I think we've still got one year to go until a release truly crystallizes that sound[2]—but we're close enough that I'd still count it. What's that expression? Horseshoes, hand grenades, and prog rock?
Anyway, about this album. I'll go ahead and get the negative out of the way first: The Soft Machine is one of those records that's way more historically significant than it is interesting. I mean, it's an alright album on its own, if a little stilted in the way it stitches its various tones together, but it's far from what I'd call Soft Machine's artistic peak (which, for the record, I'd peg a few albums down the line at 1970's jazz-fusion opus Third). So we've kind of got a Snow White-Disney situation here, where I don't think anyone would ever call the debut the best of the bunch, but it's almost unquestionably the most important. And I mean really important. What The Soft Machine is is a more or less direct evolutionary link between psychedelic rock and progressive rock, which makes it a pretty big deal in the scope of this blog series.
Except for maybe "Nights in White Satin," Days of Future Passed is a collection of just slightly tipsy pop tunes wrapped in some pretty straight-laced orchestration, and while the incorporation of that orchestration is as important an innovation as any for the general principals of prog's state of mind, it's hard to say that it's a natural outgrowth of the prevailing psychedelic sound vibrant in the UK in the mid-to-late '60s—think Cream, think early Pink Floyd, think the Jimi Hendrix Experience, all bands that are expanding the boundaries of rock music through extended repetition, improvisation, and electronic distortion, not string instrumentation. Enter Soft Machine[3], the weirder, hipper, more literate[4] cousin of all those bands. What's so important about their debut album is that it takes the premise of psychedelic rock and tries to give it new form by applying an organizing ethos to the recordings. That organizing ethos is to draw on not just blues archetypes (as had been the standard for other psychedelic bands) but also jazz. And it blows the possibilities for psychedelic rock wide open.
The true habitat of psych rock in the '60s was always in its live setting, where the performances had a vivacity and strangeness that bands often had trouble translating to records. The most common result is that psychedelic LPs ended up sounding a lot more poppy than their deranged live versions—just compare Piper at the Gates of Dawn to live recordings of Pink Floyd from the same era and you'll know what I mean. Bizarre, sweeping jams become condensed into 2-3 minute tracks, etc. It seems as though the members of Soft Machine were aware of this possible pitfall and had even fallen prey to it themselves; if you listen to early Soft Machine releases (for example, 1967's "Love Makes Sweet Music"[5]), you'll hear mostly conventional, albeit hazy, pop/rock structures, despite that by this time, the band had already established themselves as a standard-bearer for imaginative, outré live sets. By the time of the recording of their debut, though, the band had found a solution to that problem, and, interestingly, that solution bears a striking conceptual similarity to what the Moody Blues did in Days of Future Passed: link the pop-song kernels of their music with suites of non-pop, though in the case of Soft Machine, the non-pop at play was not classical but jazz. In doing so, The Soft Machine becomes the earliest album I know of to successfully replicate the spirit of live psychedelic music in the studio.
Arnold Shaw, writing on the original album sleeve, says that "the [band's] drive is to synthesize the diverse sounds of jazz and rock in an electronic continuity. 'Continuity' is the precise word, for even in personals, the group's sets are like suites, with an organ-drum interlude serving as a bridge to the next tune." Shaw's absolutely right: "continuity" is the vital word here, and for more than what he's talking about. Sure, there's sonic continuity in that each side of the LP has extended suites of continuous music, sans the normal breaks between songs, with instrumental jazz improvisations filling in the space between the more conventional melodies. But that's not exactly an innovation; the Moody Blues with their classical interludes had sonic continuity, too[6]. What makes The Soft Machine special is that it builds sonic continuity out of instrumental continuity. By that I mean that unlike the Moodies' orchestral passages, the connective tissue between Soft Machine's formal songs is played on the same instruments as the songs themselves are, which gives the impression that these non-pop flourishes are flowing naturally from the songs as opposed to interrupting the songs (as is sometimes the case on Days of Future Passed). As a result, the band manages to pull apart the boundaries of the songs themselves, and everything kind of blends together into this odd sea of instrumentation that feels bigger than pop music. That's huge for progressive rock, this ability to disassemble the components of pop and reconstruct them into larger, more continuous pieces. You heard it from Soft Machine first.
It also helps that the core songs are a lot weirder than anything on Days of Future Passed, meaning that the improvised sections don't feel as out of place as they might have on, say, a Mamas & the Papas album. This, coupled with the strong jazz touches, is what I'm talking about when I refer to The Soft Machine as being an early ambassador for prog's avant-garde side of the family. Tracks like "We Did It Again" and "So Boot If At All" are chock full of these out-there sound collages and instrument distortions, and "Why Are We Sleeping?", with its repetitive harmonies and organ-guitar breakdowns, is unclassifiable as anything outside of some primordial mash-up of heavy metal and krautrock. It's a strange-sounding record, to say the least.
So that's all cool. But, as I said before, a lot of it is more historically and conceptually cool than it is actually fun to listen to. That's not to say that there aren't good moments ("Why Are We Sleeping?" comes to mind as a particular highlight) or that the album is bad, per se, but the seams definitely show. It's unfortunately obvious that Soft Machine was pioneering new sounds and techniques here, because the mixing at certain points—especially transitions between songs—can be rough and often awkward. I'm thinking specifically of "A Certain Kind," a slower, sweeter song that closes out side one and that jars the flow of the album pretty badly. That's the worst instance, but there are other examples all over the album. And while I'm complaining, I might as well bring up the Robert Wyatt's vocals, which I find strained and occasionally grating throughout the album. Listen, Robert Wyatt is a very talented man[7], but I'm afraid singing is not among those prodigious talents. It might be more endurable on this album if the lyrics were anything worth our time, but for the most part, they're just boilerplate '60s rock: lots of "baby"s and "love"s with a touch of pseudo-mysticism. Thankfully, future Soft Machine albums would move away from vocals entirely.
I really don't want to be too hard on this album. It does some heavy lifting for prog while still managing to be a good album on its own right. Still, knowing what's to come (both for the band[9] and the genre as a whole), it's hard not to think of this album as a sort of pit stop rather than a destination of its own.
But what do you think? Agree? Disagree? Feel free to contribute to anything I've said here (or heck, go off on some other tangent) down in the comments. As always, discussion is great.
Until 1969!
1] Later known simply as Volume One, in keeping with the numerical scheme of the band's later albums.
2] Aw yeah, y'all know what it is. It's going to be great.
3] Or, as they were known at the time, The Soft Machine, since an unwritten rule of British rock of the '60s is that all bands must have a definite article at the front of their name. It happened to Pink Floyd, too, who were The Pink Floyd until the '70s.
4] The Soft Machine is the title of a William S. Burroughs novel.
5] Which, by the way, is a great song, even if it's a crappy distillation of live psychedelic music.
6] As did the Beatles in Sgt. Pepper and the albums immediately following. Continuous sound was pretty mainstream.
7] In addition to being a major creative figure in Soft Machine, he'd also contribute to several other ambitious avant-prog bands over the next decade or two, including Henry Cow[8] and Matching Mole.
8] Best prog band name ever? Perhaps.
9] I forgot to mention this earlier, but Soft Machine would go on to become a central group in the not inconsequential "Canterbury" subgenre of prog, which makes the band doubly important as innovators. In fact, The Soft Machine is a pretty decent introduction to the Canterbury prog sound: heavy jazz influence, heavy avant-garde tendencies, fleet moments of weirdness and whimsy. That's another reason I wanted to cover Soft Machine here; I wasn't sure if I'd have a chance to write about anything else from the Canterbury scene later on, since the early '70s (Canterbury's heyday) get pretty crowded with classic releases from prog's mainline.
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