Progressive rock came of age in a big way in 1971. Good progressive rock albums—even great ones—exist prior to 1971, and the general ethos of the genre had, by this time, permeated the European rock scene for a couple years at least. But when you scan the field for preexisting prog, there's just something smaller about it, some sense that, compared to where the genre would go, the bands just hadn't managed to realize the promise of their live shows and intellectual ambitions. As I pointed out last time, the boundaries between prog, metal, art rock, and pop were remarkably fluid in the UK, such that acts like David Bowie and The Beatles weren't meaningfully distinguished as separate from, say, Yes[1]. And then came 1971, and with it, a flood of prog classics. The Yes Album. Tarkus. Acquiring the Taste. Nursery Crime. Meddle. Freakin' Fragile. Major, career-defining works from major, genre-defining groups. These weren't albums you would ever think about lumping in with Bowie. With these releases—pretty much prog's Cambrian explosion
—progressive rock established itself as something strange, epic, and altogether different from what any other scene in rock music (even psychedelic rock) was doing. With 1971, genre boundaries were hardened; capes were donned.
Pawn Hearts, the fourth album by the Manchester-based Van der Graaf Generator, is not the best of the '71 bunch (that distinction would have to go to either Pink Floyd's Meddle or Yes's Fragile). But it may be the most important, because with Pawn Hearts comes (to my knowledge) the last prog innovation to graft itself onto the genre's DNA: the three-song album.
The three-song album usually goes a little something like this: one side of the LP has two songs, usually 9-10 minutes in length a piece, and usually both a bit light in tone, while the other side of the record has a single, epic suite that stretches anywhere from 17-24 minutes and is usually dark, brooding, and complex. It's a popular structure for progressive rock albums, the two most famous examples coming from Yes, with 1972's Close to the Edge and 1974's Relayer, and it's super effective at imbuing even a relatively slight 34-37 minute album with a sense of grandeur and scope while still giving the band a little room to play with different styles. And as far as I can tell, Van der Graaf got there first.
The idea of having one side of a rock LP be the "light" half with the poppy hits and the second side have the "experimental" stuff had been kicked around for a while before Pawn Hearts, all the way back to '60s Frank Zappa oddities and The Beatles' Abbey Road, and the idea of having a single track encompass an entire side of a 45" had been popular in jazz for well over a decade and had already been explored by rock-ish groups like Pink Floyd and Soft Machine (and even Bob Dylan) for a few years, too. But that specific, fruitful combination of having all the tracks be epic-length, with two of them being slightly less epic, was new. And it gave prog the idea, for better or for worse, that hey, maybe an album doesn't need poppy songs on its "light" side.
Arguably, prog would have gotten to that epiphany with or without Van der Graaf Generator's help. It definitely was moving in that direction already, especially with the increasingly a-melodic, avant-garde grooves of the likes of Soft Machine and Caravan in the Canterbury scene. But golly, if Pawn Hearts didn't give it a shove, because there's not a darn thing on this album that resembles anything close to a traditional pop/rock song, much less a radio hit[2]. The track length definitely has a lot to do with this: "Man-Erg," the second and shortest track, still weighs in at a hefty 10:25. Radio stations barely give half that time for "Hey Jude," much less a Van der Graaf Generator song.
Van der Graaf Generator's a weird band. I mean that in a few different ways. It's an eccentric collection of instrumentalists, for starters: Pawn Hearts alone features piano, organ, guitar[3], three kinds of saxophone, flute, synthesizer, mellotron, and something called a psychedelic razor, and that's not even taking into account the generally cacophonous production and idiosyncratic styles each of VdGG's four players give each of their instruments. Apparently one recording session involved the band recording sixteen (!!) different songs and then playing them back all simultaneously (according to band leader Peter Hammill, the resulting blast of Van der Graafs only made its way into about a minute's worth of the 23-minute closer, "A Plague of Lighthouse Keepers"). Other times, as in "Man-Erg," the band crashes screaming hard rock and impressionist saxophone blasts into delicate piano balladry. Even at the album's most melodic, the secondary and tertiary instruments deliver flairs of dissonance and avant-garde fragmentation. All this makes Peter Hammill's vocals (which are actually kind of lovely, echoing both the theatrics and versatility of David Bowie[4]) even more alien in context, again setting melody and pleasantry against a grain of experimentation. It's an odd, baffling sound that nowadays recalls, of all bands, Of Montreal in their noisier moments.
And it's not as if the lyrics help sooth any of this alienation. In pretty much every one of their albums, the band writes in dystopias and apocalypses. Their second record, The Least We Can Do Is Wave to Each Other, closes with a spooky, synthesized voice shouting "total annihilation" just before leaning into a rollicking, repeating outro of "And when the water falls again, all is dead and nobody lives." Cheery stuff. Although Pawn Hearts doesn't have anything quite that bleak, all three of its songs definitely engage with dystopias of varying degrees. The opener, "Lemmings," describes what seems to be the collapse of a kingdom (or even civilization in general); the troubled speaker of "Man-Erg" faces a more existential threat, singing of how "A killer lives inside me" and eventually shrieking, in a rather frightening passage[5], "How can I be free? Am I really me?"; the epic closer, "A Plague of Lighthouse Keepers," is sort of a combination of the first two, describing an unfortunate scenario in which someone experiences both interior and exterior apocalypses at the same time.
The extent to which you find all of this "good" is probably a good indication of how much you like prog in general. This intricate, chaotic sound and deadly serious writing definitely anticipates the genre's future, as more and more bands moved away from their playful, psychedelic roots and poppy whimsy and more toward increased complexity and stone-faced grandeur. When at the end of the '70s punk rockers sneered at prog, this is the sort of thing they had in mind[6]. This is prog, folks. Bask in the excess.
My personal take is that the album is overall pretty solid, though nowhere near as good as the best prog would have to offer even during this same year. It's not so much the intent or the disorienting instrumentals or the darkness. I actually really dig the darkness—prog could be pretty darn hippyish in its early-going, so it's nice to see some good, old-fashioned '70s malaise thrown in there. It's that those three—intention, instrumentals, and darkness—don't always synchronize as successfully as they should to make the album consistently engaging. When it's on, it's on: "Lemmings" is the best track here, and it's the place where all the various philosophical and musical impulses gel. At the album's best, the unease delivered by the bizarre instrumentation bolsters the unease expressed by the lyrics, and that's what's happening in "Lemmings" (not to mention that it's got a pretty cool riff at the "We have looked upon the heroes" part, although I'm pretty sure there isn't any guitar in there). It's also what's happening in that spooky mid-section of "Man-Erg." That song isn't nearly as successful overall, though, despite being the most lyrically interesting; its beginning minutes, which feature just piano and vocals, are too operatic for my tastes and stuffy in that '70s FM radio way that's kind of insufferable. "A Plague of Lighthouse Keepers" fares about in the middle, grouping some great passages with others that are awkward, overly portentous, or just plain dull. It also does this thing that a lot of early, lengthy prog tracks do, which is that it's more of a bunch of small song ideas stitched into a longer, lumpier mass—in fact, iTunes adds "(Medley)" to the end of the song title, and that seems about right.
Pawn Hearts has the reputation of being a prog classic. On artistic merits alone, I'm not sure if I can fully go along with that consensus. It certainly isn't bad (and I'd say it's good without quite being able to call it great), and it's a vital evolutionary step for the genre, which does make it essential listening for anyone looking to get a good historical survey of the progress of progressive rock, which—what do you know!—is exactly what I'm doing in this series. Good thing we stopped in, isn't it?
Until 1972!
1] In fact, future Yes pianist and general prog maximalist Rick Wakeman worked extensively on Bowie's 1971 Hunky Dory before eventually declining Bowie's invitation to join the Spiders From Mars in favor of a position in the Yes lineup. The genetics of early '70s British rock is a strange soup.
2] The lone single from the Pawn Hearts sessions, the instrumental "Theme One," doesn't even appear on the official UK release of the album, although US and Canadian versions shoved the track in between "Lemmings" and "Man-Erg" to create what Nirvana would call a "radio-friendly unit shifter." Apparently the band did not approve.
3] King Crimson's creative guide/guitarist extraordinaire Robert Fripp makes an appearance, too, although it's hard to pick him out with the (no joke) dozen tracks dubbed on one another.
4] Who, incidentally, was recording Hunky Dory at the same studio at the same time as VdGG were working on Pawn Hearts. Genetic soup, I'm telling you.
5] This is that part I was talking about earlier with the piano ballad colliding with all the avant-garde stuff. It's super effective at evoking the guy's state of mind.
6] Although interestingly, John Lydon, aka Johnny Rotten of the Sex Pistols, was apparently a VdGG fan back in the day (no clue on what he thinks of them now).
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