As I've said many times already, English progressive rock in the early '80s was in retreat. I'm not sure what it's like to be a musician in a dying movement, but I can't imagine that it's fun. Your specific set of skills and sensibilities, which once felt alive and cutting-edge, are now used as examples of the bloated or out-of-touch old guard; what once was a vibrant community of artists is now a graveyard of shuttered projects. I mean, in the case of prog, we're still talking about artists generating millions in ticket and album sales—Yes's last pre-hiatus album, 1980's Drama, peaked at #2 on the UK charts—and pretending to record an LP as an excuse to go on a beach vacation, so on the one hand, perhaps all these guys deserved was the tiniest violin in the world (with which they undoubtedly created a 15-minute instrumental suite in tribute to Tolkien's Silmarillion or something). But on the other hand, I do kind of understand how this might have been a trying time for prog musicians, at least existentially, to have the world that you've built your entire adult life around begin to turn on your endeavors.
So it makes sense that these musicians would want to shore up their resources and tilt toward the new mainstream. And oh boy, did they. I've already talked in previous posts about how most of the bands that survived the late-'70s had, in the early '80s, transitioned into pop or pop-adjacent projects, be that New Wave (Yes's 1983 reunion record 90125), synth-rock (Rush's Signals in 1982), or just straight-up pop-rock (Genesis's Abacab in 1981). But I haven't talked much about how much the increasingly small world of '70s-turned-'80s prog had become a veritable game of musical chairs. Musicians jumped from band to band, project to project, in search of artistic fulfillment, commercial success, freedom from bandmates who trample their egos, or (ideally) all three. Prog had always been a pretty collaborative genre with shifting personnel, and while even at its early '70s peak, prog still had the battle of egos and competing artistic/commercial impulses, at least the effect of this rotating talent made the golden age feel similar to how jazz communities work, with musicians flitting from project to project because they are too full of ideas for a single band configuration to contain them. But now ten years later, in the '80s, it's clear that there's a real scramble for opportunity within the English prog community motivated by (at least the perception of) scarcity.
Lucky for us listeners, it still yielded some good music! Yes's new lineup on 90125 unequivocally slaps, and while '80s Rush can be a little hit-and-miss, the balance is definitely more toward the hits. I can even get behind nu-Gensis at times. But probably the best example of making a silk purse out of the sow's ear of the trend-chasing and personnel shuffling of the early '80s is Asia.
I'm cheating a little bit to include Asia on this project, since one of my rules is that each band gets only one post, and Asia is comprised almost entirely of musicians from bands I've already covered. It is, in other words, a supergroup. But I've already covered a supergroup in this series (ELP), so since I've already opened that door, might as well let a few more people in. Asia's drummer is Carl Palmer, who of course is the "Palmer" in Emerson, Lake & Palmer; Steve Howe, guitarist and backing vocalist, was Yes's guitarist from 1970 up until the band's 1981 hiatus; John Wetten, lead vocals and bass and one of the primary Asia songwriters, had been in King Crimson (though during the group's legendary mid-'70s trio of albums, not on In the Court of the Crimson King). And then we have Geoff Downes, the keyboardist and (alongside Howe) the other major songwriter in the group as well as being probably the most important member of Asia, at least for the purposes of this post, for reasons I'll get into now.
In one sense, Downes is just another progger that ended up in Asia during the musical chairs of the early '80s, having been a member of Yes immediately before that band temporarily disbanded. But he's not really in the same class as, say, Carl Palmer or Steve Howe. He was, in fact, only in Yes for a year before the hiatus[1], and it was decidedly a lark for Downes. Downes is much better known for his involvement with The Buggles, a New Wave duo consisting of Downes and Trevor Horn that found moderate success with their two studio albums and massive success with their debut single in 1979. In fact, if you know The Buggles at all, it's almost certainly because of that debut single: "Video Killed the Radio Star." Written by Downes, Horn, and their former bandmate, Bruce Woolley[2], "Video Killed the Radio Star" is one of the defining crossover moments for New Wave into commercial pop, a #1 hit in at least 10 countries, and famously the very first music video MTV ever aired—it was, as they say in the business, a big deal, which transitively made Downes and Horn a big deal.
The Buggles acquired Brian Lane as their manager following their smashing success on the back of "Video Killed the Radio Star," and in a bit of fortune, Lane also happened to manage Yes; perhaps seeing the writing on the wall for the aging prog group (especially after vocalist Jon Anderson and keyboardist Rick Wakeman left in early 1980[3]), he asked Downes and Horn to join Yes for the recording and touring of the album that eventually became Drama. The two agreed to do so for reasons I can't quite fathom, essentially dissolving The Buggles in the process[4] and becoming lightning rods for hate from Yes fans irritated at Anderson's replacement and the slightly poppier touches that the pair brought to Drama. Apparently they were booed in concert, which is probably not what Lane had in mind when he was hoping to salvage Yes. The band broke up the following year.
But some important seeds were planted. The infusion of New Wave with prog ended up being a gigantic development in the long run. Prog bands like Genesis who had pivoted to pop had usually done so through a baroque or art pop portal, with members basically brushing off their own pop skills (Phil Collins in Genesis, for example), but The Buggles's involvement in Drama brought musicians who had cut their teeth as pop songwriters into the prog fold, showing that perhaps there was more of a direction forward for prog than people might have guessed and that this direction had to do with the merging of pop talents with prog instrumentalists. Even if Drama in particular didn't quite find the right format, the symbiosis between pop New Wave and prog would prove to be enormously fruitful for both genres, at least commerically. In fact, for all the talk about New Wave and punk killing off prog, there really was a lot of room for overlap between the old and the new, most obviously encapsulated by Yes's 90125 (and, to a weirder extent, King Crimson's early '80s trilogy of Discipline, Beat, and Three of a Perfect Pair) but also just generally with The Buggles's having zero qualms just hopping into Yes when the occasion offered itself. At least at times, New Wave and prog were more or less friends, and New Wave didn't kill prog as much as it absorbed a good portion of it and in doing so brought prog full circle to its early-'70s heyday adjacent to the mainstream, albeit in a much different form.
And it wasn't just New Wave that could benefit from this approach of having pop sensibilities merged with prog instrumentation—which brings us back to Asia. Even before the dissolution of Yes, Steve Howe and John Wetton were writing material for a new project, a project that Carl Palmer (newly displaced from a disbanded Emerson, Lake & Palmer and halfheartedly involved in the band PM with guitarist John Nitzinger) soon joined as well. When Yes broke up, Howe brought over Geoff Downes, and Asia was complete. Within the next year, the group had released their self-titled first album.
The music on Asia is not New Wave by any stretch of the imagination, despite the presence of Downes, nor was it truly a progressive rock album, despite Palmer, Wetton, and Howe being there. The album was produced and engineered by Mike Stone, who was not exactly a stranger to prog (he had worked on Genesis's Nursery Crimes), but who was also much more immersed in the arena rock scene of the '70s, having worked extensively with Queen throughout the first wave of their career, helping that band in the span of a few years to go from the quirky pomp of their first two albums to their arena-rock smash News of the World[5]). He's also the producer behind Escape, the 1981 album that transformed Journey from the barely successful jazz-fusion/prog wannabes they were in the '70s to the belting-to-the-cheap-seats power balladeers they are famous for being[6]. Accordingly, more than anything else, Asia is an arena rock record. It's got punchy singalong choruses; its songs consist of, as Robert Christgau memorably puts it, "two lyrics about why they like their girlfriends, three about 'surviving,' and four about why they don't like their girlfriends"; it's loud; it's brash; it's swaggering; the closing track, "Here Comes the Feeling," features (presumably) Carl Palmer just pounding a cowbell. You could be forgiven for at times confusing some of these songs with, say, a Foreigner track. And that's entirely the point.
Alongside New Wave, arena rock was the lingua franca of mainstream rock in the 1980s, with even ostensibly hard rock bands like Scorpions swinging for the cheap seats with those big chorus hooks in the '80s, not to mention the whole hair/glam metal thing taking off with the likes of Bon Jovi, Def Leppard, and Poison. So Asia's whole conceit seems to be to throw all these old prog dudes together with this hot, young pop guy and a mainstream producer and jump as enthusiastically as possible into that mainstream with a big, anthemic record with monster hooks. And on that rubric, it's entirely successful. If you're into this kind of music, Asia presents nine cheesy, catchy, fun arena rock songs that, frankly, kick ass. I've talked some in my past posts about the general insipidness among the music produced by prog's late-'70s push toward pop and craven commercial motives, and I still stand by my criticism in general. But as this post has already amply alluded to, there were some exceptions that managed to find gold outside of the prog tradition, and I declare without a shred of irony that Asia is one of the best of that lucky group.
Reading the liner notes, it's hard to tell exactly who's responsible for writing which pieces of the songs (they are all collaborative efforts), but it doesn't seem like an accident that the hookiest songs on the album are the ones on which Downes is credited as a songwriter: "Wildest Dreams," "Only Time Will Tell," "Sole Survivor," and especially the opener, "Heat of the Moment," which became Asia's biggest hit, going to #1 on the Billboard Mainstream Rock charts and all the way to #4 on the Billboard Hot 100. The world may have lost The Buggles, but those songwriting chops didn't go anywhere. These songs go hard.
Asia's status as a progressive rock record is a little more fraught. A cursory glance at the album reveals exactly zero songs over six minutes in length and nothing about that cool serpent with the glowing orb on the cover (the lyrics are, as I've already quoted Christgau as having pointed out, a bunch of rock clichés). And then there are those big hooks and the verse-chorus-verse structures. On the surface, this definitely doesn't sound like prog; there are a few moments that feel overtly progressive, like the mostly instrumental last minute of "Cutting It Fine" or the way "Only Time Will Tell" just throws out the word "insincerity" like it's a college seminar, but even then, Asia never sounds any proggier than than something like Styx's "Come Sail Away" does (arena rock's inherent grandiosity always shares a little of prog's pomp). A closer listen unearths something a little more interesting, though, which is that if you listen to just small samples of the music, it becomes clear that these musicians are playing like they're on a prog album: Howe's soaring guitar, Palmer's intricate drum patterns, Downes's atmospheric keyboard—none of these would feel out of place on a more traditional prog album. But the songwriting keeps this instrumentation firmly grounded in recognizable pop structures. The effect is a curious one in which the prog musicians' progginess is kind of treated like session musician skills only to be broken out in service of the songwriting. It's prog put into an arena-rock-shaped container. It's like an answer to the concerned prog fan's conundrum: "What if I like prog, but I also like Foreigner? And cocaine?" Welcome to the '80s, man.
A fair enough question to raise about all this is why any of it deserves its own post in this series[7]. As I've already mentioned, arena rock has always tangoed with progressive rock, from Boston to Styx to even Queen, who got their own post in this series already. But most of those examples involve musicians who were never particularly ensconced in the main prog vein dabbling in prog sounds for flavor; what to me feels different and noteworthy about Asia, at least in the context of arena rock, is that it works the other way around; the band consists almost entirely of people from the hardcore center of progressive rock dabbling in arena rock. This isn't an arena band hopping on the prog trend; it's a prog band hopping on the arena trend, a reversal of roles that feels not just a little symbolic. Moreover, in the context of prog's evolution in general, Asia represents one of the purer encapsulations of the specific ways that nearly all the surviving prog bands were dealing with the changing fortunes of a new decade. Like Genesis, it shows prog musicians shifting toward poppier formats; like what would eventually happen with Yes, this shift was aided by the addition of a relative outsider that would help bend traditional prog instrumentalists toward a more credibly pop sound.
In addition to all this, what's also interesting about Asia is that unlike most of the other prog groups that pivoted toward pop formats, Asia doesn't really brand itself as a reinvention. To go back to the same two horses I've been beating this whole post, if you look at major pop gestures from prog groups like Genesis's Abacab or Yes's 90125, these are meant to be seen as major departures with hip marketing and cool '80s-mod artwork. You hate prog? You like cool, modern music that isn't preoccupied with baroque structures and big ol' concepts? Check out this! Or this! I mean, the lead single off 90125 has breakbeat on it; no confusing that for prog, right? Contrast that with Asia, which fully presents itself as a prog record, from the progressive who's who of the musicians right down to the album art, designed by none other than Roger Dean[8] at his Roger Dean-iest; Asia makes no bones about being a record full of high fantasy and epic suites, and the fact that it isn't actually full of those things is all the more interesting, since it seems basically to argue that prog isn't fantasy yarns and side-long compositions anymore; arena rock, Asia argues, is prog. While 90125 and Abacab might say, "If you hate prog, try this," Asia does the opposite: "If you love prog, this is where it's at now."
And if that's the argument this album is implicitly making, it's not quite wrong. if we only look at the old guard of prog, arena rock was pretty much where prog musicians were allowed to be their proggiest so long as they colored within the lines, and "session musicians in their own band" isn't an inaccurate appraisal of what most of these guys would be doing during the '80s, puttering around in various roles in mainstream rock and pop. Which is kind of bittersweet. On the one hand, the sound you hear in Asia is the sound of prog persisting at the expense of its spirit and ambition, which is sad. On the other hand, it's nice to see it persist at all, and especially in a package as enjoyable as Asia is; prog gets compared a lot to dinosaurs, implying that it's outmoded, but what a lot of people forget is that dinosaurs evolved into birds. Arena rock and mainstream pop aren't the most elegant of birds, but hey, it's better than extinction.
But also, to say that records like Asia were where prog was going in the early '80s isn't quite right either; at the same time as John Wetton was teaming up with a New Wave hot shot to write "Heat of the Moment," the prog spirit was being carried on much more purely by a number of different sources. The original cycle of progressive rock had, with Asia, now completely run its course, but a couple of new waves inspired by classic prog were just getting started. We haven't said goodbye to nonsense lyrics and epic compositions yet. Not by a long shot.
Until 1983!
1] He would later return to Yes in the 21st century, appearing as a keyboardist and backing vocalist on the band's two most recent albums, 2011's Fly From Here and 2014's Heaven & Earth (neither of which I've heard).
2] Who took the song with him when he left and recorded his own version with his own band, Bruce Woolley and the Camera Club. It's not as good.
3] Wakeman had already left the band once before, so it wasn't a big surprise that he'd leave, but Jon Anderson's quitting the band was a pretty big blow, considering how much his vocals were central to the Yes sound. Don't worry, though; he'd be back for 90125. Hilariously, though, is that apparently the event that precipitated Anderson's departure was that drummer Alan White broke his ankle roller skating at a nightclub, delaying the next album's recording by six weeks. I have a lot of questions about this, foremost being: roller skating in nightclubs was a thing?
4] The Buggles would have just one more studio album, 1981's Adventures in Modern Recording, which they recorded after Yes disbanded.
5] Which of course includes the immortal "We Will Rock You" / "We Are the Champions" opening.
6] Readers will remember that Escape opens with—what else?—"Don't Stop Believin'," the arena rock song to end arena rock songs.
7] The boring answer is that 1982 is yet another year in which nothing terribly interesting is going on with prog outside of a few examples like Asia.
8] Just to remind you, this is the guy who made the cover art for pretty much all the classic Yes albums, as well as some Uriah Heep and Gentle Giant covers. He's probably more responsible for the visual aesthetic of '70s progressive rock than any other one individual (though the collective Hipgnosis is probably the most responsible).
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