The Show That Never Ends by David Weigel

Author:David Weigel
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
Published: 2017-08-26T04:00:00+00:00

GAUGING SUCCESS, or predicting a breakout, was an inexact science. Peter Hammill reconstituted Van der Graaf Generator in 1975, promising a revision of the sound. “Previously we were very much an overdubbing band, which at the time wasn’t something that people did all that much,” Hammill told Melody Maker. “The great problem with the whole psychedelia era was that the wall of sound was being produced but totally without control. There wasn’t, in fact, the degree of musicianship behind it which would make it valid.”28

The new band had the full support of Charisma, which released a series of comeback albums and paid for ambitious tours. In 1976 the band put out two melodic albums: Still Life and the ironically titled World Record. An American tour, outfitted with a full road crew and light show, simply could not make back its cost. The crowds diminished as the band returned for shows in England. At the final gig of the tour, in Germany, no one missed the joke of a bill that allied VdGG with the band Farewell. The result was that “Farewell Van Der Graaf Generator” appeared on all of the badges. “It was demoralizing for all of us,” said bass player Pete Donovan. “I left halfway through.”29

A similar drama afflicted Daevid Allen’s Gong, but the ageless pixie of the progressives went along with it. In 1975 he parted with the radically transformed group. Steve Hillage, a proudly unevolved hippie who fascinated the music press, became the creative force in the group. “There had been a punk revolution in the ranks of Gong,” Allen said. “After I left Gong in ’75, I grew quickly tired of the clean hair, white clothes, and glistening instruments of the prog rock coterie and fell into bed with the UK punk revolution, which was extremely raw, dangerously violent, and as wild as a cyclonic updraft. Maybe I was lifted up into the land of transcendental punkadelics.”30

Once again, Allen found himself outside of a group he’d created, happily building from the spare parts. He teamed up with the musicians of Here & Now, old associates of Gong, for a project that would be released as Floating Anarchy 1977 by Planet Gong. Punkadelica was born; extraterrestrial bleeping and Allen poetry were brought into the zeitgeist by reliable, thudding riffs. A single, “Opium for the People,” fit more naturally in the moment than most of what Allen’s peers had done.

“Curiously, the UK press kept publicizing Gong as the most likely band to be assassinated by the kill-the-hippy extremists while I was running with the assassins and misbehaving in their ranks,” said Allen. “Seven or eight of us would rampage through London in a battered Bedford van and conduct lightning graffiti raids on everything we could get away with. We toured the UK for free in an outrageously antique bus with a coal stove at its rear. It had a top speed of about 50 mph and would black out the motorway behind us with great clouds of smoke from the stove.

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