Return with me, dear reader, to the days of 17-minute song suites, the days of double-necked guitars, the days of keyboardists dramatically playing two synthesizers at once. The days of Emerson, Lake and Palmer, of Gentle Giant, of Amon Duul II. The days of progressive rock.
Emerging out of the musical underground in the late '60s and early '70s, prog rock flourished in the mid-to-late '70s. But a huge backlash in the punk/new wave days eventually took its toll and by the mid-'80s, prog rock had all but vanished from the face of the earth.
Or so it appeared. It turns out that prog rock had just gone back underground, to basements and garages where musicians could jam and improvise and create the complex music of their dreams.
This is the story of Mind Gallery. Keyboardist Elio Bruno, bassist Mike Anderton and drummer Tracy Gloeckner have spent a decade in the basement experimenting with all sorts of strange times and sounds and beats. Two years ago, they added guitarist Gary Bourgeois -- aka Gary Middleclass, a local punk legend who'd done time in the Payola$, e? and the Generators.
By treating their music "as a hobby," the band was able to concentrate on music they thought was interesting, rather than compromising for commercial potential. Finaly, they've decided the time is ripe to come out of the basement and into the sunlight. Mind Gallery has released a debut CD -- The Lemmings Were Pushed -- and has booked a rare live show for this Saturday at Station Street Theatre, 930 Station St. (by the VIA Rail Station).
Say it loud, they're prog rockers, and they're proud.
"I always considered prog-rock the classical music of our generation," states Bruno, a 36-year-old postie with wide musical tastes (his CD collection runs from the Butthole Surfers to Tchaikovsky).
"Compared to radio pop and stuff like that, it was the high end of rock. That's what I was going for. The worst thing that happened for me was the end of the '70s, when record companies and the media conspired to destroy prog-rock, calling it pretentious and stuff. I've never seen any other form of music get the attack that prog-rock did.
"I hate country music, but I don't go to a country bar and go, 'this stuff should be banned, it's the spawn of Satan!' But you mention prog-rock, and people get that excited about it, like it should be banned off the face of the earth and never played again.
"There's room for everybody. Some people like gospel, some people like whatever. I want music that makes me think. I don't feel music in my body, I feel it in my head."
To make matters worse, Bruno feels a lot of his prog-rock idols abandoned prog-rock when the going got tough, chasing commercial goals rather than artistic ones ("they decided to become the Archies"). In the '80s, Bruno and his friends wound up turning to jazz musicians like Miles Davis, John McLaughlin and Ornette Coleman for their musical inspiration.
Bourgeois took the opposite route.
"When prog rock started becoming really commercial and no longer was so interesting, the direction I went in was joining the Generators and getting into the whole punk thing," he says. "Maybe the whole opposite direction of this idea of technical virutosity being so important. After a few years, I'm settling down, getting older, it's like back to my roots."
The duo met when Bourgeois sold Bruno a keyboard at Annex Hi Tech, the music store where he works. Mind Gallery had already gone through a dozen guitarists, and Bourgeois admits it took a while to get used to the band's constant use of odd time signatures.
But he met the challenge, adding the missing ingredient to opuses like The Holey War (which Bourgeois dubs "Arabic heavy metal"), One-Eyed Kings and The N' That N.'
There is still one ingredient missing from a typical prog-rock band of the '70s -- a vocalist. Mind Gallery is an all-instrumental band.
"We figured we could get farther ahead if we just concentrated on the music, go for putting pictures in your head," explains Bruno. "That's why we called the band Mind Gallery -- we're a soundtrack to your imagination."
"I think it's almost inevitable that prog-rock will make a comeback, because everything tends to work cyclically," says Mind Gallery guitarist Gary Bourgeois, over a plate of perogies at a Davie Street eatery. "I think our audience is primarily people in our own age group: thirtysomethings who grew up with the same music we did. But there are a lot of kids that have never been exposed to any of that stuff, and as they start to get exposed to this '70s revival sort of stuff, they'll find it's not that big a leap to go from Led Zeppelin to [Yes albums like] Close to the Edge or Fragile or something. So there are a lot of people who might be interested in shifting back to the idea of musicianship being an important issue. I think it's just a question of tastes shifting, and they will.
Bourgeois has a unique perspective on this: although Mind Gallery's other members -- drummer Tracy Gloeckner, keyboardist Elio Bruno, and bassist Mike Anderton -- have been die-hard prog fans since their teenage years, the classically trained guitarist abandoned technical complexity in the mid-'70s and spent several years in the thick of Vancouver's punk scene, playing with the Payolas, the Generators, and e. So he has the breadth of vision to see such popular acts as Primus (prog-rock with a punk attitude) and Metallica (Robert Fripp in tattoos and leather) as signalling the kind of change he sees as inevitable.
When Bourgeois refers to his band's sound as "kinda like Yes crossed with King Crimson crossed with Nirvana", it's more than a flip remark: Bourgeois is the Nirvana element in an otherwise static group; his manic physicality adds a dangerous edge to a music that could too easily slip into some of the excesses that sunk the original prog-rock ship.
What were those excesses, and how could a music that once attracted hundreds of thousands of listeners fall into such disrepute? Again, Bourgeois invokes the tides of fashion: the original prog-rock bands, he says, simply overstayed their welcome. But he also notes that words were important in prog's demise: tired of hearing about starship troopers and obscure cosmological theories, people were simply ready for music that, like punk and disco, celebrated the ordinary street-level realities of sex and aggression.
"That's one of the reasons we've really decided to stay instrumental," Bourgeois says. "Becuase we don't have a vocalist, more of the focus is going to be on something like the guitar. It's almost like a jazz band, where the trumpet, being the lead instrument, is going to take care of a different part of the music than the accompaniment. But the basic tools of our music are definitely in rock."
Just how raucous Mind Gallery gets can be discovered at the Station Street Arts Centre on Saturday (June 5), when the band will present a two-hour program of its original compositions. Bourgeois says that although the band will play most of the material from its first CD, The Lemmings Were Pushed, it will also unveil the tunes it's planning to record soon. The guitarist is looking forward to the sessions.
For one thing, he's going to have a lot more input into the group's compositions. On Lemmings, he played more a ornamental than a structural role: by the time he joined the group, it already had a CD's worth of tunes written by the other three members. And, as a specialist in high-tech home-recording equipment, he's looking forward to working with the group's ADAT digital eight-track recorder, as well as the DigiDesign computer-recording hardware he won in a sales contest through his day job with the Annex musical equipment shop. An avowed fan of contemporary dance styles as well as prog-rock, Bourgeois says that Mind Gallery's ease with high-tech electronic toys will let the band sound quite a bit different from the inspirations.
"I think, on the second album, we're going to use a lot of sampling," he says. "We do have some things that we want to make a bit of a statement about, and that's one way to go about doing it without having to have a singer, a persona. This kind of technology is going to give us a more '90s sound, because a lot of this stuff wasn't possible in the heyday of the prog-rock bands. Although the ideas were there: if you look at a Mellotron [a kayboard instrument, popularized by King Crimson and the Moody Blues, that played tape-loops of pre-recorded sounds], it's basically the first sampler."
