TARKUS

My conversation with God took place at an old (and I mean old), shoebox-sized roadhouse in west central Texas somewhere outside Abilene. It was hot, breezy, and the cicadas were out in full song. My host, a physically ambiguous presence wearing stained, ancient brown coveralls and nursing the butt of a near-gone cigarette between lips, spoke briefly of classic era rock and several favorites. A rusting reel-to-reel played some of the muddiest, rankest sludgerock I'd ever heard but at a volume we could talk over. "This is the sh*t", the nominal Ruler of the Universe commented. How could I disagree.

Of course what I really wanted to hear about was progressive rock, if it was the extraordinary artistic breakthrough it seemed to be, or a bunch of nonsense; smoke & mirrors easily lapped-up by a gullible rock market. "It's all smoke & mirrors, everything", came the immediate response, "that's why it's called show business". I blushed with embarrassment and began the interview.

A- What is your personal favorite prog album?

G- The one with the totem on the cover, the fetish. Y'know, the armadillo with the guns.

A- Tarkus?

G- Is that it? All I know it that the artwork and music were the closest anyone's come to a perfect match.

A- You believe the art and music of that record enhanced each other?

G- I don't believe anything, but that's my current thinking. And that would be the best example I can think of.

A- Let me just say we're all gonna miss Keith Emerson a lot, and hope he's in a good place.

G- I didn't know him and have no idea where he is or if he still exists. He's dead.

A- Right. What is it about the music of Tarkus that attracts you?

G- Y'know, I'm not even sure-- It is, man, and that's what counts.

A- Can you expand on that?

G- Not really, no.

A- Okay-- Tell me about your first time hearing it.

G- (with a grin) That would've been at Dan's, an old buddy who has the best record collection I know and he only owns maybe two or three hundred LPs. But somehow each one represents the distillation of a certain music. He goes by the cover as much as the content; in other words, he'll often buy an LP strictly based on the artwork. That's where I learned you can and should judge a record by its cover, if not a book. It was a used first issue so it had seen better days but he put it on this elderly turntable of his, the overture swelled up, and then that opening organ phrase. It had me like a mainline of high-quality heroin. Marvelous.

A- Could you be more specific?

G- Listen to it, that intro, 'Eruption', is it?

A- That's right.

G- Well there it is, all of it, the cerebral culmination of everything modern music had accomplished in the five-hundred years before they recorded. The very foundation of modern populist tonalogy; the classics; the advent of electricity; jazz; mid-20th Century; and folk. Emerson understood, and knew he was the right man at the right time to attempt what needed to be done. To do, if you'll forgive me, God's Work.

A- I've always felt the album is a sort of "Church of Prog".

G- If you like, but that opens up a big festering can of worms. It suggests worship and I don't care for that.

A- And the rest of the first side?

G- Yeah, great, I mean can you imagine a clearheaded music appreciator hearing that thing for the first time? It's almost beyond reason that some scruffy English rock trio would have, not the skill, but the balls to do something so beyond the scope of what rock 'n roll was. It was a sublime moment, you see. It was crash or fly and they knew it. Big risk. Music is a business and the possibility that Tarkus would've sat on shelves getting dusty was quite high. They broke something the day that record was released, a barrier, or maybe just a membrane, that had been between youth music and something more.

A- Great. Let's talk about side two, reviled by many as inferior; a letdown compared with the first half of the record.

G- Really? But you see if it had just been more of the same it wouldn't have had the same impact or been as important. You have to have the contrast, the difference, otherwise there's nothing to work against it all. Like fruit and cheese, coffee and cake. Besides those are some great tunes, melodic, straightforward, well-performed.

A- So in closing, what's the overall assessment--

G- Sometimes a piece of work is so great it can't be seen. I don't think I could explain it any more clearly than that. ~~