The 1968 prog turned protest instrumental, courtesy of Keith Emerson
It’s the back end of the 1970’s, and John Lydon is walking around with the words “I hate” scribbled across a Pink Floyd t-shirt.
A lot of people think that the protest song was invented by the punk movement. Lydon’s opinions existed well beyond his T-shirt, as he put pen to paper and wrote the scathing lyrics of tracks like ‘Anarchy In The UK’, ‘God Save The Queen’ and ‘Pretty Vacant’. These all certainly helped set the foundation that punk could be built on top of, but they weren’t the birth of protest music; that came in multiple variations long before Glen Matlock had even started writing tunes.
The truth is, genres overlap and contort long before they’re ever given a name. One of the first bands to ever champion a sound that was a remote representation of prog rock was The Nice. A member of this band was Keith Emerson, who later became famous for his work in Emerson, Lake & Palmer. However, before he was writing for what we recognise as a prog band, he was sowing seeds in The Nice. Ian Anderson recalls first listening to the band and recognising them as a precursor to prog.
“I suppose one of the precursors before it was really being called prog rock,” he said in an interview with Far Out, “Probably at a time when maybe progressive rock had just being maybe mentioned for the first time in the British music press, it would be the band The Nice, which featured Keith Emerson, who went on to be in Emerson, Lake & Palmer, a true prog rock band years later. But yes, I would go with The Nice and their first major album, which…name escapes me. That was something that got me fired up.”
By acting as such trendsetters, The Nice were injecting multiple different styles and sounds into their music that separated it from your bog standard rock. In trying to push boundaries as much as possible, they wound up essentially creating punk long before punk was ever a thing, as they were responsible for the first-ever instrumental protest song in rock music. Protest instrumentals existed before this in the form of noise music, free jazz and other genres, but it hadn’t been done by a mainstream rock band yet. And as you might expect, it landed the band into trouble that was far from nice.
The Nice had just finished playing a gig at the Isle of Wight when they heard the news that Robert Kennedy had been shot, in what was the most recent in a string of assassinations, and the sombre news got Emerson thinking about the gun laws in America and how much he disagreed with them. As a musician, he opted to express that frustration in the only way he could.
“He was trying to get the Democratic party nomination to run for the presidency of the US,” he said, discussing Robert Kennedy, “That got me thinking. A few years earlier, John F Kennedy had been shot, then Martin Luther King. It seemed to me that American was ruled by the gun; so I decided to turn it into the first instrumental protest song.”
The song itself was a cover of Leonard Bernstein’s ‘America’, which the band had pretty much stripped of any kind of happiness. The track was already controversial enough, but Emerson took things a step further when, at an anti-apartheid gig at the Royal Albert Hall, he decided to set an American flag alight, a move that was met with uproar, but it also made fans curious about coming to their shows to see if they would do it again.
“The next day we did a gig in Norwich, and arrived to find the queue round the block,” said Emerson, “They were hoping to see me burn the flag. But to do it again would have lost the impact of the gesture”.
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