The bassist Geddy Lee thinks gave birth to prog-rock: “A huge influence”
Finding the origins of prog rock is pretty impossible, purely because the genre is famed for its limitlessness, and how do you find the beginning of such a thing?
Frank Zappa put it best, as when he was asked to define prog rock, he essentially said that it was rock music with other bits added. Sure, the definition lacks clarity slightly, but he’s on to something, no matter how flimsy the parameters of his definition might be.
“I would presume that people would accept this definition,” he said, “Progressive Rock is anything that doesn’t sound like regular Rock. Regular Rock is everything that sounds like itself. All songs which sound the same, everything on MTV, everything on the radio, that’s Rock. Progressive Rock is stuff that doesn’t sound like that.”
Who was the first person to inject different elements into rock music? It’s a tough question to answer, and one that means we can’t locate the origin of prog rock in the same way we can locate where other genres began. Opinions on who helped create this style of music changes depending on which artists you ask. The fact of the matter is that a lot of prog rock pioneers helped develop the genre before there was even a label for it.
If you were to ask Ian Anderson, he said that the members of Cream were some of the first musicians to give listeners a glimpse into this style. “A more progressive approach, which had been the latter part of ’66, listening to people like Graham Bond, who had at that point in his band Jack Bruce on bass and Ginger Baker on drums,” he said, “In many ways, Graham Bond was kind of a precursor of that thing that became progressive rock.”
He continued, “And, of course, Cream in its way when those two guys left Graham Bond and set out as Cream, that became something that moved Eric Clapton along from just being a blues guitarist.”
Another legend of the genre, Geddy Lee, would disagree with this assessment (at least when it comes to playing bass that is). Lee believes that a lot of the new generation of bass players who championed prog rock were influenced by a band who we don’t remotely consider prog – The Who. When discussing some of the music that they were responsible for, Lee said that John Entwistle’s style of bass playing had an impact on everyone listening.
“He gave birth to a whole new generation of English bass players like Chris Squire, people of that ilk, who brought that tone,” he said before naming other influential bassists within the genre, “You know, Greg Lake, (he) had a really great deep bottom end and a real nice piano string top end. Chris Squire to me had the perfect combination to me of bottom and grunty twangy mid-range. So those guys were a huge, huge influence on my sound.”
There isn’t a style of music which relies on a bassist more than prog rock, as when the sound begins to grow out of control, it boils down to the bass players to hold everything together. As such, the influence of these four string wonders can never be understated, and in Lee’s mind, they all owe a debt to John Entwistle.
