Hippies vs. Punks: The Nice, Pt. 2, Five Bridges

The reasons I began this digression on progressive rock pioneers The Nice were many. I happened upon Ars Longa Vita Brevis (1968), the band's second album, in my library and forgot what I was looking at, forgot who The Nice was. Then I remembered. Prog rock.

Prog rock at the dawn of the 1970s seemed the true way forward for the Hippies. Fantasies of psychedelic Utopias had been discarded in favor of a synthesis of futurism and classicism that was spanking new at the time. Think Stanley Kubrick's A Clockwork Orange (1971) and its Moog-saturated soundtrack.

Five Bridges (1970) reached as high as #2 on the UK album charts. Unbelievable today given that it sounds, side one at least, like a traditional classical music record. It was the last album the band would record together prior to Keith Emerson discarding the group in favor of a bigger payday with ELP. The Nice's final album, Elegy (1971), was released after the band broke up and was comprised of live material of previously released songs. Probably what is most memorable about the Five Bridges album is its fusion of Bob Dylan's "Country Pie" with a J.S. Bach Brandenburg Concerto:

For four years I worked a graveyard shift job where I watered baskets of hanging flowers in the Emerald City's cabaret district. The equipment -- heavy-gauge hose and copper watering wand -- was kept in a subterranean lockup. One evening when I descended the steps to the lockup and after unlocking its metal-grate door I saw that another door, one that I had never noticed before, was open at the other end of the small equipment room and a light was shining inside. I stepped through the doorway and beheld what must have been a rathskeller from another generation, the early 1970s. There were posters of long-haired young men in jerseys representing the North American Soccer League's Seattle Sounders. The carpet was filthy. The walls were exposed brick adorned with artificial vines. It looked as if the rathskeller had not been used in years.

Listening to The Nice the past couple of weeks I have been thinking a lot about that evening. 

Hippies vs. Punks: The Nice, Pt. 1, The Thoughts of Emerlist Davjack

Progressive rock is synonymous with the rise and fall of the Hippie. Long after many of the bands responsible for the creation of the San Francisco Sound split up or moved to Hawaii, prog rock outfits continued to power the avant-garde right up to the time that Punk took over.

The great white whale of prog rock is Emerson, Lake & Palmer. A popular story when I was a kid (whether true, I don't know) was that drummer Carl Palmer's kit was so huge that during one of the band's concerts it collapsed the riser it was on. We snickered and giggled when we heard this. By the mid-to-late 1970s, it was apparent to all but the most die-hard prog-rock devotee that ostentatiousness had got the upper hand of the music.

Precursor to Emerson, Lake & Palmer was a band called The Nice. Originally formed as a backing band for former Ikette P.P. Arnold under the tutelage of Rolling Stones manager Andrew Loog Oldham, The Nice -- Keith Emerson on the Hammond organ; David O'List on guitar; vocalist Lee Jackson on bass; Brian Davison on drums -- were so named because they misheard P.P. Arnold announce them by saying, "Here comes the Naz" -- black American slang for Jesus, the Nazarene -- as "Here comes the Nice."

The Thoughts of Emerlist Davjack (see top of the post), released at the end of 1967, is considered one of the first prog rock albums. With the band's eight-minute-plus reworking of Dave Brubeck's "Blue Rondo à la Turk," infused with a little of Bach's Toccata & Fugue in D Minor, the listener gets a taste of the megalomaniacal classical-rock fusion to come; but mostly the record strikes me as a sonic snapshot of Swinging London. Reason enough to give it a listen.