Abstract
Contributing to this collection’s theme of unfashionable bands following the footsteps of Rush, this chapter focuses on Saga. They carry on the tradition of British rock dinosaurs like Genesis and Yes, but in the late 1970s which saw Saga’s beginnings, the UK music scene was a post-punk world that partly defined itself through vilifying progressive rock. At the same time in the US, radio play was guitar-centred. Saga were both unwilling and unable to transform themselves into a guitar group and stuck to their multi-keyboard sound. Their songs are populated by ‘a dramatis personae of vulnerable, sympathetic antiheroes’ who display anxiety and insecurity in social interaction and alienation amid capitalism’s demands of mindless work. Such modern malaise is also seen in their apocalyptic album covers which depict not an alien world but our familiar one turned cold and alienating, including one which depicts the aerial destruction of the New York skyline by spaceships. Saga’s multifaceted statements of individual and cultural alienation reach a pinnacle on the 1995 concept album Generation 13, a portrait of America’s Generation X. The cover features a sinister Statue of Liberty and the album’s hero as a marionette, recalling their drummer Ed Pilling’s remark about the difficulty of American success: ‘they pull all the strings’. Taylor concludes that the paradox of the band’s ongoing, respected, yet limited career, which sees their fame faded in Canada while they are welcomed with maple leaf flags in Europe, reflects the ‘stresses of national and private identity’ explored in their work.
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Notes
- 1.
Saga’s chief sound engineer Andi Charal mirrors progressive rock’s enthusiasm for recreating studio recordings live: ‘We had everybody playing through one mix. With the 12 or 13 keyboards that they had, it was pretty easy to set the leveling correctly when you’re jumping from one keyboard to the other’ (Ammerlaan 63). Dutch journalist Edwin Ammerlaan’s Saga: The Biography (2008) currently stands as the only single volume account of the band’s career. Its collection of interviews, in particular, marks it as an indispensable resource.
- 2.
Ian Crichton pinpoints prog’s emphasis away from guitar-based tradition to keyboard atmospherics: ‘Sure, I had a hard time getting my guitar in. I wasn’t used to it. The band before Saga was all about guitars…I could do solos for twenty minutes!’ (qtd. in Ammerlaan 49–50).
- 3.
Having seen the Sex Pistols in Manchester’s Lesser Free Trade Hall in June and July 1976, Wilson referred to the experience as ‘an epiphany’ (Morley).
- 4.
Peel became increasingly unsupportive of progressive rock throughout the 1970s, despite occasionally playing new releases: ‘during the mid-1970s the various “progressive” styles began to appear less regularly in Peel’s playlists, as the rock scene changed, due to the emergence of pub rock and, later, punk. This led to shorter, simpler records which corresponded more to Peel’s own tastes (and with the preferences of many 1970s rock critics.) By the late 1970s prog had disappeared from his shows’ (‘Progressive Rock’).
- 5.
See ‘Emerson, Lake & Palmer’; also see ‘Peeling Back The Years 3 (Transcript)’ where Peel, retrospectively in 1987, speaks of ELP as ‘a band I still regard as probably being the most awful ever, of all time…whose stuff was just transcendental in its awfulness’.
- 6.
- 7.
‘Hoedown’, a cover of the Aaron Copland ballet piece from Rodeo (1942), played at a breakneck tempo live, is exemplary, being the opening track of Emerson, Lake & Palmer’s Welcome Back My Friends to the Show That Never Ends…Ladies and Gentlemen (1974).
- 8.
Saga’s Jim Gilmour could be accused of having privileged origins and classical education, as he studied music at the University of Toronto and trained as an opera singer (Gilmour).
- 9.
The stuttering sequencer passage which begins ‘How Long?’, track one of Saga, the first album, closely resembles that of ‘Don’t You Want Me’ from Dare (1981) by The Human League.
- 10.
According to The Mojo Collection: The Ultimate Music Companion, ‘The obvious eyebrow-raiser is Jungle Line’s concatenation of Burundi drums, Moog, gymnastic voice and bloody clever lyrics’ from ‘Joni Mitchell, The Hissing of Summer Lawns: Joni stays two steps ahead of the competition’ (Irvin and McLear 358).
- 11.
- 12.
From a 1980 interview by Alan Niester of the Globe and Mail.
- 13.
- 14.
For manager Neil Corcoran’s decision to create an offshore company in the Caribbean exempting Saga from Canadian tax, see Ammerlaan (100).
- 15.
Beyond Europe, and especially Germany, Saga retain a strong following in Puerto Rico (Ammerlaan 64).
- 16.
The ‘Tour Archiv’ of Saga Germany is the main German online fan resource for past Saga tour dates, here listing the cities played on the ‘Trust’ tour of 2006. Saga’s strong fan base in Germany has remained constant, with another successful tour in 2016 dominated by dates in that country. The year also saw Saga perform in Switzerland, Sweden, Italy, Panama, and Canada. The thwarted relationship with America has meant that Saga has not toured the US since 1986.
- 17.
The 14 February 1982 show in Budapest, Hungary was followed by a presentation from the Canadian Ambassador, Dorothy Armstrong, of a gold disc for sales of Worlds Apart (Ammerlaan 88).
- 18.
‘Cruise to the Edge’ took place between 7 and 12 April 2014, featuring over 25 prog bands, which, aside from Yes and Saga, included Marillion, UK, Steve Hackett of Genesis, Tangerine Dream, Renaissance, Three Friends (former members of Gentle Giant), and Patrick Moraz (formerly of Yes).
- 19.
A sole venture into Arthurian myth and legend came with short-lived replacement vocalist Rob Moratti’s return to Britain’s heritage in ‘Avalon’ (‘Standing on top of Avebury Hill /A circle appears, the pathway is still’ (on The Human Condition). Michael Sadler returned to front Saga in 2011 after a three year sabbatical.
- 20.
From a 1985 interview by Paul Suter of Kerrang.
- 21.
Michael Sadler and Jim Crichton are Saga’s principal lyricists.
- 22.
The Dickensian overtones of early song characters Ellery Sneed, Billingford Bluffer, (‘Perfectionist’ on Saga,) and Little Audrey (‘Someone Should’ on Silent Knight) chime with the English eccentrics and rogues’ galleries to be found on the Genesis albums Nursery Cryme (1971) – Henry Hamilton-Smythe, Harold the Barrel – and Selling England by the Pound (1973) – Ethel, Miss Mort, old Tessa, and the cast of ‘The Battle of Epping Forest’.
- 23.
The guitar’s predominant role in African-American Delta and Chicago electric blues has encouraged recognition of onomatopoeia, the sounds of string bending and vibrato techniques redolent of human experiences of physical or emotional pain. Intriguingly, Saga’s piercing, high-pitched synthesizers have a comparable function: the Moogs on ‘Careful Where You Step’, on In Transit, seem mimetic of warning sirens and distressed voices, rather than having prog and heavy rock’s lesser ambition of special effects or speed playing for their own sake.
- 24.
‘On the Loose’, on World’s Apart. This uncharacteristically jubilant mood swing (albeit momentary) and the diminished keyboard presence on most tracks may well have been instrumental in the success of Worlds Apart in the US. It might be speculated that Saga’s more usual preoccupation with psychological and authoritarian repression accounts for their strong reception in Germany with its traumatic experience of fascism and communism.
- 25.
The theme extends to include fear of musical and artistic belatedness: ‘How long do you think you’ll last/Living with a continuous past’ (‘The Interview’, on Worlds Apart).
- 26.
Since the ‘Chapters’ began on Saga, with ‘Young Albert’ named on Silent Knight, through to his most recent representation on the sleeve of 20/20 (2012) – having his (less than 20/20?) vision tested – Einstein and Cold War consciousness continue to motivate.
- 27.
Jim Crichton, from the sleeve notes of The Chapters Live (2005): Two main ingredients inspired the story itself. The Cold War, and an article I read about how Albert Einstein’s brain had been preserved and was now residing at the home of Thomas S. Harvey, MD, the pathologist who performed the autopsy on Einstein in 1955. The reason that Harvey ended up with Einstein’s brain was unclear, but the idea that the mind that unlocked the mystery of the atom was being kept on a shelf in someone’s house was the spark that inspired the concept for the Chapters.… As the Chapters begin, the Earth is being observed by extraterrestrials that are becoming concerned about our path toward self-destruction. They realize that they have to find someone on earth they can communicate with to help turn the situation around. Someone very intelligent. (qtd. in Ammerlaan 53–54)
- 28.
Einstein advocated ‘a world government…which is able to solve conflicts between nations by judicial decision’ (qtd. in Lu).
- 29.
The illustrations by prog rock’s most prominent album sleeve artist Roger Dean imply that the harmony represented between humanity, architecture and nature is furthered symbiotically in the band’s music. Jon Camp, former bassist with Renaissance, reiterates a maxim of the 1970s: ‘The album cover was almost as important as what was inside of it’ (‘Jon Camp Interview’).
- 30.
Financial crisis and Armageddon remain topics to be railed against, as on the latest album:
If you’re worried sick about a third world war /Go ahead, press *…If you want the IRS to go away /Go ahead, press 9 (‘Press 9’, on Sagacity).
- 31.
In 13th Gen: Abort, Retry, Ignore, Fail? Generation X, being those born between 1961 and 1981, takes its place in the wider definitions of the outline of historical phases of American identity in the Strauss-Howe Generational Theory.
- 32.
- 33.
- 34.
Close to the Edge (1972) by Yes is widely held to be one of the seminal prog masterpieces. The album’s three songs feature characteristically abstruse lyrics by Jon Anderson, though he states that the second track ‘And You and I’ had ‘The Protest Song’ as its working title (Yes, Progeny).
- 35.
The ubiquitous second person pronoun seems to expand its range over other albums to include national and political negotiations:
Once you mistook me /For the menace, the menace /Oh, if you’d only known /And that last confrontation /Was just a warning, so that you’d know /What would happen /If you push me too far (‘No Stranger (Chapter VIII)’, on Worlds Apart)
- 36.
‘My Generation’, on My Generation.
- 37.
‘Hold On’, on New York (1989).
- 38.
Former member of Toronto band Fludd, Pilling continues on the obstacles of promoting a band in Canada: ‘I think what makes it very difficult for an act to gather momentum in this country is because you’ve got a large country that you have to tour, with only a very small population. You’ve got 21 million people spread over three thousand square miles. We could tour England for 80 million people and it’s not as big as Ontario.… The Canadian music scene has gotten a lot more credibility in the world. The geographical problem is still there, of course. So you have to move out, you have to create the energy somewhere else’ (qtd. in Ammerlaan 30).
- 39.
On Dark Side of the Moon.
- 40.
Sadler’s ability to engage with his audience in German is in evidence on Contact – Live in Munich (2009).
- 41.
Two separate interviews of Sadler are quoted here: by Alan Niester in the Globe and Mail, 19 January 1980, and by Greg Quill of the Music Express in February 1981.
- 42.
From a 1982 interview in Canadian Musician.
- 43.
‘Shape’, on The Beginner’s Guide to Throwing Shapes.
- 44.
‘Outside Looking In’, on Network.
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Taylor, D. (2017). ‘Outside Looking In’: Saga’s Progressive Protest. In: Connolly, T., Iino, T. (eds) Canadian Music and American Culture. Pop Music, Culture and Identity. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-50023-2_8
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