On 1976’s The Roaring Silence Manfred Mann’s Earth Band leaves Earth behind in a progressive rock-et ship powered by pure synthesizer shlock. You can call the results abominable—I do—but they’re also entertaining in an over-the-top pop prog way.
The Manfred Mann Earth Band directed their low-rent, high-energy version of progressive rock at the kids in the cheap seats, and I’m betting the kids loved it. The Earth Band weren’t as technically proficient as Yes, as rigidly neoclassical (although they have their mortifying moments) as Emerson, Lake & Palmer, or as austere and melodically sophisticated as Pink Floyd. The closest comparison is to The Alan Parsons Project. The music on The Roaring Silence isn’t half as smart, subtle, and sophisticated as it thinks it is, but that’s part of its sick charm. This is art rock for people with no appreciation for good art. It’s dumb. Very dumb. So dumb I sometimes find myself rooting for it.
By the time the Manfred Mann Earth Band got around to recording The Roaring Silence they’d gone through numerous other phases, including one during which they seemed to think they were the Mahavishnu Orchestra. And Mann and Company’s cosmo-futurist jazz leanings linger on here, united, alas, with depressing and sometimes inadvertently hilarious results, to the classical past in the form of the music of Schubert, Stravinsky, and Philip Hayes, whoever the hell he is. (They’d had the same intentions on 1973’s Solar Fire, so it’s not as if they were on to something completely novel and horrific.)
So yeah. If an unholy fusion of space jazz and classical music filtered through the pop (and populist) sensibility of the British Invasion veteran who gave us “Do Wah Diddy Diddy” and some cool Dylan and Springsteen covers is your idea of a good time, The Roaring Silence could be your cup of progressive shlock. If not you’re in for some very real pain and suffering, bookended by the Earth Band’s pair of Springsteen covers, “Blinded by the Light” and “Spirits in the Night,” although you’ll only get the second if you buy the 1998 re-issue of the album.
About those two Springsteen covers–they’re the only reasons any right-minded individual without a morbid taste for stupidity would want to own this record, and they’re real doozies. Come 1974’s The Good Earth Robert Christgau of The Village Voice wrote “Manfred has learned just enough about the synthesizer to be dangerous” and it tells on “Blinded by the Light.”
But in this case his exuberant brand of synth-overkill, and the hard rock guitar stylings of new-to-the-band Dave Flett, are just what the song need. This is camp, and camp of a high order, as the vocals of fellow newbie Chris Hamlet Thompson make clear. The slinky “Spirits in the Night” is more restrained—Mann contents himself with some space whooshes and random blips, and overall what you get is more hard rock than interstellar twaddle. But both work, and if I’d been Mann I’d have dug deeper into Springsteen’s debut. His interpretations of the Boss’ E Street shuffles exude shiny dumb charm.
The trouble starts when the boys in the band depart Asbury Park. Granted, “Singing the Dolphin Through” is no disgrace. It’s a slow one, and pretty enough in its own way, and unnaturally restrained in comparison to much of the rest of the LP. It features lots of females vocalists, Thompson sings the title about six thousand times in an annoyingly heartfelt voice, and it gets pretty damn repetitive it does. But not in a maddening way. And things open up at the end, with Flett playing a more than presentable solo before things quiet down and Barbara Thompson launches into a free-form saxophone solo.
No, things only begin to get… out of hand… on the instrumental “Waiter There’s a Yawn in My Ear,” which opens metronomically before straying into ersatz Pink Floyd territory, with Mann sending out synthesizer messages to theoretical life forms on distant planets. It’s all very serious, that is until Mann throws caution to the wind and commences to noodle shamelessly in a jazz-like manner on synthesizer, while behind him you get this sort of bad secret agent movie theme. This is… what? Neo-classical jazz fusion? Is there even such a thing? Or better, should there be such a thing? The answer is no.
About halfway through Flett comes shredding in on guitar and adds rock to the equation, and duels it out with Mann for a bit, and when you’re not getting these mini-climaxes the song is threatening to spin completely out of control and crash through the guardrails of common sense off a high cliff into a rocky gorge, killing band and listeners alike. I recommend you fasten your seatbelt and pray to the god of your understanding.
Things go scary wrong on “The Road to Babylon.” So far as I can tell it’s a (pay attention here, it’s not important) adaptation of Don McLean’s “Babylon,” which in itself is an adaptation of 18th Century English composer Philip Hayes’ canon “By the Waters of Babylon.” Who adapted it from Rick Wakeman, quite likely. The thing to know about it is it’s as pompous as a room filled with second-rate Anglican theologians, what with its swelling female vocals that segue horribly into a mid-tempo portentousness that makes me think, despite his absence on the album credits, that Alan Parsons was jumping about in the studio shouting, “More pomp! Dig deep, lads! We need more pomp!”
Thompson, middle name Hamlet, is fully on board the pretension train, and the only thing saving the song from total gargoylism is the extended guitar show-offery of Flett, who really lets rip, and even carries on when some unexpected horns show up to try and stop him. After he’s had his fill the female vocalists come back, Thompson sings about a golden helmet that I doubt is a football helmet, and the song comes to an abrupt and thankful stop. “The Road to Babylon” is not one of those songs you don’t want to ever end.
“This Side of Paradise” has Mann doing his best Tubular Bells imitation before he goes into some really twisted synthesizer work. For some reason I can’t listen to this without hearing Bono, and I’m wondering if in fact this isn’t the secret pompous template His Vox-ness and his self-important fellows used to create U2’s singularly self-important sound. While I’m wondering this, Mann’s busy torturing us by torturing his synthesizer, but I take that back because it’s all kinda fun and funny listening to him shamelessly showboat, occasionally leaving Flett some space to toss in some flashy guitar licks. I honestly couldn’t tell you if I love this song or hate it, and that’s really something.
Follow-up “Starbird” is an amusing and in its own way impressive cautionary tale about putting progressive rock in the hands of dunderheads. It “takes its theme” from Igor Stravinsky’s 1910 ballet The Firebird but after some insufferably pretentious a Capella vocals it devolves into a fast-paced romp during which drummer Chris Slade kicks out the jams while Mann endangers lives with his daredevil synthesizer driving, swerving from here to there at unsafe speeds to avoid colliding head-on with the frenetic guitar playing of Flett. Then comes the over-the-top climax during which Thompson really pomps it up on vocals. It’s a cosmological classico-jazz monstrosity but undeniably entertaining—it’s so amusing, in fact, that I rather like it. Mann has a singular gift for putting you in touch with your inner polymorphous perverse, and that is, for better or worse, a rare talent indeed.
More’s the pity, then, that he follows “Starbird” with “Questions,” a mid-tempo orchestral sort of tumor that is unfortunately inoperable. “Heavy” is I think the word your hippies would use to describe it. “Yawn” would be mine. The song might have worked had Mann worked that “Starbird” magic on it—instead all we have to hang our hats on are Thompson’s facile metaphysical musings, which run along the lines of “Turning the key, I sat and spoke to those inside of me/They answered my questions with questions/And set me to stand on the brink.” We all hate it when someone answers a question with another question—it’s infuriating. Like this song.
I’ll say this for Manfred Mann—he’s an undisputed original. His progressive rock hybrid was utterly unique. Not good, necessarily, but fearless in its feckless, reckless way. He charged willy-nilly into the No-Man’s Land of progressive rock with his synthesizer blazing and proceeded to mow intelligence and good taste down. If only he’d dispensed with the slow, metaphysical, classically-inspired ones and gone full “Starbird,” then added a cool Dylan cover or two, The Roaring Silence would leave me with the same mindless feeling of exaltation I get when I listen to Styx’s equally brainless pop-prog masterpiece The Grand Illusion.
Alas, there’s no washing the stink of Emerson, Lake & Palmer’s classical music fixation off some of these songs, and large parts of the album leave a bad taste in the nose. This album richly deserves a D+, but I just don’t have it in me. I love the bizarre Springsteen covers and the shamelessness of “Starbird” too much. And sometimes shamelessness is its own reward. So:
GRADED ON A CURVE:
C-
