Welcome to Progtober. This month, you can catch several prog acts on tour, from Yes playing Fragile in its entirety, to Genesis guitarist Steve Hackett, who is on the road celebrating 50 years of The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway. Then there’s the Musical Box, a Seventies-era Genesis tribute band currently on tour (they’re so dedicated that lead singer Denis Gagné goes full Peter Gabriel, donning the Foxtrot costume and reverse mohawk). And just this morning, Geddy Lee and Alex Lifeson announced a 50th-anniversary Rush tour, dedicated to the memory of their late bandmate, Neil Peart (German virtuoso Anika Nilles will be joining them on drums).
But if concerts aren’t your thing, you can enjoy Progtober from the comfort of your own home. And while you can throw on Close to the Edge or 2112, something a little darker, in the spirit of Halloween. That would be Monster: The Ed Gein Story, the new season of Ryan Murphy and Ian Brennan’s anthology series, out now on Netflix. It focuses on Ed Gein — the murderer and grave robber who inspired iconic horror films like Psycho, The Silence of the Lambs, and Texas Chainsaw Massacre — and its eighth and final episode includes a fantastic prog moment.
It occurs in the finale, “The Godfather,” when Gein (played by Charlie Hunnam), is residing in the Mendota Mental Health Institute in Madison, Wisconsin, in 1984, battling lung cancer. (He was caught by authorities in 1957 and charged with first-degree murder. He was eventually found not guilty by reason of insanity and sentenced to spend the rest of his life in an asylum.) In the show, Gein had just helped the FBI agents catch Ted Bundy (a fun if entirely fictional detail) but he’s mostly spending his time reading books about death, watching other residents play ping pong, and sitting on the couch, sucked into MTV. Kiss appear on the screen, screaming, “I want my MTV!” Apparently Gein does, too. The nurse tells him, “Turn that garbage off. That MTV will rot your brain, Ed!” (I think we’re a little past that, lady, but sure).
Trevor Rabin’s opening riff floods through the room, and the band’s classic Storm Thorgerson-directed video starts to play. Gein’s eyes close, and suddenly he’s being ushered through the hospital in his wheelchair, while the staff dance along to the 1983 hit. Serial killers who were all, according to the show, inspired by Gein — Charles Manson, Ed Kemper, Jerry Brudos, and Richard Speck — are there as well, ushering him through. “I hope to burn in hell with you one day,” Kemper tells him. Gein eventually has a tearful reunion with his mother, and it’s clear he’s reached the afterlife. By the end, he’s dead of respiratory failure.
Murphy has always given us awesome needle drops (think Milli Vanilli in last season’s Monsters: The Lyle and Erik Menendez Story), but this scene is particularly awesome. Here’s a murderer on his MTV deathbed, reaching the not-so pearly gates as Jon Anderson sings, “You always live your life/Never thinking of the future.” We all have to go sometime. Dying to a song Trevor Rabin wrote entirely on the toilet isn’t so bad.
When it was released this month in 1983 (again, Progtober), “Owner of a Lonely Heart” became the band’s only Number One hit. It completely resuscitated Yes, who were then known as a painfully dated Seventies prog band. “It was the most extraordinary event in my life,” Anderson told us in 2016. “You’re playing to thousands and thousands of people all over the world who know who you are. You never forget those times. It was very much like that at the Close to the Edge time and Fragile time. You never forget that incredible sense of camaraderie, harmony and friendship.”
Explaining the lineup history of Yes would take hours, far longer than playing every classic prog album back-to-back. But suffice to say that Anderson tours on his own now, separate from Yes (guitarist Steve Howe, singer Jon Davison, bassist Billy Sherwood, drummer Jay Schellen, and keyboardist Geoff Downes). The last time Anderson and Howe performed together was in 2017, when they were inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame alongside Rabin, keyboardist Rick Wakeman, and the late drummer Alan White. You can probably guess what they played.
In an odd move, Howe handled the bass parts that night. It’s the last time he’s done the song in concert, and odds are very low he’ll ever do it again. For Howe, Progtober doesn’t mean “Owner of a Lonely Heart,” even though he’s one of the men behind Asia’s “Heat of the Moment.” Maybe Murphy is saving that for the next season of Monster, which focuses on Lizzie Borden. Imagine the scene: Lizzie butchering her family members while John Wetton belts out, “I never meant to be so bad to you….one thing I said that I would never do…” It’ll be prog-tastic.