Something Heavy

The bass plunges and thumps. The guitars buzz with electronic feedback.

Over a rocking drum beat, the voices of a group called The Electric Prunes float in breathy unison: "Kyrie eleison . . . Christe eleison."

So begins one of the most venture some of recent rock recordings, the Prunes' album-length performance of Mass in F Minor, a new Reprise re lease. Composed by Los Angeles Rec ord Producer David Axelrod, 34, the six-part Mass achieves a surprisingly successful blend of pounding rhythms, a "churchy" organ, raucous improvisations and echoes of medieval plainsong. For the text, Axelrod says he "took just the words I thought were relevant, like 'Lamb of God, grant us peace.' That's awfully hip for the times."

He avoided overdubbing and other wizardry of the recording studio, stuck to simple scoring (the Prunes, augmented only by cellos, French horns and various keyboard instruments) to make non-studio performances practical. Al ready several churches have bid for it; the Prunes plan to use it on an upcoming campus tour.

The Herald Prunes. Except on records, religious rock is not really so new or unusual, as the music in a number of churches around the country demonstrates. What makes the Prunes' Mass in F Minor significant is its heralding of an even broader trend: the increasing use of extended classical forms by rock musicians. Half of a new LP by the British duo Chad Stuart and Jeremy Clyde is devoted to The Progress Suite, a breezy pastiche that gibes at complacency and hypocrisy. The Asso ciation have begun to perform their liturgical-cum-martial Requiem for the Masses--included in one of their LPs --as a musical playlet, much as The Doors act out the visionary lyrics of The End and The Unknown Soldier. Newcomer Van Dyke Parks has cast his first album in the intricately woven format of a song cycle.

Threatening Traps. "After you've been in the business a few years," explains Chad Stuart, who is now working on an "oratorio" to be called The Election, "you get cured of the lust for money and you want to produce something--well, heavy." Other experimental rock composers seem motivated more by a restlessness to burst out of conventional molds. San Francisco's Steve Miller, who is writing a suite that will combine Stockhausen-influenced elec tronic music with rhythm-and-blues, says simply: "I don't dig three-minute sections." Classical and Jazz Composer Bill Russo, director of Chicago's Center for New Music, puts it even more decisively: "The music had two directions to go--to get decadent or get longer."

By getting longer and more complex, it may run the risk not only of becoming pretentious but also of losing out on commercially vital radio exposure and outdistancing its mass audience. Russo, who is composing three rock cantatas which he hopes to hear performed in Chicago coffeehouses and clubs, thinks that one solution lies in underplaying the formal aspects. "I think it is just as well if the public does not know my pieces are cantatas," he says. "I for one do not intend to tell them." Stuart believes another built-in guard against obscurity is the plain fact that "there just aren't enough people in the business who can do this sort of thing."

Perhaps the greatest danger of all is that the trend will not escape the traps of faddishness and superficial exploitation of anomaly--traps that threaten even the more serious and gifted innovators. Dave Hassinger, who produced The Electric Prunes' Mass recording for Reprise, is considering a rock adaptation of an opera for a future project. A modern atonal opera? A newly commissioned work? No. "I'm thinking," says Hassinger, "of Madame Butterfly."

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