CURRENT CARAVAN

It’s been a good year or so for progrelated box sets. First King Crimson’s mammoth examination of their Crimson King debut album, then Van der Graaf Generator’s 1970s catalog, and now, the beast-daddy of them all, no less than 37 discs detailing the life and times of Caravan.

You remember Caravan. Between 1970 and at least 1973, the Canterbury, English, quartet were responsible for some of the most ear-worming melodies in the entire prog spectrum, not to mention some of the most memorable LP titles: If I Could Do It All Over Again, I’d Do It All Over You, In the Land of Grey and Pink and, best of all, For Girls Who Grow Plump in the Night, home to both the deathless delights of “The Dog, The Dog, He’s at It Again,” and the epic menace of “C’thlu Thlu.”

Yet behind the occasional juvenalia of the band’s love for puns and wordplay (of which, more later) there lay an ocean of melodic and musical magnificence, a tangled skein of bizarre signatures, spasmodic rhythms and harmonies so sharp that you