Grateful Dead for Prog Related?

I would always push back against this notion. Never been that keen on 'experimental' and the word 'progressive' can refer to the way a piece of music progresses and not about whether the artist is progressing. It gets highly subjective. Ie 'bad' experimental versus 'good' conventional music? Experimentation is good in itself but can be horrible to listen to. Conventional music can have no unique or experimental qualities but still be good to listen to. I still think we need a strong historical understanding of prog rock and why it exists. I tend to see The Grateful Dead as a band that existed in its own space. They had little to do with the movement that was lead by ELP, Yes, Genesis and King Crimson. They will always be the 'big four' for me. The US bands tended to be more jazz fusion orientated and that is not at all surprising either. Psyche was a hangover from the sixties and largely about hippy dippy culture and especially drugs. The UK prog movement was more formal and conventional and very much middle class and 'safe'. I think many folks have a hard time with this idea and want it to be a more edgy thing. It wasn't.

Cream absolutely influenced prog, you can hear it (e.g. Tempest just as one example). So I would not object to them being in the Proto-prog category.   Quicksilver is a different matter, and as they did not influence prog (to my ears), I'd have to hear a largely progressive album from them which I am not aware exists.

To reiterate, when all is said & done, I don't think the Grateful Dead would be an astute addition to any category on PA.   

Brian Wilson & Brothers, aka The Beach Boys are another matter and the evidence for Protoprog is abundant and evident.   In fact they were the first true progressive rock band.

Mellotron Storm wrote: I feel they don't belong here. But maybe if I was a fan I wouldn't be saying this. Maybe prog related but then again... I just don't feel that they belong. And I did own a few of their so called key albums back in the day which I have since given away. To each his own I suppose. We all fight for our favourite bands to be on here.

Hi,

To make PA a better place with a more interesting and detailed identity about what makes "progressive" music in any language or idiom, I think that you have to be able to look at music and having a reasonable understanding without it being your "favorite". In other words, a more reasonable amount of objectivity is necessary, in order to make the PA ideas better, and not just an Internet fame and hit thing.

The idea and fact that helped start it, was the it was not "commercial" or defined as a "hit song", is something that is totally forgotten, or ignored these days, and the style of listing and showing these is likely to be something that we would not do in the old days, although this would easily be dismantled as an argument depending on the quantity of the bands listed ... we didn't have 100 bands or more every month ... we had 10, maybe 20, and there was nothing written about most of them!

And a whole lot of us loved them, and today, these are revered and appreciated, but no one is wanting to help with the effort to show how the music survived, for which the wily ways of radio, and specially FM Radio in America, are a most important piece of information. There even were a lot of differences in the FM radio dial across America, but the horrific, and destructive example, took place in LA ... and was ignored across the country. On that day, corporate seized control of music again (they had it before via the movies and their stars), and turned many of the FM stations into classic stations, playing the same hit songs over and over on tape. The days of a DJ were over, and it ended up looking like no one wanted to hear stoned out idiots picking up young girls anyway, and playing loud rock music to show they were cool!

NOTE: This is important today, with so many corporations buying out a lot of artists' catalogues left and right ... and it means they will play whatever they want when they want, and if they want to bury someone, they will! But, I'm not sure that we will criticize folks selling their work like it has happened. I can hear it now ... "love is the drug" twice every hour!

But, through all this stuff, which was there before, the music survived. And is still appreciated, and this begs for a better discussion and a clean up of all the ideas, as an artistic movement, not a singled out hit song. These days, the ideas of an artistic anything is one of the biggest turn offs for internet folks. The only art that matters for them is how the number of hits that the pod cast gets ... to the point where RB is worried about the number of hits and signed fans.

Someone joked one time in a movie about burying someone ... go ahead ... they will be bigger and better yet! And I, somehow, think that the GD has the quantity and quality to make something like this take place. And it still being appreciated after all these years ... is neat ... far out ... and worth while the listen, be it this or that kind of something or other.

Edited by moshkito - 16 hours 37 minutes ago at 09:06

Oops.   Sorry I mis read something

Edited by Valdez - 14 hours 48 minutes ago at 10:55