Prog's Origins

ExittheLemming wrote: BrufordFreak wrote: ExittheLemming wrote: I've always felt that the beneficial influence afforded to drugs on any creative endeavor to be completely spurious. The idea that if someone like Syd Barrett, the Beatles, Pete Townshend, Stones, Ray Davies etc hadn't been chipped off their tits, they wouldn't have been able to fashion such innovative and unprecedented music is putting the cart before the horse. Judging by most of the aforementioned's testimonies to the creative process, these classic songs are arrived at when sitting on a bus/train/fence, reading a book, waking up in the morning, having a piss/dump, staring into the middle distance, night/day-dreaming, walking the dog or hearing/seeing a simple phrase. Our finest creations completely dwarf their mundane and humdrum origins. The late Bill Hicks perpetuated this stubborn myth by asserting that if you're so against drugs, you should destroy your entire album collection. (He was a very funny and insightful man but an incorrigible and deluded hippy right to the end). Most great rock and pop seems to exist in spite of the unheeded warnings of it's legions of ungrateful dead. Even those substances that kept touring bands and artists upright and awake to meet an insanely heavy workload are at best, tenuously connected to creativity. And what about alcohol? Does it count? I've never heard anyone describe booze as 'consciousness expanding' have you?

twosteves wrote: Other---people grew up in countries where all kinds of music was heard and appreciated --unlike the USA. And after the Beatles and other 60's experimental music---all things were possible.

ExittheLemming wrote: I've never heard anyone describe booze as 'consciousness expanding' have you?

Apart from the Ancient Celts, especially the Gauls? Not a lot of people!

BrufordFreak wrote: ExittheLemming wrote: I've always felt that the beneficial influence afforded to drugs on any creative endeavor to be completely spurious. The idea that if someone like Syd Barrett, the Beatles, Pete Townshend, Stones, Ray Davies etc hadn't been chipped off their tits, they wouldn't have been able to fashion such innovative and unprecedented music is putting the cart before the horse. Judging by most of the aforementioned's testimonies to the creative process, these classic songs are arrived at when sitting on a bus/train/fence, reading a book, waking up in the morning, having a piss/dump, staring into the middle distance, night/day-dreaming, walking the dog or hearing/seeing a simple phrase. Our finest creations completely dwarf their mundane and humdrum origins. The late Bill Hicks perpetuated this stubborn myth by asserting that if you're so against drugs, you should destroy your entire album collection. (He was a very funny and insightful man but an incorrigible and deluded hippy right to the end). Most great rock and pop seems to exist in spite of the unheeded warnings of it's legions of ungrateful dead. Even those substances that kept touring bands and artists upright and awake to meet an insanely heavy workload are at best, tenuously connected to creativity. And what about alcohol? Does it count?

I've never heard anyone describe booze as 'consciousness expanding' have you?

Other---people grew up in countries where all kinds of music was heard and appreciated --unlike the USA.

Progosopher wrote: BrufordFreak wrote: Progosopher wrote: For the sake of simplicity I voted 'Other' instead of clicking on all the options because each and every one contributed.  These are not the only roots, however, and many good suggestions have been mentioned already.  I reject the notion that there is one cause, one beginning moment, one point where Prog or anything else became what it is.  There are always multiple causes, not the least of which are certain conditions that promote such developments.  In the case of Prog, both an openness to experimentation and training in music were aspects with wide-ranging results.  Given the existence of rock, classical, jazz, and an openness to mixing musical styles, something like Prog would almost be an eventuality.  To get away from references to Delta Blues or ancient musics, a clear definition of 'Prog' would be in order, but that is the most difficult thing to define on this site.  Mostly, I think, because people try to limit it to a single concise definition when it is too broad for that in much the same way people insist on a single cause for something.  This is not to say we cannot identify the characteristics of something specific because we most certainly can.  Great response with which I whole-heartedly agree. My above analogy of prog as a tapestry is not unfounded.     A good analogy indeed.   Note that the final result relies on an illusion - where you look so closely as to identify the individual threads you have completely missed the picture itself.  The threads are essential of course, as atoms are essential but we cannot say that the threads and atoms are the same as the things they make up.  The whole has its own characteristics independent of the mere sum of its parts.  So too is the case with Prog.  It is the elements combined in a certain way that makes Prog what it is.  Note that many of these same elements also create Blues, Country, Jazz, Classical, etc.  In the original Cosmos series, Carl Sagan showed a large glass beaker containing 150 pounds of water.  Next to it was smaller glass beaker containing a few pounds of charcoal briquettes.  Next was a small vial of trace elements.  These represented the approximate amounts of these substances in the human body.  He then mixed them all together, stirring up a gross sludgey gray mess in the large beaker.  Then he asked, "Now, why don't I have a human being?"

BrufordFreak wrote: Progosopher wrote: For the sake of simplicity I voted 'Other' instead of clicking on all the options because each and every one contributed.  These are not the only roots, however, and many good suggestions have been mentioned already.  I reject the notion that there is one cause, one beginning moment, one point where Prog or anything else became what it is.  There are always multiple causes, not the least of which are certain conditions that promote such developments.  In the case of Prog, both an openness to experimentation and training in music were aspects with wide-ranging results.  Given the existence of rock, classical, jazz, and an openness to mixing musical styles, something like Prog would almost be an eventuality.  To get away from references to Delta Blues or ancient musics, a clear definition of 'Prog' would be in order, but that is the most difficult thing to define on this site.  Mostly, I think, because people try to limit it to a single concise definition when it is too broad for that in much the same way people insist on a single cause for something.  This is not to say we cannot identify the characteristics of something specific because we most certainly can.  Great response with which I whole-heartedly agree. My above analogy of prog as a tapestry is not unfounded.

MattGuitat wrote: To the idea of technology being the most important (so far), remmeber that the first groups to truly be what we consider to be fully "prog" were those who's main progressive aspect were composition. If we take ITCOTCK as the first "full" prog album by a progressive band (up for debate,  its as close as we're going to come seeing as other prog artists beforehand hadn't fully embraced prog's expansiveness yet), then we see that the main aspect of it is its compositions.

To the idea of technology being the most important (so far), remmeber that the first groups to truly be what we consider to be fully "prog" were those who's main progressive aspect were composition. If we take ITCOTCK as the first "full" prog album by a progressive band (up for debate,  its as close as we're going to come seeing as other prog artists beforehand hadn't fully embraced prog's expansiveness yet), then we see that the main aspect of it is its compositions. 

I've always felt that the beneficial influence afforded to drugs on any creative endeavor to be completely spurious. The idea that if someone like Syd Barrett, the Beatles, Pete Townshend, Stones, Ray Davies etc hadn't been chipped off their tits, they wouldn't have been able to fashion such innovative and unprecedented music is putting the cart before the horse. Judging by most of the aforementioned's testimonies to the creative process, these classic songs are arrived at when sitting on a bus/train/fence, reading a book, waking up in the morning, having a piss/dump, staring into the middle distance, night/day-dreaming, walking the dog or hearing/seeing a simple phrase. Our finest creations completely dwarf their mundane and humdrum origins.
The late Bill Hicks perpetuated this stubborn myth by asserting that if you're so against drugs, you should destroy your entire album collection. (He was a very funny and insightful man but an incorrigible and deluded hippy right to the end). Most great rock and pop seems to exist in spite of the unheeded warnings of it's legions of ungrateful dead.
Even those substances that kept touring bands and artists upright and awake to meet an insanely heavy workload are at best, tenuously connected to creativity.




Edited by ExittheLemming - February 28 2015 at 19:13