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KingCrimson250 View Drop Down
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Direct Link To This Post Topic: Tell me about your prog journey
    Posted: June 02 2017 at 14:34
How did you get into prog? What bands and albums were your initial favourites? What sort of music do you listen to now? What sort of music did you listen to in the interim process? If there hasn't been a change, why not? How do you feel today about the bands and albums that you initially loved? How do they stack up against your current favourites?

Tell me about your prog journey! I love hearing about this sort of thing. 
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Direct Link To This Post Posted: June 02 2017 at 14:44
Oh, I don't know. It's 1976, and the guy across the street has on his turntable things like A Trick of the Tail, Chocolate Kings, and Yessongs. It just kind of envelopes you, doesn't it?
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Direct Link To This Post Posted: June 02 2017 at 15:06
That could be a very interesting thread.

I used to listen to hip-hop a lot (the good stuff not the crappy rap most people here have heard). My brother and father listened to great music, mostly classic rock but they were limited to the relatively popular stuff. I grew up hearing a lot of Zeppelin, Floyd, Supertramp, Dire Straits, etc. and being from Quebec, Harmonium. Around 15 I became obsessed with Animals by Pink Floyd on an impulse. I remember listening to "Dogs" compulsively. At the same time I got into MGMT and at 17 I discovered the self-titled Rage Against The Machine album which had a striking influence on my musical taste. It officially marked my transition from hip-hop to rock due to the way De La Rocha almost raps with RATM. Then I got more acquainted with classic rock; all albums from obvious bands like The Doors, Pink Floyd, Nirvana, etc. The Velvet Underground & Nico was very important to my musical development although I did not realize it at the time. One day, again by impulse and with great chance, I got my hands on In the Court of the Crimson King. This album was definitely it. I had around 200 albums at the time and here I am now with 900+. Fun ride.
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Direct Link To This Post Posted: June 02 2017 at 16:02
How did you get into prog? 

Natural transition from psychedelic rock, the key bands were Floyd and Soft Machine.

What bands and albums were your initial favourites? 

King Crimson - In the Court of the Crimson King
Genesis - Nursery Cryme, Foxtrot, SEBTP
ELP - Tarkus, S/T
Tull - Aqualung, TAAB, APP

What sort of music do you listen to now?

Canterbury Scene, Experimental Rock (Avant Prog, R.I.O. and Krautrock), Jazz Rock/Fusion, Avant-garde Jazz

"Classic" Progressive Rock albums are still up there too, but not in my first preferences. 

What sort of music did you listen to in the interim process? 

Hard Rock and Psychedelic Rock.

How do you feel today about the bands and albums that you initially loved?

Main reason of my actual personal tastes.

How do they stack up against your current favourites?

I can't compare them. Let's say, they're classics in my book as the oldies that I still love.
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Direct Link To This Post Posted: June 02 2017 at 16:43
For me, when I was a pre-teen back in the early aughts, I was exploring my dad's CDs and came across that Geneis Greatest Hits album. I decided to give it a go because he'd always mentioned how great Genesis was, and man, did I love it! Land of Confusion, Invisible Touch, No Son of Mine. I jammed out to those for days. My dad always told me "Okay but that's not Genesis' good stuff" but I didn't care. One day we were out at the music store and I saw Selling England by the Pound on sale for cheap and recognized it. "Hey, that's the album I Know What I Like is from!" Eagerly got home and popped it in. Dancing with the Moonlit Knight started up, and it was completely unlike anything I'd expected - and yet, far and away, the best music I'd ever heard. This was exactly what I wanted, and I never knew it until then.


I became a Genetic fanatic and started searching the internet for everything I could about them. Discovered that they belonged to a genre called "progressive rock." Looked up other artists in that genre, and suddenly I was discovering Yes, and King Crimson, and ELP, and Rush (JT came later). I still remember my awe when I asked my dad if he'd heard of a band called King Crimson and he took me downstairs and played In The Court for me on vinyl.


As I discovered more prog, old and new, I gradually made my way to Frank Zappa. Listening to Frank Zappa got me into fusion, and led to me picking up Bitches Brew and In A Silent Way by Miles Davis. That led me to Kind of Blue by Miles Davis, and from that moment I was hooked. To this day, jazz is by far my preferred genre, and I could go on for ages about it. I even was a special collaborator on JMA back when I had more time. 

Of course, you can't listen to jazz long before you get to Bud Powell, and you can't listen to Bud Powell for long before you get to Bach. I'll cop to being a fake classical fan in my teens, because I was an obnoxious dickhead and there's no better music to own to make you feel self-important, but here in my twenties I lost any interest in the image or the "intellectualism" of it and discovered that I just completely love the music. Passionately. So many composers were able to evoke such incredible imagery and powerful emotions. Bach is precise to the point that it feels "perfect." Rachmaninoff had an incredible grasp of melody. Mahler filled everything with a harmonic denseness that gave more layers than I'd ever heard in music before. Jazz remains my greatest love, but classical isn't too far behind it.


And prog? I still love prog. A lot. It remains, in my mind, a singularly unique sort of music - people who took jazz and big-c-Classical music and filtered it through a context of rock and roll. Albums like SEBTP, Hybris, Larks Tongues in Aspic, and CTTE are gone from my top five, but still find a place in my top twenty. It's a combination of what made the genres it's based on great. It's got the grand ambition and passion for thorough composition of classical music. It's got the desire to invent, innovate, and create on the spot of jazz. And it's got the angst and rawness of rock and metal. Each of those original genres or categories individually carries out these things better than prog does, but prog marries them all into something else, something beautiful.


Overall, though, I would say my tastes have skewed a bit towards the fusion end of prog recently. I've also become a bit non-plussed with a lot of prog acts that seem, in my view, to be doing complexity for its own sake. Complexity can take a decent song and turn it into an amazing epic full of unique and inventive things. What it can't do is take a bad song and make it good. Complexity only helps if it's built on a solid foundation, and I do think some bands skip that foundation.

Wow, this was long and meandering.
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Direct Link To This Post Posted: June 02 2017 at 16:46
Back in 1973 it was on the radio, in the stores ( where the guy in the record store knew his sh*t ) and my friend's brother was listening to all kinds of crap from England,Germany and other places. Got into Yes, King Crimson, babe Ruth, Genesis and all kinds of imported sruff. Used to be able to get imports at quite a few places in Montreal back in the seventies. Hocus Pocus was even being played on AM radio. prog really belonged to the seventies. I still have all my viny and a ton of cassette tapes even about a hundred or so 8 tracks that I can't play. I'm actually looking for an 8 track player that 's in good condition.
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Direct Link To This Post Posted: June 02 2017 at 18:37
1977, first year of college, the guy across the hall in the dorm, Buzz, keep playing this weird music. Turned out he was into three albums that became my progressive gateway music: DSOTM, Foxtrot, and A Young Person's Guide to King Crimson.
He neither drank, smoked, nor rode a bicycle. Living frugally, saving his money, he died early, surrounded by greedy relatives. It was a great lesson to me -- John Barrymore
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Direct Link To This Post Posted: June 02 2017 at 21:50
I heard Your Move and then Fragile and never heard anything like that before---with CTTE I thought I had died and gone to heaven musically---then a British friend of mine turned me on to SEBTP----and I heard the yang to Yes's yin and was complete.Big smile Of course there were other bands that came along for the ride
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Direct Link To This Post Posted: June 03 2017 at 00:35
When I was in my early teenage years, I listened to late-60's British psychedelic-esque blues rock a whole lot, Cream, Ten Years After, Steamhammer, early Climax Blues Band, and also lesser-known bands like Red Dirt, Black Cat Bones, John Dummer. Songs rarely got longer than 8 minutes and almost never "took-off" from Earth. I was blown away when I first listened to UFO's Flying: One Hour Space Rock - I had never heard stuff like this before. This went well with my fascination with cosmos, so next was Hawkwind's Space Ritual. Somewhere along the line, I discovered how great Emerson Lake & Palmer, King Crimson, Soft Machine, and Camel were, bands that I had known of, but somewhat discarded for whatever the reason.

My initial favorites were the aforementioned Space Ritual by Hawkwind, ELP's first two albums, In the Court of the Crimson King, and Camel's Mirage. Genesis came a bit later.

These days, my favorite things are
Originally posted by DeadSouls DeadSouls wrote:

Canterbury Scene, Experimental Rock (Avant Prog, R.I.O. and Krautrock), Jazz Rock/Fusion, Avant-garde Jazz
and also zeuhl, afrobeat, loads of electronic music, and everything that's bold and uncompromising. I have been really enjoying mid-90's jungle music recently.

In the interim process, I discovered loads of symphonic rock, heavy prog, psychedelic and space rock.

I still really like to come back to bands that I initially loved. Just don't do it that often, there is so much stuff to discover!

Obviously, I like my current favorites a bit more than the stuff that got me into prog in the first place, but all of them occupy a special place in my heart and I will never forget them.


Edited by ALotOfBottle - June 03 2017 at 00:37
Categories strain, crack and sometimes break, under their burden - step out of the space provided.
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Direct Link To This Post Posted: June 03 2017 at 00:56
I started using a turntable when I was 3 years old, spending hours listening to my elder brother and sister's discs. Some of those songs are still in my memory and I have spent some time during the years trying to find them back.
At the age of 10 I listened to ELP Trilogy and it changed my life. 
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Direct Link To This Post Posted: June 03 2017 at 06:07
My first experience with progressive music was in 1972, when I heard Jethro Tull"s Stand Up, and I've been hooked since then. I was quite a prog head for a decade or so. Then I started listening to Jazz, Blues, Classical and other word music, and it really enhanced my listening and appreciation for progressive music.
These days I still listen to what is called prog, I guess 70% of what I listen can be considered prog, but I'm into any type of music which I consider worth listening, but I've never been able to get into rap, hip-hop, or any of the contemporary pop artists. 
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Direct Link To This Post Posted: June 03 2017 at 07:29
When I was growing up as teenager in the late 1970s, early 1980s, I was aware of progressive rock, my friends would play me groups like ELP, Genesis, Yes, King Crimson, Pink Floyd, and I thought it was ok, but just ok. (I was very much into Heavy Metal at the time)
         Then, in the spring of 1985, a friend lent me a couple of Nektar, and a couple of Triumvirat albums. The Nektar was quite nice, and I still love that group's music, but the real album that finally won me over to prog was Illusions On A Double Dimple by Triumvirat. I thought to myself, hey, this is the real thing, and I have really been missing out by not immersing myself in this genre. I started  collecting 70s prog like wildfire, both well known, and obscure, European groups.
           In January of 1988, I first heard Passport's album Looking Thru, and that started my love of jazz-rock, and started to collect other European fusion recordings. Also that year, I first heard Dzyan's Time Machine album, and Triumvirat, Dzyan, and Passport became my top three favourite groups, and that continues to this day.
          Also going on at this time, was my developing interest in classical music, after having seen the movie Amadeus in the summer of 1985. Anton Bruckner became, and still is, my favourite composer, and The Symphony, in general, my fave type of classical music. My tastes developed in the area of Historical Recordings, those recorded before 1960, and to this day, this is my main musical love, even more than prog itself.
          


Edited by presdoug - June 03 2017 at 07:41
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Direct Link To This Post Posted: June 03 2017 at 13:12
Growing up as a little kid in the seventies there were a few albums with interesting covers in my dad's collection. One had a bunch of guys sitting in a room with a mannequin head and a mannequin head on the back cover. I always thought it was kind of spooky. Years later I remember playing that same album(probably early to mid 1983)but didn't really care for it. Then later that year or early the following year I bought the 90125 album(on cassette)and liked it. I guess mainly for "owner of a lonely heart" and some of the other hits. I suppose I was vaguely aware it was the same band that did "the Yes album." Eventually it sunk in and I rediscovered my dad's old album plus eventually got more into them. One of my cousins was into them but also into Genesis and King Crimson. While it was good to make the connection of this kind of music I mostly discovered it on my own. Around 1985(when I was 15) someone(I believe my ex stepmother) gave me a guitar book with Robert Fripp in it. She also gave me a rock encyclopedia book around the same time that mentioned these bands as "progressive rock." I got more into Genesis and then King Crimson and also Rush through one of my brother's friends. Things just sort of took off from there. There was a brief period of time when I was in college(in the mid 1990's)when I sort of moved away from prog for a bit and was more into alternative rock and grunge but eventually I rediscovered prog(mostly through old prog catalogs I had kept)and not too long after that I got online and discovered prog on there. 

The new prog isn't as good as the old prog imo but much of it is still worth exploring and getting into. This site is a great resource for old and new fans. 


Edited by AFlowerKingCrimson - June 03 2017 at 13:16
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Direct Link To This Post Posted: June 03 2017 at 14:48
I was 14 in 1978, first bands I discovered were records from my older brother, ELO, Supertramp, Styx, than Pink Floyd, than the great revelation, Genesis. To this day Genesis is still the ultimate band for me, a band that is song oriented not trying to put complicated stuff in the music just to look cool. Then I followed the usual path, Yes, Jethro Tull, King Crimson, Harmonium, Rush. After that, I started to discover the artists that never reached massive success, Gentle Giant, VDGG, Camel, Nektar, Renaissance, Steve Hackett, Peter Hammill. At the same time I discovered European prog, PFM, Le Orme, Banco, Ange, Mona Lisa, Focus, Eloy and the emerging bands from the 80's like Mariliion, Twelfth Night, Pallas, IQ, Pendragon, Mach One, Miriodor. These are just a few names. I prefer music generating emotion and I am not very attracted to stuff that is too technical or stuff made to display virtuosity. I also prefer artists signing in their native language even if I don't understand a word.

Edited by ClaudeV - June 03 2017 at 14:50
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Direct Link To This Post Posted: June 03 2017 at 15:52
My dad had a turntable and a pretty diverse lineup of albums. One of my earliest and fondest memories is of laying face down on the living room floor being positively obliterated by sound of Dave Brubeck at age 3. It began a lifelong obsession with music (particularly complex music) in aid of recapturing that pivotal moment of conscious awareness. I think almost everything I've done in life has been an attempt to regress back to that state because it was unfathomable bliss. That could've been partly due to oxygen deprivation, but who cares. It worked!

He also had some of John Williams' scores (Star Wars was relatively new,) Jethro Tull's Aqualung, Fleetwood Mac and 'best of' classical collections, alongside the typical Glenn Miller stuff that seems to be on every parent's shelf somewhere.

I was a 'problem child' so I didn't have much time for music, but when I hit my early-mid teens and gained a degree of independence, my tastes diversified quickly and experimentation became its own reward: from film scores, jazz music, 80s-early 90s metal, synth pop (first crush: Pat Benatar) and even pop country hits, I consumed everything, but at that time I didn't consume music intelligently. 

Come to think of it, Tool is actually the band that set me on the path to prog addiction. I just loved the weighty material and they were probably the first group I thought about in depth. I met a friend who also liked the band and he got me into Rush and King Crimson. From there, I rediscovered Jethro Tull and all the greats followed. At some point after buying every album Yes had put out at that point, I realized that I was no longer looking in other genres for new music, and when I did, I found them fun but somehow lacking. I knew then I had found my thing, man.
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Direct Link To This Post Posted: June 03 2017 at 16:29
My older brother brought home lps like Focus 3, Mirage by Camel, Time honoured ghosts by BJH, Friendliness by Stackeridge and 6 wives of Henry 8th by Rick wakeman; a few years earlier an English/ Drama  teacher introduced me to Pink floyd, Hendrix and the Moody Blues. My Dad was a closet Jazz- big band drummer who never got to actually drum but introduced me to Gene Krupper and Buddy Rich. Living in the sticks meant there were quite a few longhairs and hippies living around who introduced me to more obscure, wierd and cosmic music.. I had brief time working in music (as road crew) with various bands (some progressive, some not) before settling into a totally non music related career. My tastes have become more and eclectic as ive got older and i think its all those influences  which have fed into the pot and after all is what 'progressive' music is all about.

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Direct Link To This Post Posted: June 05 2017 at 06:16
As a small child, my parents exposed me to the Beatles. I believe my love of Beatles music planted the seed to my eventual love of prog. That seed, however, would take quite a few years to germinate. It wasn't until my family moved to a new town in 1979 that I was exposed fully to classic rock and by extension, prog. 

Rush became my favorite but I also developed a liking for Yes. There were some Jethro Tull songs that resonated with me as well. That was about it, in the beginning. Rush pretty much dominated the 80s for me. 

An awareness of other prog wouldn't happen until the late 90s. Spock's Beard became a favorite in the early 2000s. Finding this site really opened up my eyes to the truly obscure stuff. I've since developed a liking for Gentle Giant, pre-Abacab Genesis, King Crimson, Porcupine Tree, Soft Machine, Mahavishnu Orchestra, Mars Volta, and many, many others.
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Direct Link To This Post Posted: June 05 2017 at 10:55
^It sounds like you're around the same age as me(teen in the eighties). The eighties were a weird time to discover prog weren't they? :)
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Direct Link To This Post Posted: June 05 2017 at 12:38
^I would imagine there was a little less green smoke in the air of the listening dens of the '80s. Was that the case?
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Direct Link To This Post Posted: June 05 2017 at 12:53
You had to have experienced it back in the 70s when it was even on the radio. I even remember hearing Hocus Pocus on AM radio! Back then it was normal to go out and buy the latest Yes or ELP album not to mention all the other less popular stuff. The internet has really killed the fun. I remember buying Focus' Hamburger Concerto new with Guru Guru Dance of The Flames and a couple of others. Went on the train from Two Mountains to Sam The Record Man in downtown Montreal. The Sam's in Toronto was even better. I We would take the train to Toronto from Montreal just to go to Sam's to get all kinds of crazy stuff. Glad I kept all my vinyl from the seventies. Last time I counted was close to 2000 Lps.
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