Prog Fans In Your 50's

*curtseys*

 

 

 

I'm not listening to Rap, Glam Metal, Motley Crue, Def Leppard or Wham, but that's probably because I'm 60.

53 here. Obviously too young to get into prog when it was really hot in the early seventies. When I started my interest in music around 1979, it was a bit schizophrenic. I could clearly see that prog was considered a thing of the past and the new "cool stuff" was very different. My first discoveries were Manfred Mann's Earthband (kind of by accident; my father played it because he had it flying around as tape in his car but he didn't really know what it was) and Pink Floyd, which was easy because The Wall was so big, although I found out quickly that I like their earlier stuff more. On the other hand New Wave and Post Punk  fascinated me and the Cure were another major early discovery. I was kind of ambiguous about what prog hereoes such as Yes, Genesis and Jethro Tull did at the time; I was happy to have the chance to see these giants live in the early eighties and had some time for their new material, but well, it wasn't quite like what they had done 5-10 years earlier. I think I was enough of an independent music mind to build up my own taste, reading and buying cheap albums on the flea market, rather than following some trendsetters. My cool cousin was into Devo and Bauhaus and this kind of stuff, which I found OK, but I couldn't help finding that "yesterday's" prog grabbed me more. I wasn't alone though, I had one friend and music partner who was a big Pink Floyd fan and would listen to some prog and some classic rock (and he got me into Art Zoyd), and another was into the more accessible side of prog, Barclay James Harvest, Alan Parsons, Genesis after Gabriel, Supertramp. Another one listened to Grateful Dead, Kansas, Roxy Music. Bands ike Gong, Can, Amon Duul II etc. I discovered on my own. So I had some good exchange despite the fact that we were a bit out of our own time.

I personally was always after discovering good new stuff, I always wanted something fresh, never just stick to the seventies, although at some point in my life, in my thirties, I didn't do that much research and suddenly discovered that I had missed a whole lot of things although I still appreciated some new stuff (incredibly I lost track of the Cardiacs at the time, whom I had already discovered in the early eighties, but I didn't come back to them until the didn't play live anymore ).

 

Rather than getting into neo-prog, which never really convinced me despite bringing forth the odd good album, I welcomed Talk Talk and post rock, and I like the fact that there's so much unique and creative music out there these days by musicians who don't depend on it for making a living, although it's a pity that by and large they couldn't. 

Maybe the major characteristic of being a prog fan at my age group (not so sure whether this holds for those 5 years older) is the conscious decision to get into something that at the time was seen as not cool and a thing of the past, despite these "dinosaurs" still being around and appreciated in some quarters (and at the time it was enough to be 35 to be a music dinosaur, so what am I now?).