Timeline of progressive rock

 

As somebody moonlighting  and selling records from 1964 to 1971, I would suggest Nice's Ars Longa Vita brevis, Soft Machine Volume 2 and Touch (one and only album) made some impact in 1968/9. Moody Blues Days Of Future Past, needed Moody Blues to decamp to USA before being accepted back home but then as a psychedelic album with orchestra. Pink Floyd remained psychedlic into the 70's. I agree with Sid Smith that Yes really did not have that  a genuine prog album until The Yes Album (but then The Clap ain't prog). And with afterthought (since initial sales were poor), Genesis were belated heard as prog from Trespass. Gentle Giant  were almost an afterthought. Jetro Tull with Mick Abrahams' influence initally jumped belated on the British blues boom wagon, with This Was.

 

ITCOTCK, appears to be the first fully rounded AND complete progressive rock album, with IMHO the first Renaissance album just about squeezing in meeting these criteria. Touch's Alesha & others/78 is perhaps one of the first prog rock tracks, but other offerings on the eponymous album are more difficult to assign as "prog". Nice's ALVB isn't wholly prog, Soft Machine's Volume 2 shifts between prog rock and avant jazz fusion. WRT wholly prog albums and Yes, I would suggest we had to wait for the 4th album.  You can go to the Doors with "The End" or Vanilla Fudge's "You Keep Me Hanging On", as inventing some of the rules as they went along - and then there were the odd Beatles' tracks but really we had to wait for the archetypal >>3 minute prog-like track from the band, while they were permitted time to experiment in studio.

 

The Beatles were a music group plain and simple. They used polyrhythms “Happiness Is A Warm Gun”, and they were the same band who wrote a song Frank Sinartra called the greatest love song . The Beatles were a pop band, "I Want to Hold Your Hand", an experimental art rock band "Tomorrow Never Knows", a rock band "Helter Skelter", and yes they did progressive rock type things like "A Day in the Life" and "I Want You (She's So Heavy). They influenced the Monkeys and they influenced  Yes and Genesis. They influenced music.  

 

"A Day in the Life" is certainly a progressive rock song IMO and this was the track that influenced Robert Fripp to create progressive music in rock in the first place..

 

tempo shifts, special effects, complex structure... But if we want to get technical about it is, probably it would be "influential on prog" or "proto-prog".

 

Well, many of the tracks like "Strawberry Fields Forever" which was part of the Pepper sessions were recorded before Pink Floyd ever got into the studio.The Beatles influence was pervasive at this time and even the Velvet Underground were influenced by them somewhat. As much as I like the Doors or Pink Floyd they were still using basic rock instrumentation while the Beatles were incorporating world music instruments, and using avant garde tape manipulation. Take the loops on "Tomorrow Never Knows" were only common by the likes of John Cage and a few other before Revolver, but afterwards it became one of the common sounds when bands wanted to create spacey psychedelic sounds.

 

 

It is evident that a lot of contributors' arguements in both threads have been made from  current viewpoints, aka with lots of hindsight, rather from firsthand experience of the events from ~1955 to 1975.  That is from the probably first sighting of rock and roll, through the tin pan alley days with "artists" being manipulated by managers to make diluted rock and roll records, soon known as pop also aiming at the mums and dads market (aka Las Vegas caberet).  Then a revitalisation of  rock and roll, etc. as the Beatles and the rest of British  invasion materilaised.

 

Questions asked before: is rock music different from rock and roll, and if so, when did rock appear? I'm happy to go with Joe Boyd in his autobiography White Bicycles, that rock appeared the evening Bob Dylan appeared at the Newport at the folk and jazz festival with members of Paul Butterfield Bluesband and Al Kooper backing - what in the summer of 1964 or 1965? Quite happy to hear the case for earlier forms of rock music. Once this realisation that rock could be fused with any other form of music, the UNDERGROUND SCENE  unveiled itself  largely with either the folk rock (Dylan, Byrds, Beatles) and/or the psychedelic movements - especially developing on the US west coast, London, (and probably Germany).  Theatre and popular music/poetry and music/etc. etc. also were there too. Music journalists in the UK were using the term PROGRESSIVE MUSIC in late 67/1968 - check out the title of the early compilation album, Wowie Zowie The World Of Progressive Music, released in 1969 - but Progressive Music/Underground Music  certainly had a fair degree of interchangeability - although bands deemed to be psychedelic were unlikely to be called progressive. If you had beeen playing psychedelic music since 66 or 67, you were old hat be 68 or 69, and clearly not literally progressing away from psychedelia.  Perhaps the first bands to produce progressive music, were fusing rock with jazz and/or classical (Nice's Rondo being an obvious reference point, out of Mozart via Dave Brubeck).

 

ITCOCK and to a greater extent the first Renaissance album, were the first records that didn't reveal musical ideas cobbled together, instead showing a seamlessness and this through the whole albums. As a reminder: in the early days to be labelled 'progressive' meant a band had actually and literally PROGRESSED beyond what had been heard before.