The First Proto-Prog Songs

...that's really rather nice.

 

I think we have to be careful about making connections in retrospect that didn't exist at the time, just because something sounds like it is proto-prog it does not mean that it was proto-prog. By that I mean the song or composition in question had to have been influential on the emergent genre for us to see it as Proto Prog now. B. Bumble and the Stingers is pretty much self-evident as ELP covered it on Pictures but it is just a vamped-up piece of classical music done in a pop style, it isn't Prog or Proto-Prog, just as Dave Edmund's Love Sculpture version of the Sabre Dance is neither Prog nor Proto Prog.

 

One statement i think we can make without qualification is Barqoue Pop was one of the precursors to Prog Rock - The Zombies, Moody Blues, Procol Harum, The Move, Love, The Beach Boys and The Beatles all produced 3 minute pop songs that incorporated orchestral elements as an integral thematic part of the composition (as opposed to just the bland orchestral backing that was endemic at the time ... re David Bowie's first album and From Genesis To Revelation). I think it is a leap for Baroque Pop to be seen as Proto Prog, it's proto-Proto Prog - the seed that would lead to longer compositions and even more diverse influences that became Psychedelic Rock/Pop and then Progressive Rock.

 

But then (in the mid 60s), it all happened very quickly - music developed far more quickly then than it does now - from 1964 to 1968 the explosion in Rock music was phenomenal - In '64 we had Go Now, She's Not There and I Feel Fine (arguably the first proto-psyche song) all sitting comfortably within Pop Music and by '68 we were immersed in full-blown psychedelic rock with long tracks and musical "excess", concept albums, side-long suites (Love, Pretty Things, The Small Faces, The Who, etc.). Yet there is little linearity among all that - it was happening in parallel and often simultaneously or as near as it is possible to get - Piper at the Gates, Saucerful of Secrets, Sgt Pepper, Magical Mystery Tour, Days Of Future Past, In Search Of The Lost Chord, Ogden's Nut Gone Flake, SF Sorrow, Odessey and Oracle, The Twain Shall Meet, In-a-gadda-da-vida, Goodbye and Hello, Tangerine Dream, Easter Everywhere, Are You Experienced, Forever Changes, Their Satanic Majesties Request, etc., etc., etc. - were all released within such close proximty to each other it is impossible to say who influenced who and when.