How did you find these bands?

I'd have to say (and kudos to the marketing departments), but a lot of the prog bands I followed in the '70s were because of some really striking cover art! It's one of those "the cover's cool so the music must be great!" kind of things.

I met the right people but was never happy with the singles chart so never really liked much "popular" music. Although anyone buying the music press would be aware of anothyer world besides the charts. 

Edited by Snow Dog - March 27 2013 at 12:17

They came to me in a dream one night.

I donwloaded Arena bij excedent, found King Crimson because it was said to 'progressive rock' like Arena en then I found progarchives.

dysoriented wrote: I asked my father the other day if he had heard of some of the 70's prog acts I listen to. To name a few, King Crimson, Hawkwind, Gentle Giant, Caravan... And he said no. This absolutely baffled me, because his music, in general is proggy! David Bowie, Queen, Bryan Ferry. So I suppose, what I'm asking here is, how was it marketed back then? I was told "We didn't have the internet back then to discover music, we just made do''. And it made me wonder, how people found out about these bands? As I'm guessing it was just as niche then as it is now. Does that make sense?  (By the way, I don't just mean those select few, I mean the whole prog scene, obviously there's a ton of bands/musicians that were active at the time)

My older brothers found prog for me, and how they found, I don't know.

Edited by Moogtron III - March 27 2013 at 13:01

Some Prog bands and albums were as popular as, say, Radiohead or Dream Theater have been in more recent years. For people following a bit what's going on in the music world besides the radio mainstream hits it's not too hard to discover that this music exists. So for example I'm pretty sure that your father knew about DSOTM, Wish You Were Here or Tubular Bells.

Snow Dog wrote: cstack3 wrote: dysoriented wrote: I asked my father the other day if he had heard of some of the 70's prog acts I listen to. To name a few, King Crimson, Hawkwind, Gentle Giant, Caravan... And he said no. This absolutely baffled me, because his music, in general is proggy! David Bowie, Queen, Bryan Ferry. So I suppose, what I'm asking here is, how was it marketed back then? I was told "We didn't have the internet back then to discover music, we just made do''. And it made me wonder, how people found out about these bands? As I'm guessing it was just as niche then as it is now. Does that make sense?  (By the way, I don't just mean those select few, I mean the whole prog scene, obviously there's a ton of bands/musicians that were active at the time) Ha!  Prog was HUGELY popular back then!  Singles by Yes, ELP, Focus, Flash and other bands received as much airplay back then as Justin Bieber does today!   Rock magazines like Circus were full of news about Yes, Genesis etc.   Not in the UK it wasn't. Most kids never heard of those bands

King Crimson - My dad had a guitar book that mentioned several guitarists, one of them being Robert Fripp. Not long after that, I was exposed to most of  In The Court Of The Crimson King via AOL Radio.

Gentle Giant - My dad wanted me to listen to Three Friends. I wasn't too interested, but there were some parts I really liked. It wasn't until I delved further into their output that I stared listening to it more often.

Van Der Graaf Generator - I liked the computer game Lemmings and was curious if there was a song titled "Lemmings" - don't know why, I just wanted to. I think these guys were the first to pop up.

As a veteran of the 70's...in LA no less, we relied on word of mouth, knowledgable record store (member those?) clerks, and publications such as Melody Maker, Creem, Rolling Stone, and of course the fun, but often unreliable method of choosing cool album covers.