What about Soft Machine, the VdGG debut, the Magma debut, the Gentle Giant debut, etc ?

 

 

                  If you think those are all essential, I'll put them in !  My current Timeline doesn't have any

                Van Der Graaf albums until PAWN HEARTS, but I know there are a lot of VdGG fans on

                 here, so I should probably include more. As for the others you mentioned, I have

                       SOFT MACHINE ""Third", and I think the first Magma album I have listed is

                 "Mekanik Destructiw Kommandoh". You really think Gentle Giant's debut is essential

                 to the early lineage ?

  

       Do you agree with the above post to include Magma (debut), Soft Machine (debut),

             and VdGG ?  (btw, most of my release dates are from "Strawberry Brick's Guide to

             Progressive Rock", I'm going on faith that they are mostly accurate)

 

               ........good point......and the "events that made them important to the scene" had to do

                    with popularity and visibility in the public's eye. The debut albums by Magma, Soft Machine, 

                    Gentle Giant, and VdGG had little or no visibility at the time of their release (especially

                     in the States), which is probably why I didn't include them. I think this timeline is meant

                   to be somewhat of a compromise between a History Project (focusing on historical

                    relevance at the time), and a critical appraisal of the essential albums to the develop-

                    ment of the genre. The debuts by Magma and Soft Machine are essential in retrospect,

                    but from a historical perspective of how prog evolved they aren't so important, because

                      hardly anyone knew of them at the time they were released.

 

                               Thanks for the feedback, though. The main question, is whether people are

                          interested in this thing (regardless of which albums are included) ? I thought

                        it would be nice to have something like this on the PROG MUSIC GUIDES link,

                        for new listeners, but I won't pursue it if people think it's a dumb idea.

 

                           

                     

       Do you agree with the above post to include Magma (debut), Soft Machine (debut),

             and VdGG ?

Piper is pure psychedelic.  Prog elements don't show up until Saucer.

 

I disagree, and these are the points:

 

"At the time The Piper at the Gates of Dawn was originally released in 1967, it was one among many aurally ripped, acid-tripped albums including Jimi Hendrix's Are You Experienced, Cream's Disraeli Gears, Jefferson Airplane's After Bathing at Baxter's, and, of course, Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, which the Beatles were recording down the hall from Pink Floyd at Abbey Road. But as those albums have gracefully slipped into the mainstream of our music consciousness, Piper, along with The Velvet Underground and Nico, still sounds like it broke through from another dimension. Pink Floyd were employing musique concrete techniques, inventing glissando guitar, and exploring areas of trance with tunes like "Interstellar Overdrive," actually two takes of an extended rave-up laid on top of each other. Mixing sci-fi imagery with swinging London metaphors and pastoral fantasies (the title is lifted from The Wind in the Willows), Pink Floyd's music was even more dappled, swirled, and surreal than the light shows that accompanied their performances. Piper represented Syd Barrett's vision as the sole composer of all but three songs. He was yet to have his acid-induced meltdowns, and all things were possible and beautiful. Barrett mixed whimsy on "Bike" with cynicism on the wordless but ominous "Pow R. Toc H."; goofy innocence on "The Gnome" and mysticism on "Chapter 24." But there's no doubting the contributions of Richard Wright with his swirling, reverb-drenched organ fugues and jazz ellipses and Roger Waters's earth-rooted bass. Nick Mason's underrated drumming, time-shifting polyrhythms, and colorful flourishes pushed Barrett's elliptical pop even further over the edge, especially on the space-music opus "Astronomy Domine."  --John Diliberto

 

It was not any psychedelic rock album, it was an innovative one thus making it highly influential and even progressive.

 

Ummagumma is not 1969 I don't think.

 

And this has got to be the weirdest discussion I have ever seen in this board. Also th emost incomplete and off key that I have ever seen.

 

If I was any of those musicians I would be embarassed to even be associated with this!

It's not prog, though it is progressive and innovative thus highly influential for the evolution of rock music to prog rock.

http://www.themarqueeclub.net/interview-peter-banks-yes

Clearly, there was a LOT of progressive music that was churning in the mid-60's, but never made it to vinyl!   Also, I was struck by the fluidity of the British prog scene (musicians changing bands & the various creative interplay going on). 

"The Origins of Prog" could be a book....hell, The Yardbirds morphed into Renaissance!   Iron Butterfly might have a prog-claim, they morphed into prog-metal Captain Beyond.  

I tend to follow the "it must have a Rickenbacker bass and a Mellotron to be Prog" school, which would narrow the definition quite a bit.  Good stuff!

http://www.themarqueeclub.net/interview-peter-banks-yes - http://www.themarqueeclub.net/interview-peter-banks-yes

Here is how I see things...

 

In the Court of the Crimson King	King Crimson	1969	10/10/1969
In the Wake of Poseidon	King Crimson	1970	5/15/1970
Trespass	Genesis	1970	10/23/1970
Emerson, Lake & Palmer	Emerson, Lake & Palmer	1970	11/1/1970
Lizard	King Crimson	1970	12/11/1970
The Yes Album	Yes	1971	2/19/1971
Nursery Crime	Genesis	1971	11/12/1971
Fragile	Yes	1971	11/26/1971

 

...after In the Court of the Crimson King bands converted to progressive rock. 

 

Based on my tiny sample there appears to be a tendency to release albums in the last quarter of the year.  So the pattern that fits this small sample is that proto-prog bands like Yes and Genesis heard King Crimson and a year later they started to release albums of a progressive quality.

 

I consider Trespass as Genesis' first progressive album (having heard their From Genesis to Revelations... only once or twice) and The Yes Album as Yes' first progressive rock album.  In early 1972 Jethro Tull did Thick as a Brick which was a step into progressive rock from their concept album-ish Aqualung (which I think had just one or two songs on it that I would consider prog).

 

From other's comments it has been claimed that A Saucerful of Secrets was Pink Floyd's first prog album and that album was released 06/29/1968 which predates even In the Court of the Crimson King.  If this is a true claim (and I haven't the music collection to decide this for myself (I've just recently purchased that Pink Floyd album)) then I would still have to consider the fact that Pink Floyd's album is almost a year and a half older suggesting that its influence may have built towards prog rock but wasn't as close to when it was ready to really blossom.  Maybe In the Court of the Crimson King marks the beginning of the "Golden Age".

 

My view on all this is to look for when bands would convert or newly form in much larger numbers than previously with prog rock as their (new) focus as the time when the genre was born.  The genre would then have a kind of critical mass to where there would be a sense of itself, a collective contemporary musical movement that musicians wanted to become a part of rather than an experiement that the composer or band was trying in seemingly relative isolation.

 

Interestingly at the same time as prog rock was revving up it seems that hard rock/heavy metal was also forming.  Deep Purple seems to have turned away from progressive rock just as the above mentioned bands were turning toward it.  I have to wonder about the influence of Black Sabbath at this point.

 

 

 

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.

However, I always tend to put ITCOTCK as the seminal "first prog album," for many reasons = generous and innovative use of the Mellotron, jazz-rock fusion elements, poetic lyrics, and amazingly tight performance.  

The first Yes album (1969) also qualifies as prog, with "Beyond and Before" one of the stronger tracks.  As with ITCOCK, it was highly developmental in instrumentation and portended their future direction.  Each subsequent LP expanded remarkably!    

I'm surprised nobody mentioned "From Genesis to Revelation"!   

Good stuff, I wasn't aware of the early Nice, Soft Machine and other material back then!   I've never heard the first Renaissance LP and must seek that out.  

 

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.

 

http://www.progarchives.com/forum/forum_posts.asp?TID=66592&PN=1 - http://www.progarchives.com/forum/forum_posts.asp?TID=66592&PN=1

 

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.