Did Prog Kill Prog?

Lucky for you, Peter, dreaming of an upcoming Floyd album, wow!  It just shows where your head was at the time.

I myself once dreamt I was at a concert... a Rolling Stones concert. I remember hearing many tunes from their répertoire and although I don’t recall seeing Jagger swagger all over the stage, I vividly remember hearing every one of Keith Richards’ mean riffs and enjoying it thoroughly. It wasn’t a really prog but since you can’t ‘will’ your dreams, I considered myself lucky just to have seen an entire concert for free.

For sure, discovering new bands, even exciting neo-prog bands, isn’t the same when you’re 30 + but I'll take IQ, Echolyn or Arena any time. I also miss the art work on those 12" x 12" lp’s, especially the ones that opened up - Yes albums, the Floyd (those green pyramids on the poster inside), Led Zep’s "Houses of the Holy", Anthony Phillips "Wise After the Event" to name but a few - awsome! I wonder if anyone has ever bought albums from totally unknown bands, just to hear what was inside...

What an interesting thread this is! I particularly enjoyed reading Maani’s and Aztech’s analyses; yet I’d like to touch on one more aspect.

I often wondered if the popularity of prog in the 70’s wasn’t simply a fluke, albeit a very lucky one. What I mean is this: mainstream music, no matter from what era, is meant for the average listener who doesn’t particularly care for music. Prog, however (like jazz, blues and classical music), attracts real music lovers. How then can we explain that prog had such a huge following in the 70’s? Does it mean that the average Joe had suddenly become ‘enlightened’ musically speaking?

I think not.

The 70’s were a time when it was considered ‘cool’ to spit on the establishment. Protesting, using psychedelic drugs and basically doing anything counter-culture-wise were the thing to do. Buying prog albums was just another. Prog arrived at a time when it was ‘cool’ to say you loved Hendrix, even if you had to be stoned out of your mind to enjoy it.

If you read a bit about the history of prog, you’ll learn that a lot of DJ’s at the time couldn’t make heads or tails of what they were asked to play on the airwaves, but they did anyways. Because prog ‘sold’. It ‘sold’ because it was riding a revolutionary crest that supported its very nature: it broke the musical barriers that had so far limited rock music to 3 chords, binary beats and repetitive refrains. This fad benefited many artists who would otherwise never have had the opportunity nor the means to publish their music.

As fashions come and go, however, so did prog. And Paco’s saying that ‘critics played some role in prog’s decline’ rings true, considering that many of these critics had had to review a kind of music that was often beyond them. In fact, many must have let a sigh of relief in the 80's when they no longer had to deal with it.

We may never see the same world-wide infatuation for prog as we’ve seen in the early 70’s. But I'm sure it will never die, for the simple reason that there will always be passionate music lovers who take to it, no matter what the fads dictate. As Jim Garten put it so well, ‘there will always be an audience for well crafted songs, played by good musicians, but sadly, never in the mainstream’.