Story of your first prog album

Well, I remember Dark Side of the Moon being pretty big when I was in Grade 9.  My first real initiation with prog was from a drummer I was playing with when I was 16; his older brother was a huge Genesis fan and I discovered that band, as well as Yes and ELP.  I think Genesis Live was probably the first album I actually owned, although it's possible I had KC's Starless and Bible Black first.

How cool it would be to have a family that appreciates prog, how wonderful it is to listen to "Io Sono Nato Libero"  with your dad. Since I live in Middle East, the chance of finding someone with a similar music taste is nearly zero, and even if there were someone, the odds are too low to meet them.
Middle East is a beautiful place, but the religion stuff ruined everything from music to the whole structure of life. Yea, people in more privileged countries have their own problems, but still you should be happy for what you got.

Edited by progprogprog - January 12 2012 at 18:10

The first prog album I heard was "Aqualung" at a friend of mine's home, and truly blew my mind away. I went to a record store and couldn't find it (it was hard to find that kind of music in Central America back in the early 70s), but found "Stand Up" instead, which also sent my mind to outer space, and that was the first prog album I owned.

octopus-4 wrote: my brother's and sister's 45 rpms

You may want to translate that for our younger viewers, bless their CD only socks

I can't quite remember which: either Rush, Moving Pictures or Rush, 2112. I think it was 1982 or 83 when a friend introduced me to Rush (age 12 or 13) and it didn't take me long to become a Rush fanatic, though I never heard of the term "progressive" until much later.

Before that Rush introduction I only listened to some pop radio and Men at Work. After that I started expanding my musical tastes beginning with several Rush and Yes albums.

Well, I was showing my dad some music, I was into various things at the time, music was new to me. I was listening to Taproot, showed my dad, then showed him the 80's Transformers movie soundtrack, and he said he thought I'd really like Dream Theater. I listened to some samples and was really excited.

I bought Images & Words, Awake, Scenes From A Memory, and Train of Thought in one trip to the store. I listened to Images & Words at the very beginning of a very long car drive to Florida with my family. I loved it, and consumed the others between Blind Guardian albums, and  The Odyssey and V by Symphony X. It was a great experience. I really expanded my musical horizon that trip with Dream Theater and those other bands.

Hm... I had been a fan of the Moody Blues for a while, and my dad had bought us a CD of Thick as a Brick. Despite that, I consider my first prog album 2112 by Rush, because after that I voraciously bought all the Rush I could, then found Yes, and then this site. The first chords of the Overture blew me away...

We never owned a stereo in the 60s so my early Psychedelic Rock and Prog listening was from late night radio or around friends houses listening to their record collections. I lived in a small English village with few people my own age so most of my friends were older than me by a year or two and my tastes in music were influenced by them playing Soft Machine, Pink Floyd, Van der Graaf Generator and Moody Blues. My dad bought our first stereogram around 1970 and the first album I bought was Move by The Move that I picked up cheap because it lacked a cover (I painted my own cover for it based on the song titles Yellow Rainbow and Mist on a Monday Morning - it was dreadful ... and still is since I still have it). With the stereogram dad also bought a secondhand Fergerson reel to reel tape recorder that I may have used when borrowing albums from school friends and may have built up a collection of every Floyd album released up to then, though I would never admit to that in public (). The first Prog album I got (a Christmas present as I recall) was The Moody Blues' Every Good Boy Deserves Favour (1971) and later that year I bought myself a copy of Kaleidoscope's A Tangerine Dream - a fortunate error on my part as I had heard a german electronic band on the radio and thought it was an earlier album by them (this was before TD signed to Virgin so their early stuff was unobtainable in the UK unless you bought from Branson's mail order import shop) - I instantly loved the psyche-pop of Kaleidoscope but was still looking for that illusive german band. I bought Dark Side Of The Moon on the day of its release, skiving off school and helping the guy in hte record store unpack the boxes of new deleveries so I could get my hands on a copy. Those four albums were pretty much all I owned until I left school in the summer of '73 and started earning money, spending my weekends working as a sound engineer with a mobile disco so I could get some extra cash to buy on average two albums a week - something that I contiuned for the next five years until I went to University.

Mine was Octavarium when I was a freshman in high school

Being born at the back end of 1964, i was a little too young to catch the "genesis" of prog, although I do distinctly remember seeing bands such as Yes, Tull, and Procol Harum on Top of the Pops. My mother also had a love of symphonic music, so I grew up listening to some good stuff.