Welcome to the show that never ends...

Greetings fellow proggers,

I thought I'd drop a note to say hi, as I'm new to this forum and it's

great to find a place where people can say things like "Octopus and A

Passion Play" without even mentioning the bands and people know what

you're talking about (as someone here said in listing his favorite

albums). 

I've been listening to prog bands since 1975, when I started an album

collection in earnest.  My playlist from back then would contain all the

usual suspects most of you are probably familiar with: Giant; Yes; Tull;

Floyd; ELP; Renaissance; Genesis; PFM; plus many others. 

I must say, I took alot of heat back in the day for listening to prog (we

called it "art rock" then, to the extent we gave it any label).  I had

only one good friend back then that "got" all this music.  The farthest

anyone else would go would be to listen to "Bloody Well Right" off of

Crime of the Century,  and maybe a little I Robot.  Gentle Giant was out

of the question. One of my friends in 1977 had somehow acquired King

Crimson's Court album, and he asked me if I knew it.  I'd had it for two

years and told him so.  "Well, it blows", he vehemently yelled at me, and

promptly donated his copy to me.  Apparently "Moonchild" was just too

much for him; and not even the more accessible "Schizoid Man" could grab

him.

A little bit of trivia that might interest some: it turned out that

during my voracious first three or so years of building up a prog

collection, some of my album choices were indirectly influenced by the

band Saga.  As it happened, my good prog friend at the time was the

younger brother of two members of Saga (who actually weren't quite Saga

yet).  I was living an hour or so outside Toronto, where my prog friend

lived, and his older brothers were feeding him music suggestions, and he

in turn gave me recommendations and sampled albums for me.  It was

certainly by this chain that I first heard of Gentle Giant, King Crimson,

and PFM.

A few years later, in early '78, I had an umarked cassette tape of the

first Saga album before it was released and of course got a promo copy of

the first album.  When I went to college in southern Illinois that fall

of '78, I donated that first Saga album to one of the local radio

stations that played "good" music at the time (WTAO, in case anyone might

remember those call letters).  For quite a bit of that school year, they

often played the tracks "How Long?" and "Humble Stance" (and "Ice Nice"

here and there). 

Other prog I just found for myself, sometimes taking a gamble just based

on the cover art.  I stumbled upon Renaissance's "Scheherazade" in a

dinky general store in 1975 and bought it just because the cover looked

interesting; it turned out to be one of my faves (although on the whole I

would put Turn of the Cards slightly above it).  Mostly, I would load up

on prog on trips to Toronto.  We used to go downtown to Sam The Record

Man, where many of the albums were $4.44 at that time.  I'd usually come

away with 3-5 solid albums each trip in this way.  I remember getting

Tull's A Passion Play for even less than that then.  Here and there I

would hear prog-related stuff on the radio, and that put me onto a few

things...notably I first heard Parson's Tales of Mystery in this way, and

snapped it up at Sam's in '76.

I probably bought my last prog album in late '79 or '80, when the whole

genre just seemed to have fallen off the map.  I remember hating

Genesis's Duke, and Gentle Giant had died for me with the Missing Piece

(maybe even Interview, but I think that's controversial). My musical

tastes were changing a bit anyway, and from 1982 to about 1992 almost all

I listened to was classical music (literally...I was a bit rigid then,

but have since loosened up...).  I suppose prog partially set me up for

this.  Compare Yes's "Cans and Brahms" and Renaissance's "Cold is Being"

(that's pure Albinoni there).

In the last few years I've had a bit of a personal prog revival, and started listening to and re-evaluating alot of the old stuff.  So what do I really like now?  Well, Gentle Giant isn't the be-all-to-end-all that it was for me back then, although they still rank high for me, in particular, In a Glass House.  Lately I've been playing huge amounts of Yes's Relayer, Genesis's Selling England By the Pound, and Tull's A Passion Play.  I've been listening to these albums for so long and have so many memories bound up with them that it may be impossible for me to separate out the musicality from the sentimentality. 

Edited by dotnetpete - March 22 2007 at 22:28

Huh?

Wha?(knudge)

Oh!

 

Welcome

 

enteredwinter wrote: Welcome to the forum. I'm just curious, as you've only mentioned classic acts as far as I can tell: have you tried listening to any modern prog groups? I have a lot of respect for the classic groups like Genesis and Yes, but I find myself mostly listening to prog albums that have been released in the past 15 years or so. A lot of talk around this forum centers on these modern acts. If you haven't checked them out but are interested, we could definitely recommend some for you. One key question in that regard would be your position on heavy metal. A lot of modern groups are metal-oriented, although there are certainly an equal-or-greater number that have absolutely nothing to do with metal.