Public Perception of Prog

A lot of metalheads, or at least the ones I used to hang around with, have a sort of private awe and respect for progressive rock but never listen to it themselves. Perhaps it's because they realise their music is just as geeky as ours? ;P

Well, back in the early 80’s when I entered to the university, Prog was on their first crisis and Metal wasn’t still as popular as it is today, my poker buddies were the metalheads, we joined in my house or in theirs to play and constantly jammed together.

I once replaced the drummer of one of their bands, who had chicken pox, and we played all night good metal, and as a deference they performed with me The Knife (we had only practiced it twice as a joke, but it sounded great).

The point is that we had mutual respect for our music, because our common enemy was Disco Music, but even the audience in that show responded very well to The Knife, despite few had heard it previously.

One of my good friends who later introduced me o Ozzy and Yngwie, had a real taste for ELP, Rush and Jethro Tull, while I was already a fan of AC/DC, Iron Maiden and Sabbath.

I believe more than close taste, we accepted as the only alternatives to Disco fever.

To the public, jazz is laughably insular, classical is music you listen to while you're doing something else, hard rock is for bikers, dance is for E-heads and blues is for old men. But then, who asked them?

I don’t like to make generalizations, people has surprised me lots of times with their taste.

I once had to take a plane from Juliaca (15,000 feet over sea level) which is the subsidiary of hell, and we were stuck in the plane for hours, I found one of my favorite Peruvian writers (who drinks a lot, so I won’t mention his name).

The guy was like 20 years older than me (it was 1999 and I was 35) and we started to talk and drink, in one moment he asked me about the music I heard and I said Progressive Rock, knowing he wouldn’t know, but the guy told me how many times he had seen ELP in London, Yes in Sidney and even went to see The Lamb back in the 70’s when he was a middle age bohemian writer in exile.

It was really a pleasant delay, we stayed 5 hours in the plane but talked with the guy about Prog all that time while drinking beer after beer.

As I said before, I have a nephew who has borderline intelligence, he’s very slow and influential, but I rarely talk with him, one day visiting his family, he showed me his DVD collection, WOW….It was full of Yes, Kansas, King Crimson, etc, I couldn’t believe it.

So don’t believe in generalizations, sometimes people surprises you.

Iván