How did you get into Prog?

My older sister brought home In The Court Of The Crimson King and In Search Of The Lost Chord when I was 11. Those albums changed my life.

When I was growing up I was really, really into tull. I never really knew about the Progressive genre, though. I also remember picking up Going for the One by Yes and really digging it. I rediscovered it a few years ago because I started collecting vinyl about seven years ago and found that I could get a lot of Prog rather inexpensively. This, of course, was bolstered by the fact that the Prog Archives one of the few message board sites that gets through my work's firewall. quite a blessing though, I have found some amazing stuff here. 

Being sick and listening to my older brothers album, Selling England by the Pound!...

Evolver wrote: My older sister brought home In The Court Of The Crimson King and In Search Of The Lost Chord when I was 11. Those albums changed my life.

Edited by cstack3 - May 11 2018 at 21:20

When I was eight, a friend of mine who was also eight yet into music well ahead of his years played The Lamb Lies Down On Broadway for me. I raised a curious eye brow and then went swimming. Fast forward to high school, when Genesis was getting more and more commercial, another friend recommended The Lamb and I was astonished this was the same band. So, I got into Old Genesis (always referred to as “Old Genesis”). A notable number of other enlightened students in my high school also had a lot of appreciation for “Old Genesis”. Others weren’t terribly aware of their merits. I had one particular friend who was into Pink Floyd, the Grateful Dead and Yes. I was sort of aware of Pink Floyd, but not really the other two. Someone spray painted “Genesis Rael” onto the side of a school storage building, and I had to explain to this friend that Rael was the name of character in the Lamb, which he didn’t really grasp until I said “like Pink”. I knew someone else who was into the Moody Blues. And another friend (still friends to this day) who was into Jethro Tull, but not so much of the others mentioned. The point is that there was a general desire for quality music. Also there wasn’t much of a surging underground in our area, so some of my peers assembled their own underground by digging up old bands buried in the archives, the more obscure the better. I went looking for bands that sounded something like Old Genesis with varying success and learned about “Progressive Rock”. I found out more about Pink Floyd and Yes, and then King Crimson who were entirely new to me. I I also found other groups like Focus, Jade Warrior, the Strawbs, Nektar, Eloy, Gentle Giant, Soft Machine, Gong, etc. in a used record store I frequented. I’d see their names and recall reading about them in an anthology of Rolling Stone Reviews wherein they were described as “Progressive”. That would be the gateway to Prog generally for me. Somewhere along the line I discovered Wayside Music as a mail distributor for mainly Progressive Rock. I also started working at a pizzaria, and two of my coworkers turned out to be Genesis and Frank Zappa fans, and that’s when I became a Zappoid.




Edited by HackettFan - May 11 2018 at 22:44

^ This even older dude  agrees ....we just bought music we liked ,,,,didn't matter what we thought it was called. After buying a few 'prog bands' early on I just tended to like that style better but as Elf said we also listened to non prog classic rock and jazz ,etc. It all got played together at parties and gatherings.

Quinino wrote: The Dark Elf wrote: Back in my day, prog wasn't prog. There was either good music or bad music. I listened to Yes, Tull, King Crimson, ELP and Genesis right along with Sabbath, Floyd, The Allman Brothers, Bowie, The Doors, Hendrix and Zeppelin. It was all rock, with no delineation except it was good rock. Totally agreed - even the same bands ... almost (you forgot The Who, man, The Who)