The term "prog rock"

 

"Progressive" was certainly in use in 1973, because I wrote an article in Imperial College's student mag on progressive rock when I was doing my PhD there, which was from 1972-3, and I didn't coin the term so I had to have heard it well prior to that.

 (<- that's me being very surprised) I'm very surprised (see, told you), in 1976 when the punks were rebelling against the Prog Rock dinosaurs the name "Prog Rock" was established well enough to the "right-on" music press to warrant them calling it a "dinosaur" - journalists are not the brightest of people, rock journo's doubly so - therefore tagging Prog Rock as a dinosaur wasn't some surreal hard-to-understand metaphor - they picked dinosaur because they are big and ponderous and very old, and they called it Prog Rock because that's what it was called at the time. The fact that since then the received wisdom perpetrated through-out the whole of the media industry and with much of the elder generation of "the public" that Prog Rock was pretentious and grandiose adds weight to the argument that the term existed before that date.

 

Pop and rock music is a transitory and fashion driven, musical styles adopt a name very soon after they emerge because next week they will be history and they often take-on the adjective word that was originally used to describe it, (eg Rock and Roll, Beat, Punk, Indie, Synth-pop, Gothic Rock, Shoe-gazing, Grunge, etc...). It is very rare for a style of music to be named long after it has passed from the public consciousness, rarer still for ordinary members of the public who have no direct interest in music to then not only know that revisionist name, but to also know which bands it refers to, yet in the UK at least, Joe Public of a certain age knows that Yes, Genesis, Floyd et al are Prog bands. It is true that those bands had other descriptions at the time - I remember Yes being called "technoflash", ELP and Queen were called "pomp rock" and Hawkwind and Gong was "head music" because to some the diversity in musical styles of Prog was too generic, every rock journalist wants to be credited with coining a name of a style of music (just as we sub-subgenre-ise Prog), but none of those other names stuck.

 

I do not doubt that you and your mates did not call it Prog, but we did.