Catcher10 wrote: ^ When KC first came out I did not get it at all, I was too young, Schizoid was cool because of the metal sound, distorted and all that. The rest of the album made no sense.......Flash forward a long time and I have only begun to appreciate KC in the past 10yrs. Pulling that album out 10-15yrs ago I knew something was not right with the recording. Then reading about how the tape deck was not aligned well, creating a bad recording...You can't fix that. But SW did do a better job than any of the reissues before his. It allowed me to hear, feel the music much better, an understanding....The intricacies of what KC wa doing I was now hearing better. ...

I think I was lucky. Having heard so much classical music, and modern stuff, including Bartok, Russell, Orff and others, allowed me to hear something in the rock music that no one around me had, or knew about. Even in Brazil, the experimental classical music scene that eventually gave us Villa Lobos was quite different, than the norm and the standard "classics".

By the time I heard Sgt Peppers, Their Satanic Majesty's BS, Days of Future Passed, and all the way to KC, and several others, I was no longer afraid of the screaming guitar. Not to mention that at the time, you can hear Edgar Broughton Band, and many other smaller bands in London, doing the same thing, and LA had its batch, and NY, of course, had its batch in Iggy and even the Ramones, all of whom were getting some attention, but not in radio, or the top ten fascist choices.

hearing KC's first, to me, was just like hearing Fairport convention first time, or Amon Duul 2, or Can, and the only exception that scared me, was Tangerine Dream ... Mysterious Semblance for the Strand of Nightmares, gave me a loop and a half, and that was the last time any piece of music has been strange, weird, off the wall, and beyond my ability and imagination to hear it and get a feel for it.

I still do not have a good feel for some eastern music, some of which is really hard to get into because we are so tied up to a beat and a measure ... but all in all, the difference was what helped me decide this was great. PLUS, I knew what it was about ... no one could deny the epitath for one's friends that dies in the IRA thing, or VietNam, but these days, no one knows about the emotion that creates, and people are mostly de-sensitized to it. Saying it is almost ... bizarre and not possible. No one would write a rock'n'roll song for idiots that died kinda thing!

How times have changed. But we knew, then, that it was meaningful music. But you had to get off the "top ten" to get a feel for it, and I did. Most of my friends didn't!

barrows wrote: Wow!  It is hard to understand the SW hate present in this thread. ...

I don't think it is hate, as much as it might be considered that SW thinks he has a better say in determining what is "progressive" based on his choices of music to help clean up. However, I have not heard him use the word "progressive" at all for these situations!!!!

The fact is, that no one was going to clean up YES, GG or KC ... and he got Robert to understand things even better than before, if I am not mistaken.

Again, my feeling has been all along that it doesn't matter who re-mixes, or re-masters these things ... the original will always remain just another version of the same piece of music, and digital or not, you can not erase the human element and neither can you make it "better", and too many folks are deceiving themselves via the commercial top ten definition and understanding of things.

It's a matter of time, and digital will surpass any LP ever made. Plain and simple! Nobody ever thought we would reach the moon or that we would even be flying, or that there would be a tunnel under the English channel.

Times change.

Things change.

And one day there was a woman Prime Minister in a country that thought women were secondary citizens and the comments in the media were unbelievable ... yhou would think women were animals!

barrows wrote: ...  So far, the work I have heard him (Crimson and Yes) do has been exemplary. ...

I won't disagree.

However, that's like saying that the version of Bernstein of The rite of Spring, is better than Stokowski, which is better than Osawa's which is better than Leinsdorf which is better than Karajhan's!

That's crazy.

WHAT you are hearing that has changed from the original, has absolutely NOTHING to do with the original feeling that came through the music, something that is very specific and peculiar to that piece, and is the "secret" that keeps that piece alive for so long and appreciated even after hundreds of years!

You must see that!

Steven's touch is nice, there is no doubt about it, and it is quite visible in the Porcupine Tree stuff and in his own albums ... but I think that he should concentrate on his own work, and let the stravinsky's of rock, or the tchaikovsky's of rock live and die by their own hand. If YES, is not intelligent enough to stop playing with lesser musicians and take care of their work, then ... that's that. If Robert is not smart enough to realize that the stuff sitting in the vaults is a volcano waiting to explode ... then, that's that! If Gentle Giant is not strong enough to know what they can do with their work for another generation ... there is nothing you can tell them that will help them listen!

In the end, the electronic versions will survive, because the vinyl's time is over ... so us crying over the horse carriages of 100 years ago, will, eventually, sound stupid and bizarre!