My cousin had more of an influence on me getting into prog I would say. He was big into Genesis(as well as Yes but Genesis was his favorite)and so rather early on I think I put one and one together than Yes and Genesis were sort of similar to each other. He also told me about this band called King Crimson who "I might like if I like the early Genesis." My cousin never really went that deep into prog though even though he did like several of the major bands. I don't think he was ever into Pink Floyd, Rush, Kansas, Jethro Tull or ELP much. He did mention UK to me once but I'm pretty sure he never got into GG, Camel, Renaissance, VDGG etc. 

But there was 'indirect' influence via getting me into music that would eventually act as a bridge to prog. 

One, my dad read an article about Santana's Supernatural album in a Sunday leisure supplement of the newspaper we read.  The song Yaleo was the first time I was exposed to the idea of duels/trade off solos.  This would sound bewildering for those who do not know that I grew up in a fairly downmarket suburb of Mumbai and my only other exposure to Western music at that time had been a Beatles compilation which had mostly the songs from the first few albums (and then Let It Be ), an ABBA compilation which did NOT have Intermezzo no.1, the Yanni live at Acropolis concert which of course was heavily instrumental but in a different way and a Celine Dion concert . Oh, and some Michael Jackson songs, of course. This was long before mp3, limewire and the lot and most of our music consumption at that point was via cassette. 

The other and arguably major bridge was Ilayaraja's music. I don't know whether he did hear any progressive rock beyond Pink Floyd or whether he just appropriated Mancini and the like but looking back now, I can clearly hear the influence of prog or at least of 70s rock/funk/soul in his work.  

The passages from 11:40 to 12:10, 19:40 to 20:15 in the below video for eg (they are taken from his background scores).  There are many such but his team recently purged all the background score compilations uploaded (unofficially) on youtube, so I can't find more examples of the kind of passages I'd have wanted to show.

My parents had no interest in music whatsoever - I initially discovered prog through my friends (in particular that time I first heard 'Meddle' round at a mate's house).

Otherwise my interest started by whatever 'quality music' I could find on BBC Radio One, particularly from presenters such as John Peel and Bob Harris, and to a lesser extent from Radio Luxembourg.

Dad was an avid listener of classical music and he had way over 2K albums from the earliest to the latest Stockhausen and other electronics of the day. The variety was crazy, and combined with about 50 or more operas, I ended up appreciating the variety ... and still do to this day!It explains why I don't care for bands that only have a beat drummer, and bass player. The work has very little life to show for it.

My sister never really got into prog though.

lazland wrote: It was my cousin who introduced me to Yes. Mum and Dad had little influence, aside from putting up with the racket I made from the hifi.

Ah yes, those shouts up the stairs of 'turn that racket down will you'!

When I returned to NZ temporarily, I remember asking my friends who liked some of the same bands and artists I did, if they had ever heard of prog. Not one had, though I suspect that may have changed since, as the internet has propagated the term to the point where I am sure it has more global recognition than it does now.

I’m not suggesting that prog was unknown as a term in NZ, as I’m sure it was not. I’m not even suggesting that prog was unknown as a term in NZ for my generation either, as it’s purely anecdotal that my friends and I had never heard of the term.

But I do think the term can be more unhelpful than helpful, as it does conjure up images of old, bearded, real-ale quaffers, and a stuffy, boring old reputation. I can definitely understand why a lot of more modern bands and artists who undeniably make prog music, do not like the term, not like their music to be called prog.

Sorry to go off the track a little here, but it was more to point out that it’s really hard for me to work out who got me into prog, because I was well into it before I even knew it was a thing. 🤷🏻‍♂️

nick_h_nz wrote: I got into prog without knowing there was such a thing as prog. I had been listening to a lot of prog without knowing that was what some people call it. In fact, it wasn’t until after I came to the UK that I even first heard the word, when someone said “oh you like prog”, after I had listed off some of the bands I like, in answer to a question about my musical tastes. It intrigued me, and I had to ask what prog was, since I couldn’t even really see how the bands and artists I had mentioned had any similarities to each other. Heck, even the invented “grunge” genre seemed to have more similar qualities than what “prog” is. When I returned to NZ temporarily, I remember asking my friends who liked some of the same bands and artists I did, if they had ever heard of prog. Not one had, though I suspect that may have changed since, as the internet has propagated the term to the point where I am sure it has more global recognition than it does now.

Nogbad_The_Bad wrote: Not at all, I discovered it all via friends and the internet.

That wouild be my answer, but I probably had predispositions from my parents.

My dad listened to classical music with a certain accent on chamber music. He had also listened to a fair amount of jazz (he was helping organizing jazz concerts (I remember Rashan Kirke and Memphis Slim (the later even slept at house house) as some of my earliest memories, though he preferred swing to bop, if I judge by his LP collection. My dad also had Stand Up (for Bourée) and was given the original Hair soundtrack. I suppose he also danced rock'n roll with my mom, at one point

My mother also like some classical, but was a musical hall fan (Edith Piaf, Trenet, Garbo, Minelli, Chevalier, and also Le Grand Jacques were her fave), which means I didn't freak out at The Gabe's costumes.

But she also listened to Formule J (for Jeune) while overseeing us making our homeworks.

My dad didn't dislike Floyd, Genesis, ELP (he even had a few early Tomita albums) and Tull, so he didn't try to interfere.

Like others here, I hadn't heard the term "prog" until the 1990s. We all thought it was classic rock in the 1980s because the classic rock stations were the only ones playing this stuff.

 

 

I had no interest in any music my folks listened to. Religious, Pipe and Drum, Lawrence Welk, Hawaiian.

I did get an FM radio from my mom when I was around 9 or 10 and began to explore the dial. I like to listen to music when I was going to sleep. This also just happened to be the time that stations from the Detroit area could get picked up.  I think Arthur Brown's Fire was one of the first tunes I heard that caught my ear. A few years later it was Knife Edge by ELP, although it took some time to learn who they were. Later that same summer at a drop in centre for youth held at the local high school I heard The Three fates on the turntable and was smitten. I grabbed the album cover and saw the title Knife Edge. Now I had a name to the song and the rest, as they say, is history.

My dad did mention once that he's like to see ELP play, but unfortunately we never got that chance.

My mother couldn't stand my music. She hated the sound of a synth.

My sister (2 years older) was heavily into Elvis and Sha-Na-Na, so no influence there...at all.

My older cousin (4 years older) turned me onto the heavier stuff she listened to whenever we would visit. Stuff like Alice Cooper, Humble Pie, Grand Funk as well as the Allman Bothers, CCR and Led Zeppelin.

Just last week my son (29 yr old) made a reference to J. Geils, caught me totally off guard. I had no idea he listened to, let alone, liked them.

 

  For a lot of people, Stevie Wonder only starts with Master Blaster. 

I had one older brother into classic rock: The Beatles, The Stones, The Who etc. And another older brother devoted to Verdi, Puccini, and Tower of Power (no joke)... So it was probably inevitable that I would become an ardent Proghead.

Yeah, exactly what I have seen.  They will say they love Stevie and I will be excited to talk about his music with them and then they talk about I Just Called To Say I Love You.  Ugh!

My mom migrated to pop/rock music like myself as I was growing up, I have a feeling she lived her dreamed about music listening life thru me as I grew up listening, buying records and going to concerts.....Again something they only dreamed about in Honduras growing up.

I guess the reason I don't have a warm relationship with that song is by the time I first heard it, I had already started to dislike some of the typical 80s sounds and didn't at the time know that Stevie Wonder was all kinds of amazing. I just knew him as a famous artist.  And THEN, when I did get around to the Innervisions era, I could never reconcile songs like I just called to say/Part time lover with THAT Stevie. I was like, what happened to him!

I guess the reason I don't have a warm relationship with that song is by the time I first heard it, I had already started to dislike some of the typical 80s sounds and didn't at the time know that Stevie Wonder was all kinds of amazing. I just knew him as a famous artist.  And THEN, when I did get around to the Innervisions era, I could never reconcile songs like I just called to say/Part time lover with THAT Stevie. I was like, what happened to him!

My brother and I got into pop and rock in the early/mid 60's by listening to top 40 radio on transistor radios and 45 singles...then college where we fist got into 'prog'.

We did....mom and dad had one of those consoles with am/fm radio and turntable that also was used as a good looking furniture piece to set things on when the lid was  closed . A few years later they bought Greg and I one of those portable turntable speaker things where we could play our records. My daughter still has the console because she lives in the old homestead after my mon and dad passed. I have no idea where the old portable player ended up. In college in '69 we both had Sony compact stereo systems.

I swear. Heh, didn't know Harper did that sort of purge too. 

My wife Virginia approves of my fascination with Yes. 

If my family has contributed with anything, it has to be my older brother. My first album that wasn't a collection of pop songs (Mr Music etc.) was The Time of The Oath by Halloween that I ended up in the possession of, which I consider my start down the path that led to prog. I remained in the metal genre for a long time and my introduction to prog was probably Porcupine Tree and Tool. The rest, as they say, is history. Finding PA has no doubt been the most significant influence. There was so much I had never heard about before finding PA.

1) Appreciation of good quality sound. He always had a high end HiFi system and headphones

2) Bought me guitars and supported me playing

3) Diversity in taste, from classical to hard rock to prog to pop.

Prog rock related albums in his collection that I listened to a lot were Pink Floyd DSOTM and The Wall, DP Who do We Think We Are and Machine Head and LZ Houses of the Holy. 

I got into those bands and found out after the fact he also enjoyed them, lol. We always have plenty to talk about, mostly me being jealous of him seeing Yes live in Boston in '72 AND '74 I believe! Pink Floyd Animals tour, etc...

Same here. In the late 70s, on the radio I discovered stuff like Pink Floyd, Yes, Rush, Jethro Tull, King Crimson, ELP, Supertramp, and the Moody Blues on the radio, along with other AOR-type tunes from classic rock, British Invasion, southern rock, etc. Then whenever this site went up (was it the early 2000s? I feel like I stumbled on this site pretty early on; I've been online since the 90s), I explored stuff I wasn't familiar with, and quickly grew to love Genesis and Camel, Marillion, Discipline, Phideaux, Flower Kings, PFM, IQ, etc.

Only partly. I'm 29 now but started getting into prog at 14/15. My dad had many Floyd records and I listened to them a lot when I started getting into them, but then I discovered Yes, Genesis and ELP on my own, then my journey continued from there. We did start listening to a lot of prog at the same time, he bought some Genesis records at the time and he already had some Marillion, and I got him into Dream Theater and we went so see them live soon after. So we kinda influenced each other in that regard lol. He was very important in getting me into rock and music in general more than prog in particular. 

Interesting that you got into Yes, Genesis and ELP on your own. I suppose your dad either just wasn't into anything beyond the most obvious music or is maybe just the wrong age to be into those bands. PF seem to be one of those "ever popular" bands which(other than Rush and PF) doesn't really seem to apply to most prog stuff. I suppose a lot of people know Genesis too but not necessarily their prog period.

They didn´t. I discovered prog by searching bargain bins for vinyls, and by name dropping from artists I enjoyed, and from a chance playing of Firth of Fifth by Genesis on a radio show I happened to listen to while stoned out of my mind on vacation in the countryside. It was such a revelation to me, that music could sound like that, that I immediately started collecting Genesis vinyls and began searching out similar artists.

My parents only introduced me to early 60s pop/rock. The Beatles, The Shadows, Kinks, The Who, Herman´s Hermits, The Beach Boys. There was nothing experimental about the music my parents listened to, and while they both enjoy music, it´s on a pretty shallow level, and they never encouraged us to listen to music with a more analyzing approach. Nothing wrong with that...we just speak two very different languages :-)

Mom loved folk (Peter, Paul & Mary, Simon & Garfunkle, Rod McKuen) and THE BEATLES. She really loved The Beatles.

I lived under the shadow of CKLW AM radio: lived for my radio listening time (70-74 soul/R&B in Detroit was AMAZING!) but then discovered on the FM side of the dial a couple of "Album Rock" oriented radio stations--who gradually became my go-to stations, WABX and, soon after, WRIF. There is where I discovered the music I really loved--much of which would later be called "progressive rock."

Brother went away to boarding school and came back with an entire new universe of music--mostly hard rock guitar oriented like Ronnie Montrose, Mountain, The Rolling Stones, Humble Pie, and a lot of Jeff Beck, Uriah Heep, and Blue Öyster Cult--these last three changed my life--especially Secret Treaties, "Orange", and, especially, Demons and Wizards.

He had a lot of Floyd albums but not Yes or ELP. He had Genesis and had watched them live but I don't remember listening to them growing up. The thing is he had a lot of CDs but lost a lot of cassettes and vinyls he had when he was younger. The prog bands I remember listening as a kid are only Floyd and Marillion (He was born in '66 so prog was sort of fading in popularity when he was still very young). Then with the internet it was far easier to have access to music and we both like Yes, Genesis, Dream Theater, Porcupine Tree, Crimson (we went to see them live right before then pandemic, fortunately) etc. He's not into ELP and Tull though, which are two bands I really like, especially the former. 

But my aunt and uncle played my sister and I War Of The Worlds back when it came out, when we were staying with them, aged 10 and 7.  I think THAT influenced me hugely....

And I would like to think that maybe one day my youngest daughter will stumble across this site, and add her own post to whatever page of this thread we're on to, and say that I influenced her!  I battered her with my music in the car twice a day to nursery in Cardiff and back, to the point where she was requesting stuff!  As she grew older she denied all knowledge, but now she's started listening to PF and admitting that she likes other stuff her peers wouldn't, so maybe, just maybe.....

That's a bit of a stretch, I'll admit but it sounds pretty good 

Tjah, it should be because listening to Beatles singles as a child had some influence on my preference of say Symphonic rather 

than Avant-Prog.

Edit:

And actually, I wrote this before I read the post above mine.

The first music experience that really blew me away was my mother taking us to the Yellow Submarine film. I was 8 at the time (this was in the seventies, not when the film originally came out). My mother died when I was 10, and I never found out more about any interest in music she might have had. I think we went to Yellow Submarine because she thought that my brother and I would like it; she wasn't that much into the Beatles herself, maybe a bit.

My father listened to some great music in the early seventies, but had already pretty much stopped doing that when I became consciously interested in music. He had a big influence rather randomly when he played a tape of Watch by Manfred Mann's Earthband in the car, which got me my first prog flash, even though he didn't even know what it was. I asked him and he told me it was Elton John, who in fact was on the other side of the tape. So I went out and bought Elton John's Greatest Hits from my little pocket money, and when I discovered that this was the guy from the wrong side of the tape, I complained to my father, and I really had to negotiate to get him to refund me the money. Eventually he did it though.   

He had some albums by ELP, Jethro Tull, Novalis, Deep Purple, which I explored getting into prog, but by the end of the seventies he'd mostly listen to softer stuff such as Cat Stevens and classical music. This gave me the weird idea that probably by the age of 40 at the latest it would be normal to stop listening to rock music, that it'd really be a youth thing, and I was rather surprised to learn that most musicians would keep on rocking beyond that age, let alone listeners. 

My grandfather who listened to classical music up to properly modern stuff like Stockhausen was curious about the prog I listened to. He bought some albums on my recommendation and would comment on them in a detailed manner, sometimes positive, sometimes more critical. He didn't really get into it, but I liked how open minded he was. He didn't succeed that much getting me into classical and modern classical stuff, but when I grew older, I got more into this, and maybe he had some influence there in the long run. He was the first to get me interested in art, particularly impressionism.