Durham, North Carolina had in the 1980s one of the biggest record and CD distributors in America, for some strange reason. It didn't last long; the executives all thought that they had to live the rock star life, and the company went up in flames as drug addiction, alcoholism, and divorce wrecked the lives of these clueless chumps. I had seem it before when I was a roadie in central Pennsylvania, when some young guy getting paid minimum wage to lug equipment confused himself with Keith Richards, blowing more than his earnings on blow in a doomed effort to be cool. I was a fool, but I wasn't that big a fool.
There was one interesting thing that I did learn from that Durham distribution company, however. One executive blithely claimed that he could predict my musical tastes by knowing the years that I was in high school. I told him 1971 to 1975, which made me a classic and progressive rock fan by his calculations. I was incensed, but he was absolutely correct, although my musical tastes go far beyond just those categories.
That puts me in the group of music fans who always have to defend their tastes because they like progressive rock. In fact, I don't like it, I positively love certain groups, yet I don't simply buy into the entire genre, as I don't buy into any genre. But the best prog groups and artists were certainly the most creative, ambitious musicians of their era, and they paid a heavy price for that talent.
It seems that the rocks critics, especially in America, found it offensive for an act to try and elevate the audience. It was perfectly fine for the Velvet Underground or Iggy and the Stooges to crawl in their own filth, making heroin chic a thing, or have one note wonders like the Ramones elevated to sainthood because of their mental incapacities. God forbid someone should try to write a song that has more than three chords. It will get you thrown out of the magazine if you actually quote a classical piece or play jazz.
England was different, and was largely responsible for actually encouraging progressive rock, at least in the beginning. The problem was that the British press is always on the lookout for the Next Big Thing. Most trends and trendy groups have a life span of six months, and quality is incidental. Anyone remember the Bay City Rollers? After building up certain bands at the start of their career, the press turned on them for a couple of decades. Take for example Pink Floyd, King Crimson, Emerson Lake & Palmer...
The grand question is; When did psychedelic rock turn into progressive rock? That's a tricky question, but I can tell you that the first progressive act were the Beatles, who in fact invented much of the aesthetic of progressive simply by trying so hard to improve with each single. The fact that later in life none of the individual members did anything particularly progressive (McCartney excepted, who at least continued with vague concept albums through the mid 1970s, but he was the hates one anyway). The Rolling Stones were the epitome of the non-progressive group, but they got their first and did it well.
Fusion is another loaded term that comes into this argument. It is assumed by popular decree to mean a fusion of jazz and rock, but it was first used to mean a fusion of folk and rock, or Indian music and rock, both happening around 1965 and 1966. In fact, any time you add non-blues or country to rock it is a fusion, just not in the accepted sense. Even the terms 'Blues Rock' and 'Country Rock', defining when the influence becomes overwhelmingly obvious, muddies the water. But there you go.
Progressive was a term first slung around by the British musical press to describe everyone from John Mayall to Ten Years After. Only in 1969, when groups like the Nice and King Crimson were really doing something radically different, did an actual genre start to cohere. Even then, it was ill-defined, the folk/jazz/blues of Jethro Tull were thrown into the same pot as the sonic experimentation of Pink Floyd or the orchestral pop of the Moody Blues. It seemed to be more about an attitude of expansion - expansion of musical horizons - than about similarities between acts. That was progressive rock's great strength, the diversity of approaches.
Some record companies, like Virgin and Charisma, supported it at the beginning, but the all-important US market demanded more. It demanded that Jethro Tull put a flute solo on every single as early as 1970, corporate branding beyond what the group members were conceiving. Logos that were consistent from album to album, using the same artist to design the cover and sometimes the stage settings; these are just some of the elements that make up progressive rock. It could be more about packaging and presentation than music sometimes.
Perhaps the biggest common denominator for progressive acts was a striving for the best possible sound, both in the studio and on stage. Not every English band had a George Martin as a producer, and some groups in the 1960s, including big names like the Kinks, the Who, Cream, and the Jimi Hendrix Experience struggled to get a decent studio sound. The Beatles' 'Abbey Road' was perhaps the first example of absolutely sterling audio quality, a crispness and clarity that was stunning and revolutionary for 1969. It was the gold standard for production value in a rock album until 'Dark Side of the Moon' in 1973, although 'Who's Next' in 1971 was also sonically awesome.
The real breaking point between psychedelia and progressive was both live sound and presentation. A psych band needed to get it right only once, in the studio. Very few could reproduce their songs with the same sonic impact. A case of point would be Steve Howe, a very skillful guitarist with a tremendous resume of session work. In the psych band Tomorrow, there were complicated arrangements, but the live evidence shows P.A. systems unable to handle the vocals or the volume, and the nuances crumble away. When he joined Yes in 1970, great effort was made for him to be able to switch between a dizzying array of instruments to reproduce accurately the sounds and textures of the studio experience.
The emphasis on classical music quoting in progressive is overstated, as well. Anyone familiar with Dave Brubeck, the best selling jazz pianist in the 1950s and 1960s, will notice that he did a lot of the tricks and mannerisms of progressive first, including both quoting brief classical snippets in his solos, concept albums based on musical themes, and basing entire songs on (somewhat stolen) classic compositions. No doubt he was very influential to, say Keith Emerson. Jazz was a texture to be used, and jazz-style soloing was a big part of many bands.
The big thing was the vocals, or lack thereof. Some bands, like the excellent Focus out of Holland, barely sang on their music, yet created some of my favorite prog during their relatively brief run in the 1970s. Unfortunately, truly popular music will always depend on the human voice, so the groups that sang, at least some of the time, were the ones who did very well. Pink Floyd had Dave Gilmour, Jethro Tull had Ian Anderson, and Yes had harmonies that sounded like Crosby Stills & Nash.
The live performances were both the making and the breaking of all the progressive acts save King Crimson. The staging became more professional; Pink Floyd was known as a 'must-see' live act in the USA well before they ever bothered the album charts. But those stage lighting cues and filmed backgrounds eroded away at the improvisational nature of the music, as it did with Yes, Jethro Tull, and Emerson Lake & Palmer. Spontaneity became a thing of the past, perfection the new goal, and sterility was inevitable.
In America, progressive sold like hot cakes throughout the 1970s, but there were very few homegrown acts, unlike Europe, where they sprung up in most countries like hallucinogenic mushrooms after a deluge. Frank Zappa was a grandfather of the genre, but he was singing 'Broken Hearts are for Assholes' by the end of the decade. Except for perhaps Kansas, the rest of the groups were too derivative of the British model, such as Starcastle. Canada had Rush, which was significant in the development of progressive metal; they kept at it in a critical vacuum for decades before getting any recognition.
Europe had prog groups everywhere. Gong, full of transplanted Brits and a strange Australian, Daevid Allen, dominated France, with the even stranger Magma joining in. Italy had a significant number of groups adding operatic elements, such as PFM and Le Orme. Greece had the excellent Aphrodite's Child, from Holland emerged Focus. Germany had so many groups form in the shadow of Pink Floyd that a separate genre, Kraut Rock, came into being. But by 1978, it was essentially over, and the big acts were either trying to hide their prog tendencies, like Yes and Genesis, or splintering, like Emerson Lake & Palmer.
But those kids who went to high school from a certain year to a certain year kept enjoying that type of music, even if it didn't bother the charts much anymore after 1985. The big stadium acts had to adopt the technologies first perfected by the prog bands to keep the larger audiences engaged. Corporate branding for any band became standard. After twenty to thirty years of being terminally uncool, with the advent of a vinyl resurgence came a prog resurgence, including new acts like Porcupine Tree and Opeth.
Progressive rock is sure to go the way of jazz, gaining a dwindling but devoted fan base past its expiration date. Music is all about technology now, and those prog artists were the first to exploit the technological aspects of electronic music. Prog paved the way for modern music, even as it was being despised and scorned. It is cold comfort, but it is the last laugh.
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