Music
Albums, vinyl. The new plastic smell when you first remove the shrink wrap. The artwork and text inside. It was an experience buying a new album even before you put it on the turntable. Posters, pictures, playbills, oh my!
Digital can’t give you the “whole package” that LP’s can. The arrival of Chicago IV (Live at Carnegie Hall) in 1971 was like opening Christmas presents– a boxed 4 record set that included 2 giant wall posters, a colossal wall poster and a full-color 20 page photo album! Or, Captain Picard may be able to get his synthesized Earl Grey instantly by voice command, but when he does he loses the psychic benefits of ritual and ceremony that the making of tea affords.
I bought my first decent stereo system just as quadrophonic sound was introduced in the U.S. market in the early 1970’s: a Lafayette quad integrated amp, four speakers and a turntable with a CD-4 phono cartridge.
Unfortunately there were relatively few quad albums available yet (or ever, as it turned out,) and really none that I was eager to buy. But there was a title from an artist that I liked, so I gave it a try.
Caravanserai (in quad) by Santana was an absolute revelation to me! From the instant the needle hit the groove I found myself enveloped in sound, immersed in a three-dimensional sonic field of chirping crickets swirling around my head — it gave me goosebumps. I had never experienced anything like this before, and in fact hardly anyone had experienced surround sound at this point in time. I was entranced. And the music– well the music was (is) simply sublime. The best Santana album ever. Every guitar note was a sonic wave bending and building towards ecstasy! Now I was forever hooked on great forward- leaning music and the sound systems capable of producing it.
A few months later another album (in stereo, not quad) stunned me: Jethro Tull’s Aqualung. The cover art, the type- faces, the lyrics, the references to earlier songs on the LP, all that made this a “concept” album just “blew my mind.” And the sounds– the breathy/guttural flute playing, the aggressive, defiant guitar solos, the swaggering vocals, wow! And the lyrics were edgy, provocative, biting, sardonic. I wanted MORE. It was Tull that led me into Progressive Rock and that has been my musical home ever since.
Wind-Up
How do you dare tell me that I’m my father’s son
When that was just an accident of birth
I’d rather look around me, compose a better song
‘Cause that’s the honest measure of my worth
In your pomp and all your glory you’re a poorer man than me
As you lick the boots of death born out of fear
From then on my favorite kind of music was Rock and my favorite Rock music sub-genre was / is Progressive Rock (aka. “Prog”.) I have no formal music training, but, as they say, I know what I like, and after decades of listening to Prog, near-Prog, proto-Prog, etc. I have curated a song list of what I consider to be outstanding examples from 20 bands who represent for me the Pinnacle of Prog. While you listen, you can read my take on what Prog was / is all about (below.) Enjoy!
Pinnacle of Prog Song List
| YEAR | BAND | SONG | ALBUM | COUNTRY |
| 1967 | Moody Blues | Nights in White Satin* | Days of Future Passed | UK |
| 1967 | Procol Harum | A Whiter Shade of Pale* | Procol Harum | UK |
| 1969 | King Crimson | In the Court of the Crimson King | In the Court of the Crimson King | UK |
| 1971 | Pink Floyd | Echoes | Meddle | UK |
| 1971 | Yes | Roundabout | Fragile | UK |
| 1972 | Aphrodite’s Child | The Four Horsemen | 666 | Greece |
| 1972 | ELP | From the Beginning | Trilogy | UK |
| 1972 | Jethro Tull | Thick as a Brick (part 1) | Thick as a Brick | UK |
| 1972 | PFM | Appena Un Po | Per un amico | Italy |
| 1972 | Genesis | Suppers Ready | Foxtrot | UK |
| 1972 | Gentle Giant | Advent of Panurge | Octopus | UK |
| 1974 | The Strawbs | Hero and Heroine | Hero and Heroine | UK |
| 1976 | Camel | Air Born | Moonmadness | UK |
| 1977 | Renaissance | Opening Out | A Song for All Seasons | UK |
| 1989 | Marillion | Seasons End | Seasons End | UK |
| 1999 | Dream Theatre | Finally Free | Metro Part 2: Scenes from a Memory | US |
| 2005 | Porcupine Tree | Arriving Somewhere but not Here | Deadwing | UK |
| 2008 | Riverside | The Curtain Falls | Reality Dream Live | Poland |
| 2011 | Steven Wilson | Deform to Form a Star | Grace for Drowning | UK |
| 2016 | The Pineapple Thief | In Exile | Your Wilderness | UK |
The best Prog was / is ambitious, experimental, symphonic, cinematic, sweeping, long and majestic– like some of the best Classical music. And, like some Classical music, Prog can be pretentious and overwhelming: sometimes you just have to stop whatever you are doing and close your eyes and listen with your heart. In fact, at its heyday in the early-to-mid 1970s, I referred to this music as “Classical Rock” (not to be confused with “Classic Rock”.) I only began to refer to it as “Prog” long after the initial Prog moment (1970s) was over.
Your typical Prog band was / is a standard rock band (guitar, bass, drums, lead vocalist) plus a keyboardist (often one with Classical music training) who played a Mellotron (an early electronic keyboard) or Moog or other synthesizer keyboard. There would have been no Prog without synthesizers, or, more explicitly: Prog developed the moment synths were invented. It is also probably no coincidence that Prog’s long-song-format also appeared at exactly the moment (1969) that album sales surpassed single sales for the first time. Additionally, as FM radio stations became cheaper to own, more radio stations were created, including those specializing in “alternative” rock and Prog.
Two other technology-related factors also mitigated in favor of Prog: new generations of recording studios and home stereo playback equipment. Prog bands used their recording studios as instruments in their own right, and to a much greater extent than had The Beatles, The Beach Boys and Jimi Hendrix a decade earlier. New multi-track recorders and sequencers allowed the Prog bands to shape their soundscapes to perfection.2 And the new top-end ($1,000+) and even mid-range ($500) home stereo systems were capable of reproducing these sounds with high fidelity (pun intended.)
Every member of a Prog band was expected to be a virtuoso of at least one, and often more than one instrument. The best concert I ever attended was the fairly obscure English Prog band Gentle Giant playing in a large club where each band member (literally) jumped up and swapped places and instruments with the others continuously throughout the concert. It was impossible to keep track of who played which instrument(s) during any given song. Awesome!
Prog albums were often “concept albums” with their themes sometimes drawn from literature: Rock goes to college. Prog concerts were among the first to incorporate laser light displays and other dramatic visual elements. Prog loves tech. Peter Gabriel’s (Genesis) costumes and mannerisms (see Watcher of the Skies live, for example) set a dark, mysterious atmosphere, etc. Prog loves theatrics; Prog loves bombast; Prog is Wagner with electronic instruments.
The first Prog rock bands formed in the late 1960s; their direct antecedents were the U.K. bands The Moody Blues and Procol Harum who created rock albums with orchestral instrumentation. (I include songs by these bands in my list but with an asterisk indicating their “proto- Prog” status.) (Others have noted the influence on Prog of the Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, and The Beach Boys’ Pet Sounds.)
The Dark Side of the Moon is the Sgt. Pepper of Prog, but The Court of the Crimson King is The Beatles on the Ed Sullivan show: a pivotal moment that announced a new reality. After 1969, nothing was, or could ever be, quite the same.
Sean Murphy
Everyone agrees that the first Prog band was King Crimson1 and the English city of Canterbury (near London) was Prog’s original home town. Crimson defined the genre under the leadership of the eccentric, (some would say barely-social) restless musical genius Robert Fripp. Crimson defined Prog as being high-tech, eclectic and disregarding of commercial success: Prog was to be defiantly “arthouse”, like psychedelic rock, but “darker and edgier.”
Mellotron-induced Western classical symphonic arrangements … Individual and collective passages of arresting virtuosity and a rhythmic discontinuity bordering on the perverse are also components of an essentially tonal, approachable whole inoffensive to any Classical or pop listener.
Paul Stump, The Music’s All that Matters: A History of Progressive Rock
In the example of In the Court of the Crimson King the band fused ultra-modern instrumentation and recording techniques like deeply layered, segued tracks and novel fragmented song structures with traditional elements like Baroque and medieval English madrigals, etc. Prog adhered to Crimson’s vision of creating surrealist sonic landscapes.
Prog was born in the U.K. and most of the great Prog bands were English. Over the years noteworthy Prog bands like Caravan, Gentle Giant, Renaissance and Camel were formed in Canterbury. The first Prog bands to introduce flutes and other woodwinds started in the Canterbury Prog scene and influenced other bands like Jethro Tull.
Prog songs were too long for commercial radio, and too non-mainstream, with lots of abrupt chord changes, time signature changes and instrumentation changes to achieve widespread popular success: You can’t dance to Prog. That being said, it is true that a few Prog bands did achieve widespread notoriety and sales, especially Pink Floyd, Emerson, Lake and Palmer (ELP) and Yes.3
Prog fans continue to debate about which bands should be included in the genre. Some people (but not me) would add, for example, Rush, Styx, Kansas, Supertramp, Frank Zappa and Radiohead as Prog. On the other hand, some bands that I have listed as being the pinnacle of the genre deny that they ever were Prog!
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1Jimi Hendrix was so impressed the first time he heard King Crimson perform live in a London club in 1969 that he proclaimed: “This is the best band in the world!” Pete Townshend of The Who was similarly effusive. He hailed King Crimson’s 1969 debut album, “In the Court of the Crimson King,” as “an uncanny masterpiece.”
2 In 1970 Simon & Garfunkel became the first musicians to use 16-track recording, but as only two 8-track recorders were available, both had to be carefully manually synchronized to produce a clear sound. When it became known that they had spent three months at a time in studios recording their album Bridge Over Troubled Water in the U.S., some Prog bands in the U.K. considered this an endorsement of and even an inducement to use whatever time and technology was required to perfect their sonic compositions.
3 The band Genesis achieved its enormous popularity after it left Prog and became a Pop band.