Son's Story

Music has been my primary hobby for as long as I can remember. Practically every toddler/pre-school memory I can still recall has to do with music - either listening to it, or imagining scenarios in which I was a musician myself. Apart from Sesame Street records, the lion's share of my listening in those first few years was to either the Beatles or the Moody Blues. I think my dad must have let me keep a few of his records in my room, which I would play on a plastic Fisher-Price record player.  

I remember thinking the Mellotron sounds on the Moody Blues albums was an actual orchestra, and that Tony Clarke (the producer) must be the guy who conducts this orchestra. I would get 2 spoons out of the kitchen and pretend I was Tony Clarke conducting during "The Voyage" off On the Threshold of a Dream. Even when I was doing normal kid stuff like riding on a rocking horse, I usually had to have a record playing while I did so. I'm sure my dad encouraged this, and who could blame him? Music is the Best, as Uncle Frank once said. 

Given an early diet of Beatles and Moody Blues, it makes sense how my musical tastes tended to orbit around the general principles of a) rock music, b) which strives to be different from the norm, and c) often uses non-standard (for rock) styles or instrumentation to achieve this. This process of discovery reached its early peak in my late high school and early college years, by which time I had established myself as the school's "weird music guy" with my proud devotion to stuff like Zappa, Beefheart, early Pink Floyd, and early Spirit, not to mention a lot of underground punk and hardcore bands.

The Big Immersion in Progressive Rock for me came in what I call my Prog Renaissance (1988 - 2000), a time during which the Internet was expanding, and fans around the world were eager to share what they knew about pages upon pages of bands I never had even dreamt existed -- not just in the Anglo Saxon countries, either, there were excellent prog bands from Italy, France (Magma!!), Sweden, Japan, South America, Iceland, Holland, and Greece.  

What's more, independent CD labels (and mail-order distributors) were now reissuing these largely forgotten albums as well as a bunch of new bands building upon the styles of the greats (Anekdoten, Anglagard, etc). It was a great time to be a prog fan, and I took full advantage of it. Progressive Rock festivals began sprouting around the US -- ProgFest, ProgDay (which is closest to where I live - I still go each year), NearFest, ProgScape, and others. Eventually I began contributing to a prog-based newsletter/fanzine called Exposé, which is still alive today (www.expose.org), though my involvement had ended by the early 2000s.  

Eventually I became very active on the ProgArchives.com website and forum and was on the team responsible for reviewing requests to add new bands to the database in the "RIO (Rock in Opposition), Avant Prog, and Zeuhl" subgenres, where my main interests lay. A big source of frustration in the ProgArchives days was enduring arguments over what band belonged in what genre (or even what band should be considered "prog" at all, for the purposes of the site). With this blog, I resisted the temptation to take matters in my own hands and classify albums into sub-genres my way.  In the end, it's the enjoyment of the music that counts.

To help me frame my own personal phases of music discovery, below I have separated my life in terms of specific "eras".  I may make occasional reference to these eras in my reviews:

• Early Development (1969-1977): just a little boy
• Pre-Adolescence (1978-1982): not old enough to build much of a collection myself, but very interested in music nonetheless
• Adolescence (1983-1987): the first major wave of music buying
• My Prog Renaissance (1988-2000): college and the roughly 10 years following, coinciding with the advent of the internet (and thus most of the available information about obscure bands)
• Mostly Ignoring (2001-2009):  a period in which I'd temporarily burned out on prog and was mostly listening to other kinds of music
• Beyond Maturity (2010-present): back into appreciating prog, in addition to all the other neat stuff I'd learned in the meantime 

With that introduction out of the way, let's get into talking about some albums!  Hope you enjoy it as much as I do.