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.

Father's Story

I remember the first time I heard rock and roll music. I was passing by a party at a lakeside cottage in the Adirondacks where my family was vacationing. Some teenagers from other families were enjoying the evening, and I wondered what they were listening to. It turned out to be the Everly Brothers' "Bye Bye Love." I was 12 years old at the time (1957). I then began to pay more attention to my two older brothers' collections of 45 rpm singles and 12" LPs. 

My oldest brother was into jazz, and I loved it. It's still my favorite genre, and I've built a vast collection of LPs, CDs, and Digital Files spanning almost 75 years of music. (1949-2023). I've blogged about my favorite jazz albums of the 1980s MORE FAVORITES: Reflections on Jazz in the 1980s (jazzinthe80s.blogspot.com). 

Returning to rock and roll, when it came time to buy some of my own records, thanks to my summer jobs, I went for a few 45s but preferred albums. I liked instrumental rock and roll, played by artists like Duane Eddy and Johnny and the Hurricanes. I supposed it was more like jazz, which was actually quite popular in the 1950s. One of the singles I bought was Topsy by drummer Cozy Cole (recorded in 1958). I also bought The Book of Love, a 45 by the Monotones (1957). And so a life of collecting music began. 

We used the term "progressive jazz" to distinguish 1950s jazz from swing and traditional (Dixieland) jazz. Rock and roll didn't have many subcategories, at least not ones that I was aware of. I was happy listening to Ray Charles and a growing collection of jazz albums, all of which were played on crappy turntables and subject to the hazards of dormitory living in boarding school and college. 

My first inkling that rock was changing occurred around 1964 when the British invasion began. All those Beatles singles were played constantly. I dug a few songs but mainly wanted to define myself as a jazz lover, which I was. I was getting deeper into jazz, buying Coltrane's Impulse albums and sensing the momentum of the Civil Rights Movement as reflected in avant garde jazz. I was newly married, a graduate student, uninterested in drugs, wanting to avoid military service in Viet Nam, and wanting to start a family. As psychedelia arrived between 1967-1969, I kept my distance from the social scene but was attracted to the music, especially Hendrix, The Doors, Santana, Cream, Jefferson Airplane, The Grateful Dead, Procol Harum, and similar bands. Meanwhile, jazz was suffering economically from the double whammy of the British invasion and the new rock and roll. 

If the phrase "progressive rock" existed in the 1950s and 1960s, I was completely unaware. The term "art rock" was applied to bands like Yes, Pink Floyd, and the Moody Blues. I especially liked the Moody Blues, which is now considered to be progressive.   

Since this blog is about discovering prog, I need to explain how one heard it in the mid-to-late 1960s. Vinyl records were the primary medium for all music back then. Fortunately, FM radio was alive and relevant in those days. In 1968 I replaced my portable turntable from college days with a $300 console that had an FM tuner and turntable built into a wooden cabinet. Audiophiles sometimes referred to these units as "coffins" - beautiful on the outside but dead on the inside. It served my purposes but was upgraded about 10 years later.

Regardless, I could play FM radio stations. Even places like Erie, Pennsylvania had stations with live deejays spinning records. I remember hearing the Doors' "Soft Parade" and the Beatles "Revolution 9" on a late-night show in Erie. These are long cuts but the deejay decided what to play, not some corporate algorithm. Cars also had FM tuners installed, and I remember hearing new songs by The Moody Blues and Cream while riding to work. Such were the joys of life in 1968-69.

Steve was born on July 15, 1969. He will claim he heard the Moody Blues before he was born, but I can only confirm that he heard them a lot after he was born. We had moved again for my return to school, and the campus bus drivers (students themselves, I'm sure) would play this new "progressive rock" on the bus. I distinctly remember hearing Threshold on the bus to school, which impelled me to acquire To Our Children's Children's Children at a shop near campus. I still didn't have much of a record collection, but I relied on the radio and bus drivers to feed my need for the music. 

From 1970-1973, lots of indulgences got put on hold while I studied for my Ph.D. I do remember buying some jazz-rock fusion (Weather Report, Return to Forever, Gary Burton, Mahavishnu Orchestra) and a few significant rock albums (Abbey Road, On the Threshold of a Dream, Allman Brothers at Filmore East). My daughter was born in 1972 and we survived till graduation in 1973. We moved as a family to suburban Milwaukee in 1973. Not much changed for the next three years as work and family demands squeezed out personal recreation. 

We eventually settled in Miami, FL and stayed for 18 years (1977-1995). That's when I decided to ditch the console and buy a component stereo system (with an FM tuner). Steve and I both remember listening to Zeta4 FM and deejays like Stu Grant. It was probably illegal, but Stu played an entire album each day at noon. That's how I first heard Dark Side of the Moon, which was released four years earlier - shows you how out of it I was at the time. Anyway, it really grabbed me just like it grabbed so many people in the 1970s. It was a long way from the Everly Brothers. 

One day the lunchtime album was by a band I never heard of - Camel. Since I had decided to record the albums each day that I was at home (working of course), I made a cassette copy of Breathless, a true progressive rock album by a real progressive rock group, although I still was clueless about categorizing. 

The discovery of Camel set off searches for their record albums, still only available on vinyl. (The CD revolution would begin a few years later.) I also discovered the wonder of used record stores and cutout bins. I'd spend hours traveling from one store to the next, coming home with a lot of cool jazz but also more albums by Camel and related rock artists. Thus began a long period of co-discovery with Steve, who was digesting what he heard at home and developing his own interests.

 

In 1982, I spent 6 weeks in Copenhagen with the family. The house we stayed in had several interesting records that we listened to: Pink Floyd's Atom Heart Mother and Relics, and Steve purchased Outlandos d'Amour by the Police. During that time Steve and I went to a Camel concert (The Single Factor tour, I believe). We were probably the only two Americans in the audience; I was the oldest person there (37), and he was the youngest (12). It was fantastic!!! 

Now, on to the music!!