Prog Rock

does Bob Harris look like a long haired hippy?

love Caravan.

i bet Comus are too obscure for this program

any sign of the van der graaf generator yet?

Harris looking well groomed. Genesis now, I think.

radiohead

Genesis - The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway - Live Bern 1975

Robert Wyatt on the documentary :-)

I'm watching the arse end of Big Brother and taping the start of the doc.

Pretty good set of talking heads thus far. Some of the usual "greatest era" stuff, although most contrbutors seem to be able to analyse things a bit more than that.

Scored 321 in a 3-player game against hapless gf's mum (142) and gf (120), who won last night's triple-header and incurred the fitting response. I am the GODLIEST, she the BARMAID. Bam. All this to a lovely soundtrack too. :)

lol you so cool prog rock and Scrabble!

i know right it's totally happening here

at least King Crimson are sounding pretty good.

Jonathan Coe reckons Crimson is "progressive rock at its most melodic" Geir to thread!

Or actually on second thoughts...

uugh "thoroughbred musical statement" fuck you ELP guy.

Swallowing the "punk year zero" myth wholesale. Bit of a shame, except for Wyatt being reasonable and funny!

Yeah, Robert Wyatt came off very well on that.

I might actually have to download some King Crimson & Soft Machine after watching that.

A little bit annoyed at constant reiteration of the canard that anything using 3 chords is unsophisticated, whereas all "prog" as narrowly defined is the epitomy of questing musicianship. Also total lack of acknowledgement that anything punk or that came after punk could be in any way considered "progressive".

That's to be expected though really.

yeah fair point.

Funny, I'm playing Facebook Scrabble and listening to the new Enslaved as I peer in on this thread...

A little bit annoyed at constant reiteration of the canard that anything using 3 chords is unsophisticated, whereas all "prog" as narrowly defined is the epitomy of questing musicianship

Hmm: with the exception of Carl Palmer, I thought everyone was actually quite reasonable about it. Rick Wakeman made the point well, I thought: it's a very British trait to be embarrassed about/dismissive of technical skill. I mean, using three chords is unsophisticated, really. Trouble is, sophistication does not equate to quality ... the way it seemed to me, watching that, the music just got worse and worse until by the mid-seventies a lot of it wasn't just irritating, smug and showy but irritating, smug, showy and completely and utterly shit. I mean, there was a good reason why Tales From Topographic Ocean became an (unwieldy) byword for all that was awful about music ...

But some of the earlier Yes stuff actually sounded quite interesting, which is something I never thought I'd say. And it reminded me of how much I love King Crimson (Bill Bruford's explanation of the difference between playing in Yes and KC was one of the highlights of the entire programme).

Dude from Egg is a little ... intense, isn't he? And Carl Palmer really is a complete and utter tool. Fucking stainless-steel drum kit. Bell-end.

my 'radiohead' comment was a reference to that crimson song introed by annie nightingale. uncanny.

"Bill Bruford's explanation of the difference between playing in Yes and KC was one of the highlights of the entire programme)."

i couldn't bear to watch the doc so i'd appreciate knowing what this was.

I haven't heard the very earliest Yes albums but Fragile and Close to the Edge are good fun, and very pretty.

Yeh, it was Close to the Edge that piqued my interest. Bruford reckoned he'd achieved everything he wanted to do with Yes with that album, and left straight after.

"Bill Bruford's explanation of the difference between playing in Yes and KC was one of the highlights of the entire programme)."

You'd need to watch it to appreciate the arched-eyebrowed subtletly of his delivery, but his point was that Yes was basically a hippy democracy where absolutely everything was discussed at great length (eg should the bass be F natural with the organ in G# on top, or vice versa) whereas in King Crimson there was none of that: "You were just meant to know". He also said that with KC one was expected to develop a style unique to that group: ie they didn't want Bruford in the band because of what he'd done with Yes, but because what he'd done with Yes suggested that he could do something new and specific for KC.

Interesting, cheers.

Bruford and Wyatt were great, esp the latter - just loved everything Wyatt said and it was worth watching for that alone (the laughed hurt as he talks about he 'failed' as a pop star showing some real hunger there, great little take on the punks who followed on). Shame I never really could get on w/Soft Machine. Crimson rule. I wanted someone to ask Bruford about Cobain. Eno should've been on it as a link between glam and prog. No van der Graaf Generator mention wtf?!

The other people on it were a pathetic bunch, fucking hypocrites, talking about how uncompromising they were and crying when they couldn't get enough groupies! Little Richard knock offs were 10x more 'sophisticated' than most of the music on it.

No mention of anything German either, and Pink Floyd seemed to be the prog elepehant in the room, for whatever reason.

Well, its Prog Britannia. I think the German bands were better because they liked Stockhausen and acknowledged that riffs were good and sonatas were a dead man's game.

They cast Floyd in a pre-prog psychedelic/surrealist mode, along the lines of Pepper.

It was fun but flawed. A discussion of prog's lyrical limitations without a mention of Hammill is pretty much sacrilege, for instance.

I'm, er, acquiring a copy of Close to the Edge as I type. It's taken less than 10 minutes. Wonder if a few other people have been moved to do the same kind of thing this morning?

x-post yes true, and I suppose the German bands could have filled a whole (much better) documentary anyway.

As for Floyd, I personally prefer that earlier mode, but surely their 70s prog stuff shouldn't have been ignored?

Okay I went out on the piss and missed this but no VdGG = obvious fucking same old NME-line repeating BULLSHIT also I'm assuming there was no discussion of the early 80s neo stuff, failure to do which is also BULLSHIT also anything put together from a "whoa wasn't Prog funny and hippy and rong" perspective = BULLSHIT also whoever pointed out that a whole bunch of post-Okey Dokey Computer indie is utterly beholden to Prog for better or worser = BULLSHIT also no Geir = BULLSHIT

And there are more Zeppelin songs about dungeons and dragons than there are Prog songs you cunts

sorry, too furious to point out that whoever pointed out that post Okey Dokey Computer is beholden to Prog was right and if this doc didn't address that then it was eating its own bollocks

there is no "gnome and wizard" shit in the genre to the best of my knowledge.
― Pashmina (Pashmina), Tuesday, 18 May 2004 13:54 (4 years ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

THIS GUY KNOWS WHAT HE's ABOUT

Honest to God, FUCK PUNK and its fuckshit idolators

It didn't really go beyond 1980, apart from some piss-taking footage of Yes playing "Owner of a lonely heart".

I Was a Teenage Armchair Jagger Fan :/

Grimly, what they didn't tell you in their simplistic "every prog band started honourable but got progressively (fnarr) more pretentious and bad" narrative is that Yes' best album came out AFTER "TFTO". Namely the completely overlooked and totally incredible Relayer. CTTE is fucking brilliant too tho, you should definitely lay hold. If only for "And You And I". ;-)

Noodle bringing some heavy jurisdiction.

Relayer didn't feature choice talking-heads Bruford or Wakeman, of course, so it was never going to get a mention.

I'm with your Relayer love LJ, but you cd advance the argument further by citing Going for the One which is canonically a Great Yes Album from 77, before we even have to hit people over the head with 90125's awesomeness in a oh shit mom they're making pop music style.

I love the way shit like this pretends the first 3 or 4 Roxy albums weren't Prog because it doesn't fit the lol behemoths story arc also.

Re the late 70s "OMG punk destroyed prog" bit I thought they could have talked more about the fact that a lot of the punks actually liked prog, e.g. John Lydon, but all we got was Phil Collins talking about Rat Scabies saying he was a big fan of his drumming.

I was a bit surprised about the lack of VdGG. Also no Gong or Here & Now. I guess Hawkwind you could claim are "space rock" and don't count for some reason.

They did mention Roxy Music at one point I think but I was in the kitchen so I can't add much more than that unfortunately (xpost)

Oh yeah, they mentioned Roxy as part of an entirely different thing, without realising that their concrete definitions of prog were BS. It was a very fluid 'movement'. Much like some of the stuff they were spouting.

I don't actually have those two Yes albums, something I gotta rectify. :-/ Also, seriously, no VdGG, no cred, and I've still only got two of their albums. (Still Life is so *perfect* that I can't really imagine anything else living up to it, but I really should investigate.)

I'd look this up online but I'd probably just get annoyed by it. They slagged off prog rock lyrics? Prog rock lyrics are no worse than any other genre's IE 99% is shit as per usual. No prog lyric is worse than "don't look back in anger" anyway. "Going for the One" is v v patchy but OTOH has "Awaken" which I think is hands down the best thing they ever did.

Godbluff I think is better than Still Life, Louis.

You watch footage of any 77 era Punk gig and I guarantee there'll be some longhairs moshing down the front. What's so annoying about the "Punk killed Prog" story is that only the crassest of lazy journos and 17 year-old NME fundamentalists still spout that shit, everybody else knows it's bollocks and can trot out the Lydon loved Hammill story and list the riffs that Magazine copped, before you even begin to think about how Fall-group and Pere Ubu and Television et al make the whole sorry myth ridiculous.

I hear ya re: Godbluff Pash but I'll still rep for Still Life uber alles.

Am now gonna spend the evening trying to make Wii Music prog jams btw

You watch footage of any 77 era Punk gig and I guarantee there'll be some longhairs moshing down the front. What's so annoying about the "Punk killed Prog" story is that only the crassest of lazy journos and 17 year-old NME fundamentalists still spout that shit, everybody else knows it's bollocks and can trot out the Lydon loved Hammill story and list the riffs that Magazine copped, before you even begin to think about how Fall-group and Pere Ubu and Television et al make the whole sorry myth ridiculous.