Yes and 'How Do You Listen To Prog?'

I love Close To The Edge now. Siberian Thingy is ace, as is the first track. Not sure about And You And I.

I still don't like Steve Howe much.

I've not really added anything to the debate, have I? Oh well... next time I see some of those Yes remastered CDs cheap I'll have to snap a few up, because I want more now.

Some prog bands did eventually go over into fusion, like Soft Machine for instance, who started out as psych, went prog-with-lots-of-jazziness and then fusion.
To me it has a bit to do with how the songwriting and playing is focused. If you've ever seen Mahsvishnu Orchestra sheet music, you'll see there's also a lot of parts left open for ad lib... To me there's a pretty strong link to the sorta complex lines of hardbop and bebop taken up to a rock'n'roll fury.

Obviously this is a discussion that's been going for years. hardcore jazzguys who hate fusion will yell about it having nothing to do with jazz. While most other people tend to go "mano, what be this jazz shits? Get yer cane, pops!"

Try going to groups.google.com and search for something like 'fusion prog', and I'm sure you'll find plenty of arguments pro and con.
I know there was a looong discussion on rec.music.progressive a year or so back called "Is fusion prog?"

Great, genre-discussions! I usually try to keep out, but I couldn't help myself!
Is polka pop?
Is progmetal prog?
Is smoothjazz jazz?
Is industrial electronic?
Is bluegrass c&w?

Thank god I'm going out for the weekend so I won't be dorking up this thread any more http://www.organissimo.org/forum/html/emoticons/whistling.gif

from one listen I agree with Sundar's assessment: nice hooks, melodies but words cannot do justice to how awful that organ part is (with the really weedy ambient shit straight after that). Yes had some great melodies and rhythms but some boring bits. its Its pretty good, but nowhere near as great as Crimson ('red' is the only other prog rec i had before today).

"Soon" is still incredibly beautiful though. And "To Be Over" is great too.

Ditto Zappa. I bought "Inner Mounting Flame" a while back because I remember quite liking it but I found it to be irritating nonsense for the most part.

I'd also recommend to cure your Howe aversion finding some stuff by his former band Bodast. More like late period Small Faces, taut wired, jukebox britsoul rather than the panoramic space symphonies he produced with Yes.

Funny how the third phase (after a first "British blues" phase and the second, "classic" phase) of the band hasn't been referred yet. As Rick Wakeman's solo career declined, and Yes were craving for a new breath for their career, Wakeman got back to the fold and Yes penned two (in my opinion) great albums (Going for the One & Tormato), which mixed their standard complex arrangements with a straight-forward rock feeling.
Highlights from this phase: Awaken - Parallels - On the Silent Wings of Freedom - Future Times, etc.

Then, the band started breaking up: Anderson quit, and Wakeman followed. Instead of quitting, Squire, Howe and White brought the Buggles (Trevor Horn and Geoff Downes) into the band and created my favourite Yes album ever: DRAMA. Probably the heaviest of all Yes albums, it is chock full of great basslines and guitar riffs. Horn is similar in tone and pitch to Jon Anderson (though he has a Police-era-Sting type accent), while Downes keeps himself away from flashy solos, providing mainly some textures and backgrounds, and the occasional melodic line. Machine Messiah, Does It Really Happen? and Tempus Fugit are the highlights, but all tracks are great.

After this schizoid line-up, Yes broke up for a couple of years, just to be reborn as a art-pop number, leaded by South Africa's own guitar-wankery master Trevor Rabin (who tried to overshadow a returning Jon Anderson both on singing and songwriting fields), and produced by former Yes-man Horn, but that's another story...

But yeah what I'm really loving is the creaky, grainy darkness of the folky tracks. All those Mellotrons, I love Mellotrons. Did any more-folk-less-prog bands make much use of the Mellotron? I'd love to hear it.

As for In the Court of the Crimson King, the first two tracks are amazing, but as it goes on I like the rest of it less and less...

I want suggestions!

Fwiw I think you started with the right band (Yes) but I'm absolutely positive you'll like Caravan (they evolved from The Wylde Flowers who of course were part of the Canterbury Scene.... may I presume you're familiar with Soft Machine, Gong, Robert Wyatt and Kevin Ayers already?) and King Crimson.

After that I'd suggest you give Camel, Barclay James Harvest, Jethro Tull and Van Der Graaf Generator (Mr. Lydon was a fan of theirs you know!) a try too.

In all instances however I suggest you treat their "post-punk" output with extreme caution....

My personal theory (which naturally I am not prepared to elaborate on, discuss or justify in any way whatsoever) is that pretty much all of the Prog bands unconsciously did everything they could to pave the way and set the stage for the advent of Punk; laying themselves wide open to every bit of shit that was thrown at them in the process; by plunging head-first straight up their own self-indulgent arses at some time between '75 and '79.

Of course this is why fine, noble, intelligent, upstanding young gentlemen like yourself and myself believed all the Punk rhetoric and saw nothing of value in Prog - because by then it really was all a load of old bollocks!

The one exception to this wildly sweeping generalisation that is so hugely and monumentally, glaringly bloody obvious that I can't possibly even attempt to ignore it, is King Crimson ("like Remain in Light with more noodling and even more polyrhythms" isn't too bad description of 1981's "Discipline" and 1982's "Beat" btw, although of course they've gone on somewhere else again since then!)

Oh and there's absolutely nothing wrong with compilations when you're trying these bands out either; that sounds like just another pompous conceit to me (although that might just be a fragment of those old blinkers still stuck in the corner of my eye). In fact I'd specifically recommend:
"Where But For Caravan Would I...?"
"The Compact King Crimson" (or failing that "In The Court Of The Crimson King" AND "Discipline")
"Echoes" (Camel)
"The Collection" / "Mockingbird" (Barclay James Harvest)
"Original Masters" (Jethro Tull)
"First Generation" (Van Der Graaf)

No mellotrons, but if you want the darkest, dankest, proggy folk, you could do worse than investigate the first album by Comus
http://www.users.globalnet.co.uk/~rneckmag/comus.html

Fwiw (I did say I wasn't going to attempt to justify my comments precisely because I knew they'd inevitably lead to this sort of debate!) my belief is that the demise of Prog through auto-asphyxiation and the advent of Punk (in the UK at least) were both direct consequences of the huge bottleneck that seemed to exist at that time between the bands with the dry ice and the flying pigs and who could fill the stadia (the "rock aristocracy" that Dadaismus describes above) and the little guys slogging their way 'round the pub circuit.

The guys at the bottom thought they'd never be able to get to the top (hence the willingness of so many of them to leap aboard the first passing bandwagon that offered a chance for them to break the stalemate and get noticed) and the guys at the top who had no real competition and thought they could do what ever the fuck they liked.

Of those at the top, the Proggers simply happened to be those whose self-indulgence was most obvious and undeniable and this in turn made them the easiest targets!

Hence of course the reason why it was OK for Mr Lydon to wander 'round wearing a Pink Floyd T-shirt with "I hate" written across it whilst singing the praises of Can, Beefheart, "Bitches Brew" and Van Der Graaf Generator!

A flawed gem.

Q: "Would the Mahavishnu Orchestra appeal to people who follow prog rock?"
A: "For many, yes."

Q: "Is the Mahavishnu Orchestra a 'prog rock' band or a 'fusion' band?"
A: "Who cares?"

Not a hard-core Hammill nut, but have heard a few...

Definitely Recommended:
A Black Box

Good:
Silent Corner...
Nadir's Last Chance
Fireships
Loops & Reels

Eh:
Chameleon in the Shadow of Night (solidly in the minority here)
Out of Water

I agree with you, if you replace the words "suffers badly from..." with "if so much fucking better it hurts because of..." :)

I love 'Inner Mounting Flame', but I still have a bit of a prob. w/ the jazz-rock electric violin on it (at least there's no jazz-flute!)

Does that song seem to be riffing off of "Mademoiselle Mabry" (off of Miles' Filles de Kilimanjaro), or am I just imagining things?

Relayer
Tales From Topographic Oceans
Yessongs
Close To The Edge
Fragile

Prog was un-Peel because the man himself felt that groups like Yes, ELP and Deep Purple didn't need what limited exposure the show could offer them (he was presenting Top Gear at the time, I think). The odd thing is, while he wouldn't play Deep Purple, he's perfectly content to play the Datsuns. But I don't want to concern myself with them here.

It's funny how Tales From Topographic Oceans makes Relayer seem as concise as an early Beatles album.

The Yes Album is totally great, Phil - you should definitely pick it up. I can't imagine that you wouldn't like it. It's got Bruford, Squire and Howe, for crying out loud! It has to be good!! "Starship Trooper" and "Yours is No Disgrace" are as "prog" as anything on the follow-up Fragile.

Let's talk about Going For the One! I love that record. The title cut is one of the best songs they ever wrote, and "Wonderous Stories" is classic hippie Anderson.

Has anyone heard that alternate "Gates of Delerium" yet?

Re "Escape" - only 'problem' I have is that the G/D/A part just utterly fuckin' destroys me. More air-drum seizures! Then that subsequent ONE LINE from Perry is just "this is the voice of God speaking", a magisterial "we have achieved orbital velocity now, goodbye Earth!", the rest of the song seems like an anticlimax to me. Still an incredible attempt. Sonic analog to the picture on the cover!

Re Triumph - dunno, never could get with the singing. Maybe if Rik Emmett was Steve Perry...but then nobody is, are they?

TERRIFIC video! Haven't yet seen any video of the Blasquiz-era (though have seen Bobino, which more than makes up for it).

Guy Clement = Tony Levin's French twin?

http://www.csi.edu/ip/ce/yesology/
http://www.billboard.com/bb/tangledweb/index.jsp

I always suspected the people of Southern Idaho are closet Shakira fans!! :)

By the way, what's Fish Out Of Water like?

http://blissout.blogspot.com/
PROGMETHEUS UNBOUND: THE RETURN

So how do YOU listen to prog now?

with glittery cape on
http://wgsu.geneseo.edu/blog/images/rickwakeman.jpg

So, Dr.C never got around to hearing 'Relayer'. Pity.

I'm terrified of seventies Yes but I need to listen to it a bit for a research project. Where should I start? My best friend liked Yes so I heard it quite a bit. Not my steez back then. Such were the times...

Like Jethro Tull is cited as "progressive". I thought they were a "punk" band.

I'm scared of Yes. I'm afraid it might conjure memories of scarily free hippie people.

I'd rec either the Yes Album or Fragile. The Yes Album is probably the best for newcomers but Fragile has the full "classic" lineup and shows off pretty much everything great about 70's Yes. Nothing to be scared of - stay away from Tales, otherwise most of their peak period is chock full of great instrumental parts. Obviously they were a lot whiter than Parliament but they kind of have the same vibe - with a different singer and less time changes, you kind of feel like they'd be known more as a funk band.

I was going to say the same two albums. there isn't anything scary on those. stay away from tales of topographic oceans and relayer, they are full of scary (and boring) things.

Man, Relayer is awesome. If you are scared of awesomeness, stay away from Relayer, otherwise enjoy.

Also, Close to the Edge rules too.

second The Yes Album as a good jumpoff

yeah Relayer and CttE are great albums (CttE is slowly becoming one of my favorite prog albums ever) but you kind of have to be into the band in some respect first.