Prog Rock

I don't recall ever seeing a full-time French horn player in a band before (though he seems to pick up a fluegelhorn towards the end), it must be even more uncommon than having an oboist.

I've posted about this in the Yes thread but there's a bar here that does a "prog night" every month. basically a DJ brings in a turntable, a computer, and a video projector, and just plays prog rock for 3-4 hours (the joke always is, "what's that, like 9 songs?"). I always have a blast if for no reason other than how surreal it is to be at a bar that's playing my kind of music. like how many bars in the country are playing stuff like Gong and Soft Machine at that sort of volume? plus it does draw a good crowd I think.

anyway the dude who does it has to have surgery, but he still wants it to happen next month, so he asked some of the regulars if anyone wanted to take over. I immediately said "I'll do it!", half joking, but he was just like well alright then, let me show you the mixing board. he went through everything, I understood maybe a third of it, but regardless he told me "alright, you're up, let's see what you got, mix something into this record". what was playing was "Thela Hun Ginjeet" and I'm thinking okay this isn't fair, I know it's Crimson but its not really prog, and obviously I gotta play something prog. and I'm panicking because I can't think of anything, plus I'm not really confident I know how to use the board (I'd never touched one before this), also you know it's prog night obviously we were all smoking in the back so I was also high as hell. also I'm not really sure where in the song we are, like how many spoken word sections are there in this song? two? three? can't let it go to "Sheltering Sky", people are grooving back there and to tell the truth I'm super nervous. because I really do want to do this!! I have always wanted to DJ, but always thought my tastes were too esoteric and strange, so no one would really like it.

but I do figure something out! "Day and Age" by Frost, it's not quite as funky but it is fast and it rules very much. turns out to go down pretty well, and the dude just leaves me back there. so I'm playing all sorts of shit - "Communion with the Sun" by Utopia, the second half of "Emperor and His War Room", "Watcher of the Skies" of course (I had to, dude plays it every night), the funky bit of "Mister Class and Quality", "Going for the One", and the battle section of "Gates of Delirium", which fucking rips at this volume. plus a number of requests. mostly just excerpts, the good 4 minutes of this and that, but I did play one track in full, "Ship of Fools" by Motorpsycho which actually brought people out on the dance floor. totally surreal experience where I'm telling myself "is this really happening??" . I think I was there for like an hour and a half. apparently the guy thought I did a good job because he told me I should take all the equipment, bring a bunch of records, and do it next month. so uh...yeah. I gotta figure out how to hook all this shit up!!

That's so cool frobs! Good luck and definitely post what you end up playing next month.

What fun!

A Star Is Born.

That's awesome.

Jealous, frogs. I would love to dj a prog night.

welp I found my opening track

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eyqefTTEuDo

nice choice!

Make sure you play "5% for Nothing" as an interlude between every other selection.

hah! guess I might as well test my skills to see how quickly I can change out a record. who knows this may be the only chance I ever get to DJ so I want to do something crazy or stupid. like I'm definitely playing Limelight by Rush, I'm not big into Rush but that is the name of the bar and it's never been played at prog night so I feel I have to...but the second or third time that cool guitar riff comes in I'm gonna segue it right into Love Beach by ELP

consider this me being there and drunkenly shouting a request for NOLAN POTTER

frogbs out there living my dream! Specifically, I dream of DJing a Prog Nite and dropping the "Diana" section of Mike Oldfield's "Incantations Pt. 1" (at 8:56 below)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=15a4xFuYbqw

No joke, this world would be greatly enhanced by more Prog Nite DJs

trying to figure out what goes with what and all the cool segues you can do is pretty fun. you can't really beat match since tempos are all over the place and generally not in 4/4, but you can try to match together the ambient between-section bits a lot of these bands did. and similar riffs and what not. a lot of things mix well with Jon Anderson's "Moon Ra" which is definitely goin in

somewhere close to the peak, where you might think of playing "yours is no disgrace", a zag

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kwRDVqJ6RLY

just found out this is a PAID gig too, now I'm actually a bit nervous!

this rules, i'm excited for you and wish i could be there, sounds like a great time.

also you are def going to be very good at it.

ILX aint gonna be the only one getting all yessed out tomorrow night

alrighty, that was really fun. I decided to make it hard on myself and use two turntables, plus my phone for requests or things I wanted to play that I didn't have on vinyl. it was more work than I thought! I didn't realize how little you wind up paying attention to your own set because there's so much to do. in theory this should not be true in a genre known for 20 minute songs but I kept bouncing between snippets of this and that.

but I think people dug it, a lot of stuff got a good reaction, can post a setlist if you want HOWEVER I actually don't really remember it all! I stuck to the 'plan' for about an hour and a half and then just bounced all over the place

imo the best part was that I was running projections off a Chromebook my son primarily uses - I made a video playlist and projected it onto a giant screen, but the autoplay has a mind of it's own sometimes, and it wound up playing Peppa Pig for a while, apparently the whole bar was wondering how long before I noticed (it was about 15 minutes lmao)

nice! glad it went well. def post whatever you remember of the setlist

I mean, with the right song Peppa Pig visuals might not be that far off lol

https://f4.bcbits.com/img/a3775107497_10.jpg

okay, it was something like this

Walter Wegmuller - Der Narr
Wobbler - This Past Presence
Yes - The Remembering - I cut the mellotron bit from Wobbler into that "relayer" part, so it was only like 3-4 minutes of the side
The Nice - Brandenburger
Camel - La Princesse Perdue
Triumvirat - The History of the Mystery Part One - started halfway through this, when it starts sounding like a gameshow theme
Van der Graaf Generator - Theme One
Todd Rundgren - first four tracks from A Wizard a True Star, I cut the last note of "You Need Your Head" into "The Ikon" by Utopia, and then once that hit a big note cut it back into the "International Feel" reprise at the end of Side 1
Robert Wyatt - Little Red Riding Hood Hit the Road
Animal Collective - What Would I Want? Sky
Utopia Strong - Konta Chorus
Jon Anderson - Moon Ra
Susumu Hirasawa - Nice Nice Very Nice
Pink Floyd - One of These Days
Walter Wegmuller - Der Wagen
Hawkwind - Are You Losing Your Mind? - beforehand someone said "You gotta play some Hawkwind" - I asked what he wanted to hear and he pointed me to this album called Alien4 from 1996??
Midday Veil - Babel - people were starting to dance (!!) so I had to put on something like this
Ruins - Progressive Rock Medley
IQ - Awake and Nervous
Neil Cicierega - Fredhammer - getting a little goofy at this point...I was like "ok folks let's play a guessing game, here is a mashup between two musicians, you have to guess which one has an extensive background in progressive rock". This is a mashup between "Sledgehammer" and "Nookie" - obviously everyone knows it's Peter Gabriel, I thought it would be funny if the second one was Fred Durst
Rush - Limelight
Kansas - Journey from Mariabronn (this was a request)
Yes - The Gates of Delirium - played nearly the whole thing which was nice because I kinda needed to get a drink and the bar was crowded :)
Ween - Among His Tribe (this took the place of "Soon Oh Soon" from Gates)
Motorpsycho - Mona Lisa/Azrael
Knifeworld - High/Aflame
Gong - Flying Teapot
Midday Veil - Empire Is No More
King Crimson - Sleepless
Marillion - first two from Clutching at Straws - someone actually brought the LP in and asked that I play it, which I thought was rad as hell
Motorpsycho - Mutiny!
Cardiacs - The Everso Closely Guarded Line

hmmm...what else...I am pretty sure I played "One More Night" by Can at one point...probably a few other tracks I forgot...also I threw on "Shimendoka" by Haruomi Hosono right at the end

A++++++++++++++ set list \m/

one question -- were IQ's vocals ever a barrier to entry? i've liked a lot of what i've heard by them, but the singing has put me off so far

damn, nice set! Nice balance of classic, new stuff and under the radar stuff. I want a bar like this near me, will you take your show on the road? haha

oh forgot one - "By-Tor and the Snowdog" by Rush, which I segued into "Hyperventile" by Frost*...sheesh maybe I forgot a number of things

I never minded IQ's vocals, guess you kinda have to accept that every neo-prog singer sounds like Peter Gabriel. I mean in prog just having a dude who can sing at all is a plus honestly

fwiw I bet there are a lot of hip/weirdo bars open to doing this sort of thing, the hard bit is finding them. I got lucky in that the right guy was working the shop when I'd bought a Utopia record, he was like "oh if you like this kind of music you should come out for this"

I did really want to play "Communion with the Sun" but I did that one last time when I was being shown the ropes :)

Awesome!

Super setlist, even though I’m only familiar with a fraction of it. And dying at President Keyes’ graphic.

luckily someone did get a pic of it

https://i.imgur.com/gOcXyD6.jpg

also gotta give props to whoever on this board recommended Midday Veil a while ago (I think it was rush?), was a big nervous playing stuff nobody there was gonna recognize but both those tracks went down really well

Ha that was one band I was just researching since I'd never heard of them before, curious now.

Haha, Peppa Prog

Also love the Knifeworld > Gong sequence. Kavus, yup.

Utopia Strong was in there too :)

also gotta give props to whoever on this board recommended Midday Veil a while ago (I think it was rush?), was a big nervous playing stuff nobody there was gonna recognize but both those tracks went down really well

― frogbs

idk, i do love midday veil tho, can't remember where i heard about th em

yea I genuinely don't know where if not this board, either way it was great

just remembered I played "Island" by Echolyn and "Heaps of Sheeps" by Robert Wyatt at some point too, I genuinely don't know how I got this all in

my playlist of this -- which omits nice nice very nice and fredhammer as they don't seem to be on tidal -- just hit five hours

slightly surprised to be concluding that the funkiest track on frogbs's list is gong's "flying teapot" (courtesy francis moze and laurie allan i guess)

also laurie allan played with chris macgregor (tho i guess the wyatt-bluenotes nexus is not a total secret)

hey, if funky prog is out there, I sure don't know about it. though I would argue that section of "The Remembering" is kinda funky :)

there's a ton of funky prog. i would argue that funky drummers are an essential part of prog. even the big 3 have tons of funky tracks (bill bruford and phil collins are both funky ass drummers!). the french and italian stuff gets down and dirty. magma is hella funky. check out 3:20 in the area song:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wqhsqYJozG4

This is funky! Kind of. Goes into a bit of quiet storm around the 4 mins mark too.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bc04Xd3wOhQ

cat food is funky as hell

of course, i was just surprised at gong of all people pulling ahead in this particular race

(of course moze was magma's bass player)

of course

as much as I liked the first Area LP, I never checked out the second, indeed that sounds great

I've always thought Yes had their own brand of funk - Siberian Khatru, Heart of the Sunrise, Sound Chaser and all that...obviously Crimson has stuff like One More Red Nightmare and Easy Money. Magma's Attahk is definitely funky but also a bit out there. that's on my list if I get another opportunity though.

but tracks like "Flying Teapot" which just ride a groove uninterrupted for a few minutes - idk how many tunes like that there are out there. I thought both the Midday Veil tracks were pretty funky though, in fact Bernie Worrell is on one of them

maybe we should start a thread :)

(not a poll tho, they suck)

as much as I liked the first Area LP, I never checked out the second

Crac is the third Area album, their second is called Caution Radiation Area and is probably more fusion/avant garde than funky; although their fifth, 1978 Gli Dei Se Ne Vanno, Gli Arrabbiati Restano! contains a song called "Ici on dance!" So maybe that's what they were all about, when not fomenting revolution.

I think there's a lot of this type of material in something like Andy Votel's Vertigo mix:

https://www.discogs.com/release/498388-Andy-Votel-Vertigo-Mixed

(it's a big grab bag and not only prog, but I think it's def prog adjacent)

there's a ton of funky prog.

there is but sometimes it gets hard to distinguish between funky prog, proggy funk, "prog-funk" and fusion.

even Gong occasionally have funky inclinations