Favorite Proto-Prog Album

dr wu23 wrote: I'm sure someone must have had a similar thread before but I couldn't  bring one up on search. So what is your single favorite Proto-Prog album  of all time from the early days when prog was still in it's infancy between 1967 and 1970...? As much as I like the Beatles-Pepper, The Doors-Strange Days, and Jefferson Airplane-Crown of Creation, and many others.....I find myself over the years playing 'Twelve Dreams of Dr Sardonicus' by Spirit more than any other proto prog record. When I first heard it in college in 1970 at IU Bloomington, IN I was knocked out by the quality and variety of songs. What's your story?

Still, Sgt. Pepper's. The album had it all, string sections, harps, sitars, trons, found sounds, calliopes, psychedelic lyrics, and one of the best album endings ever!

Knobby wrote: "multi-tagging", "pidgeonholing","categories and classifications."   You two gentlemen have not had the decency to READ my words. I am not asking for a protoprog cubby AT ALL on this forum, like you deem it I am.   I repeat: protoprog is just a dealer term to link certain bands to a distinguishable sound. It is NOT A GENRE which need coverage or pidgeonholing here.   Sheesh!  How many more times I gotta pound this in your heads. You just do not want to listen. You want to argue.       I call raging bigotry against the Masterman! You should do the right thing and give  a Masterman's words the regard they  necessitate.   Have an open mind.   Not  "tl;dr".     ... And its not "psychE-pop", it is "popsike"!!

Proto Prog is not a genre here, nor is it a stylistic category and I don't have a dealer or much interest in them to worry about what they call things. Here it's a place we put bands that weren't quite Prog (by some undefined subjective measure that no one can articulate but they know it when they hear it), bands that didn't quite fit comfortably in the main database but we felt deserved a mention for, well, being there at the beginning I guess and for influencing those who would later produce Progressive Rock albums in the two or three years following their release. We unofficially have a cut-off date of 1969, purely arbitrarily of course and completely meaningless, but you've got to draw a line somewhere and there is as good as any,even if we do break that unofficial cut-off when we feel like it. Many of the bands at that time who also made albums that pedants would call proto-prog went on to be part of the Progressive Rock scene and make albums that are called Progressive Rock albums (somewhere, not necessarily just here), which is why we list those bands in different subgenres or categories or pigeonholes (as I said, if you fret over that too much then, umm, there are better things to fret over). At worse you'd call them transitional, but that would be unfair and inaccurate (Love Sculpture or The Beatles were never transitional, but they were never Prog or Proto-Prog either; The Parlour Band were transitional, they just didn't transition into Prog that's all, they became A Band Called "O" instead).

Edited by Dean - June 19 2013 at 18:22

 nope.

dr wu23 wrote: Well ...the PA 'guys' consider The Moody Blues and Procol to be crossover/prog rock and not proto prog per se....but those are certainly 2 early bands with an early prog sound...and I might have chose In Search Of The Lost Chord which we played the crap out of also in college.

I don't go by PA's bewildering categories. the question regarded favorite proto-prog albums, and I consider The Moodys and Procol proto-prog, as in prog-like sensibilities before such sensibilities were defined, cast in stone and given arcane designations that only Dean can explain to me. 

But please, let us move on. This runaway train has been derailed enough.

How's about HP Lovecraft's first album:



or their second album, for that matter:

dr wu23 wrote: Love HP Lovecraft....always thought of them as psych rock, but they could certainly fit in with 'proto-prog'..   .oh...wait a minute, they aren't on Mr Knobby's list....sorry.

Well, there are certainly prog elements amidst the detritus of psychedelia. Maybe we can call it psych-proto-prog and conduct a letter writing campaign to get it put on Mr. Knobby's pretentious list.

Knobby wrote: Now that's a new one: Prog-luver using the "pretentious" word on another fellow prog luver's arris.  Despicable.     I call BAN.

The Dark Elf wrote: . I don't make exclusive claims and Domesday lists regarding what should and should not be in a music genre that did not even exist during the time frame we are discussing. I

Proto-Prog is the reason why i created a profile here in the first place.

Genre(s) is/are made for Promotional comfort and/or to make boxing easy for the Music Press.