How did you find Prog?

I believe my dad awoke the prog-rock interest in me gradually during my youth. I vaguely remember going to a concert of "Träd, Gräs och Stenar" sometime a very long time ago. Later I was very into Kraftwerk and having listened to their krautrock-era albums, I discovered other krautrock-bands as Neu! and Faust (which I really don't consider prog-rock).

However, the real breaktrough came one day when the concert "Peter Gabriel - Growing Up Live" was shown on TV. Once again, it was my dad who recommended med to watch. 

I watched it and it really blew me away. Although this was in ~2004 and and much more complex kinds of music than PG had been out there for ages, i had never heard anything like it. You see, here in Sweden all the radio stations play standard useless commercial pop - and so that is all you know in that age (~13) unless you actively seek out something else or someone shows it for you. There's only one station playing different music - the government-owned SR P2, and because it plays much classical, opera and world music, it is often unfortunately considered a station for "old people". 

So I was blewn away by this "new" music. Sure, I had heard instrumental music and I had heard very strange and experimental music. But I had never heard just great and tasteful rock music with the concept of singing for a while and then just stepping back and let it be instrumental for several minutes. The concept of long songs with several different atmospheres, that last for a while and feels somewhat like a journey, rather than just a small pointless tune with a number of verses and choruses - it was totally new for me. 

So I started listen to PG for a while, actually believing he was original and diddn't at all realize his music in fact were just a simple, accessible take of a whole genre of wonderful music of the same concept. I read about him and learned that he appearently had been in some old 70's rock band before making his "art-rock" (or what it was called) solo-carreer. I assumed for quite some time that the band was nothing interesting, but one day when bored or something, I started reading a bit about Genesis. They apparently played something called "Progressive rock" which was said to be a kind of rock with tempo changes. 

Just out of curiosity about what those "tempo changes" could sound like, I downloaded "Dancing out with the moonlit knight". Whoa, quite some tempo changes indeed. Interesting, but that kind of hard rock was nothing for me really. But then I gave it another try and downloaded "Firth of Fifth".

Wow.

I had discovered the full potential of this concept of music making. This concept, which I already held to be the true way of making music, now had a name – Progressive rock. 

Just tanks to knowing the name of the genre it went along from there. A friend (a friends dad once again actually) played Close to the Edge (which I still consider to be the greatest song in the history of the world) and I got into Yes and from there I myself discovered ELP, Camel, Jethro Tull, Crimson, Rush, VDGG, Renaissance, etc, etc and later on the 90's era of Flower Kings, Tangent, Spock's Beard ...

Today I own almost 80 prog rock-albums and thanks to ProgArchives.com and Wikipedia I discover new ones every week.