Your Growing Roots

Be prepared for some flak, since this is the second most common thread theme on the forums, just before "Which Dream Theater musician is best?" and "Phil Collins killed Prog!"

Anyway, for me it was the wall. I had no idea what prog was, and i did not know any Floyd at all, but i remember the exact moment i was totally blown away by what i thereafter considered the best album ever for about a year or so. So i tried to hear all i could by Pink Floyd, and then one day i listened to Peter Gabriel's "UP" and the opening track was so powerful for one who has never heard anything past Floyd and ELO in his whole life, and it made a real impact on me. Shortly thereafter i decided it was time for me to check into some Genesis, since someone had told me before that's where he had his roots.

But that was really it for me for a while, before i one day was on the imdb forum for "Pink Floyd's the Wall", reading an argument about something when one of the posters linked to this site. I started by reading the "what is prog?" introduction and then went straight into the hellfire.  : )

First there was a lot of Symph, all the classics, when i decided (like all noobs) to explore the avant-garde side of the genre, because it sounded so cool. Unfortunately, i never got much farther than VDGG and Kraut into that section before i discovered that i much preferred Led Zeppelin and Fleetwood Mac to all that... umm... "Challenging, progressive and intellectual" music..

There. You got more than you asked for, now i'm up way past my bedtime, hahaha...

Evans wrote: Be prepared for some flak, since this is the second most common thread theme on the forums, just before "Which Dream Theater musician is best?"

amen brother.....   My vote is for ...oh what's his name... oh yeah.. Jack Myung. 

Pink Floyd - DSoTM.

I was actually looking for psychedelic music and had no idea what prog was.

PF basically led to everything I listen to now

My first prog album purchase was "Unfold the Future" by The Flower Kings (I figure if I can't find it on Limewire, the band needs the money ). The first prog album I heard, however was DSOTM by Pink Floyd. I didn't know it was prog back then, I was pretty much just into classic rock. One day my mom mentioned how she hated this band called ELP that made this song about necrophelia (Still... You Turn Me On), she had just heard it on the radio. So of course I immediately had to check the band out. I heard Tarkus and Trilogy (the songs) first and I thought it was the weirdest music ever, but I was intruiged, so I listened more and they quickly became one of my favorite bands. I learned it was called prog and I found out about the classics and then went on to more kinds of music like jazz and classical and then I found out about newer prog and now I'm into and all kinds of sh*t, all thanks to ELP. Thanks guys.

Edited by King Crimson776 - December 15 2007 at 01:22

I knew it was one of those common thread topics and was expecting expecting the worse for the first few replies. If it happens, oh well, I wasn't apart of the last how ever many times the question popped up so I figured one more wouldn't hurt too much. Thanks so far.

Ghost Rider wrote: My very first prog album was Italian, namely Delirium's Dolce Acqua - bought at the age of 11, when it was first released. In the following couple of years I got The New Trolls' Concerto Grosso, UT and Searching for a Land. As to my first foreign prog album, it was definitely something from Pink Floyd, bought a few years later, when I was in my late teens.

Naming Italian prog and then calling Floyd foreign prog, I guess you're from Italy? That's some pretty obscure stuff for just starting out, and age 11, wow. I was rocking Smash Mouth at that point. I know you're older than me but that's pretty intense.

Italian prog on the radio. Whoa, that seems like an alternate universe nowadays. I always thought only mainstream stuff was on the radio back then like it is today, but I guess it really was a more open minded time for music like people are always saying.

Cool cat, by the way.

Edited by King Crimson776 - December 15 2007 at 03:35

micky wrote: Evans wrote: Be prepared for some flak, since this is the second most common thread theme on the forums, just before "Which Dream Theater musician is best?" amen brother.....   My vote is for ...oh what's his name... oh yeah.. Jack Myung.

No, man, John Petrucci can do sweep arpeggios really fast!

My first experience was "Carpet Crawlers" by Genesis, sounding out of the room of my brother, who is 10 years older than me. I was 5 years old at that time (the album had just been out) and was hooked. I became a constant guest in my brother's room. He was a big collector and showed his little sister the way into the wonderland of prog. He was especially into Kraut, all this weird and trippy music. I heard sounds I had never heard before. Needless to say all this usually happened with the room being filled with "sweet smoke". My brother always had some incense sticks burning to explain the smell, though my parents appeared doubtful lol. He and his friends were a pretty freaky bunch at that time.

for me it started about five years ago with dark side of the moon. i had no idea what prog was but i loved pink floyd, and i also discovered rush and kansas around that time. from there, i just branched out in several directions, but mainly symph and metal, and it wasn't until recently that i discovered the more obscure, avant garde prog.