When were you infected by Prog?

octopus-4 wrote: I had my first stereo in 1975.

The very fact you call it a 'stereo' marks you as being of a certain age

 I did not like prog rock at first, i found what i had heard in the early seventies, which was when i started to collect records (that started in 1971, when i turned 8 years old) did not do much for me, and at the time,  i was  drawn to heavy rock, and remained so, for a long time.
        Many of my friends liked prog, but at that time, i found it's complexity rendered it innaccessible for me, as well as a feeling that it smacked of pretentiousness.
          In the spring of 1985, when i was 22,  a friend of mine  lent me  four albums-Nektar's  Recycled, and  Magic Is  A  Child, and Triumvirat's Illusions On  A Double Dimple and Old Loves Die Hard.
         The Nektar albums were somewhat interesting, but i was really turned onto Illusions On A Double Dimple-this album really epitomised for me what i felt right from the start was what real progressive rock could  be. It appealed to me in a big way, and left me feeling, for the first time really, that ignoring prog was wrong, and that i was really missing out on something special in doing so.
 The other Triumvirat album, Old Loves Die Hard, was interesting, but could not hold a candle to Illusions On A Double Dimple.
           This got the ball rolling, and the rest, they say, is history!

originally posted by progpositivity

So yanch... It seems that Prog hit you like a ton of Bricks?  

I grew up listening to prog.  My dad was a big fan of legendary band like: Yes, Kansas, JTull, ELP.   Even as a kid I went to two Yes concerts, and two Kansas Concerts.  But that wasn't the defining point for me.  Unfortunately, I started listening to the appalling sounds of Punk Rock and Grunge.  I thought it made me hardcore or something, against the norm!  Yes I was an idiot, but weren't we all?  

Anyway, one day I was sitting in Art class painting.  NOTED: I was a senior then.   And this foreign exchange student from Finland came up to me and she said "here, I think you might enjoy this."  She handed me this Sonata Arctica cd.  I turned it on and the first song I heard was "My Land".  That evening I went home and burned all my punk and grunge cds.  I have been on the journey to find the most incredible song ever every since. :)

Born a progger. When I was a kid, I thought that everyone was just supposed to know who Yes and Rush were.

A bunch of my friends started listening to pink floyd about the time i discovered rush and since all my friends thought PF was good then i might to so i bought darkside of the moon and got my mind blown and changed how i listened to music fo ever

Atavachron wrote:  ^ what was your first album?

Dark Side Of The Moon

'Popular' music pretty much washed over me until I was about 12 or 13.  The only music that had really appealed before then were some classical pieces I had heard (obvious popular classics like 'Mars' from the Planets, Also Sprach Zarathustra, Grieg's Peer Gynt) and film music like Star Wars (this was the late 70s).  Then I got friendly with someone of the same age who was in a band with some guys 3 or 4 years older than him and who had some knowledge of music.  He played Dark Side of the Moon to me but it didn't make much of an impression at first. The thing that really blew me away was something he had taped from the radio - Tubular Bells part 2 from Mike Oldfield's live album, Exposed.  Shortly afterwards I bought the album (on cassette!) and then got his Boxed collection containing the first 3 albums for Christmas that year. In the next couple of years I got into Genesis, Pink Floyd, Yes (especially), Tull, King Crimson as well as more general rock like Led Zep, Rainbow and some of the heavy metal that was popular at the time (it was the NWOBHM era).  But it was the Mike Oldfield stuff that was the bridge into all this, especially the Exposed album.  I think perhaps it was the orchestral aspect of the music that initially appealed but it gave me an entry point into appreciating rock guitar.  It also contained elements of folk and jazz that predicted some of the tastes that I would develop later.

Although I said that I hadn't listened to any pop or rock music before this point, there were a few singles in the charts in the late 70's that I heard on the radio or saw on TV that did make an impression on me and which I can also see as 'seeds' for my future tastes:

Northern Lights by Renaissance
Forever Autumn by Justin Hayward
Follow You, Follow Me by Genesis
Guilty by Mike Oldfield

I knew nothing about any of these at the time.  They are all pretty much 'prog lite' but I find it interesting looking back that I picked up on these almost instinctively.

I think I've always subconsciously been a progger, but didn't realise it until about four or five years ago. At uni, I had this friend who was obsessed with Pink Floyd, Radiohead, Led Zep, etc. I soon got into all of these bands too. It was probably Radiohead, and some of Zeppelin's proggier stuff (like Houses of the Holy) that eased me into accepting 'out there' epic songs. Before this time, I thought that the edgiest music was punk and grunge.

About four years ago when I listened to Thick As A Brick by Jethro Tull which I found in my mother's LP collection.