When were you infected by Prog?

I first started paying attention to music in the very late sixties, in the form of AM radio.  At that time, some commercial acts were stretching out into prog directions.  I heard Deep Purple do 'We Can Work It Out' on the radio before I heard the original Beatles version.  As I continued to listen over the next few years, music by Yes, Tull, and ELP were common on the airwaves.  This trend increased when I went over to FM radio.  I can say there are two defining moments for discovering Prog in its own right, though, the first being an important predecessor to the next.

In 1973 by Giorgio Moroder's single "Lonely lovers symphony".

Edited by XunknownX - April 17 2010 at 19:17

I think that I was infected when I was a child of 8 or 9 and my dad used to play Pink Floyd all the time.  I don't think there was a day when he didn't put in Dark Side of the Moon or The Wall.  Though I didn't actually start listening to prog as my main genre of music until last year I think that the early Pink Floyd exposure has something to do with it. 

Also, I pretty much entered the prog genre through Rush which I heard because of my 8th grade health teacher playing YYZ one day before class.  That was an awesome teacher.  After that I kept listening to good music and when I discovered Dream Theater last year I knew that I had found the right genre for me.

My guitar teacher, when i was 12 or 13 played a Dream Theater song for the first half of a 30 minute lesson. It Was the best guitar lesson ever because it opened up my eyes to the world of PROG. 

Born in 66 I should have rather become more of a punk or a disco or a techno, were it not for 3 facts

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

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.

'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.

Atavachron wrote:  ^ what was your first album?

Dark Side Of The Moon

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