Prog Gateway Music

Catcher10 wrote:   My gateway was thru Funk for the most part. I am a big Parliament fan, and their longer funk songs and concepts drove me to liking longer songs in general.

I encountered Rush in a classic rock compilation CD when I was 13 (the song on the CD was "The Spirit of Radio").  I was playing the CD while I had a friend over and he made a favorable comment about Rush, which led me to check out 2112 from my local library.  After three listens, I was addicted beyond repair.  My life has never been the same since.  Rush was my gateway to prog (and to this site) and later, maudlin of the Well would open my mind to more extreme and avant-garde music.

It was about 1977 ,ELP and Tarkus especially. Massive choir , thunderous drums etc. I also heard DSOTM at about the same time and wondered where was the massive choir, thunderous drums etc. A bunch of alarm clocks going off? ..lame. I found Yes boring and Genesis were just a pop group in the late seventies. A general interest in prog only started to take shape in the early eightes when I fed up to the back teeth with music videos and bands that were clearly not bands pretending to be bands.

menawati wrote: ye you are right, can i delete the thread or do i need admin to do it ?

Gateways are great. LONG LIVE RUSH!!!!

Apparently, Opera is a bad gateway.

For me and most of my friends at the time, which was 1973.  We were in high school, and one of us had just heard ELP's Brain Salad Surgery.  He was the first one of our group of friends that had discovered prog and was sharing it with the rest of us.  My parents gave me Elton John's Goodbye Yellow Brick Road for my birthday, played it over and over.  While not prog, it was my first real exposure to recorded music.  Just loved Funeral For A Friend, but wasn't sure why.  This friend I mentioned was into Yes, Floyd, Genesis, Nektar, VDGG.  We would gather at his place, and he would spin the vinyl from these bands that existed at that time.  I remember just being blown away at the epic sound, the meat of it.  Just so much content and substance to the music.  It was then I was exposed to most of what is now considered to be epic, classic prog.  I have preferred to listen to nothing but since that time almost 40 years ago.  Long Live Prog!

I want to chime in here and state that Yes' worst album ever, in my opinion, is Talk from 1994.

I only listened to classical until my dad played Fragile on a car trip. I also bought Dark Side of the Moon because I thought the cover was cool. Everything pretty much followed from those.

M27Barney wrote: work out how many CD's I have that I have never listened to, could be as many as 500 perhaps.... I know I have that many that I'll never listen to again..... Hope my wife doesn't realise this - she HATES clutter