When were you infected by Prog?

Hmm, early 2000s in my early 20s I decided to buy "The Yes Album" as I'd read about this band but never heard them and couldn't imagine what they sounded like! Wasn't too impressed but when I got "Fragile" a couple of weeks later it all made sense! I think the next albums I bought were "Selling England by the Pound" and "In the Court of the Crimson King" and I loved them both!

I remember being in high school, and being completely  bored with the straight-forward music that everyone was listening to. I needed art, and I told my father, so he bought me a copy of KC's ITCOFCK, and I've been hooked ever since.

Had always listened to Metallica and crap. Also a lot of jazz, as I was playing the sax it was sort of necessary to me. Had heard Trane albums and Miles Davis albums... (how some of those ends up at PA I don't really know). When I began playing guitar I saw a video of John Petrucci on youtube. Went and checked Dream Theater. I played a few tracks. When I heard Octavarium I was hooked. DT opened the world of prog to me. I was already half-into Rush at the time through a friend, but now I was ready for them for real. Then I got into the whole 70's spin of Yes, Genesis, etc...

Haven't looked back since.

The first time I really got into progressive rock specifically was when a friend of mine burned me a cd of Khan's Space Shanty. I thought it was very boring and couldn't imagine getting into it. But that one super groovy part on Mixed Up Man Of The Mountains got me to listen to them a few times, and I didn't know why, but eventually I loved the whole album and wanted to hear more like it.

Pink Floyd was the introduction.

I would rather ambient / trippy / jam type of prog, rather than overly technical stuff. I'm more into psychedelic/space rock, than prog rock per se.

Hence, my comfort zone currently is Pink Floyd, Harmonium, early Porcupine Tree, The Flaming Lips, Stardeath and The White Dwarfs, King Crimson's more spacey songs, etc.

Interesting thread.  Love hearing about recent teenagers discovery of prog!

Non-prog first.  My first "favorite bands" were hard rock, Y & T and Triumph in the early 80s.   But the first album I owned was actually ASIA, which my sister got me for Christmas in '82.  (I guess I found myself in '82?)  Didn't get me in to prog at the time, but still has a special place in my heart.  Didn't really know about Yes or anyone else at the time, though sometime around then my step-sister's boyfriend brought over Yessongs.  I remember the gatefold album cover and the three(!) discs and being impressed by that, but I'm not sure what I thought about the music.

At some point around then I remember my step-sister (5 years older than me, BTW) talking about this "really weird" sounding album.  Turned out to be Abacab!  But again I don't remember thinking much of it at the time.

My step-sister also listened to Journey, Van Halen, April Wine, Loverboy, and other similar bands, so that's what the rest of us listened to at the time.

When I got in to high school my step-brother (same age as me) started listening to heavy metal.  I bought him Motley Crue's Too Fast For Love for Christmas, probably in '84 (hmm, I see it came out in '81; didn't know it was that early).  I remember not caring for it at the time.  At some point he got some stuff from Iron Maiden, Judas Priest, Ratt, Armored Saint and other metal bands, and I started getting in to it.  Metallica as well, of course.  Testament, and a bit of Slayer.

Probably in '86 or so one of us found a cassette of 2112 in the street!  That started my real first investigation of prog.  I didn't have a job, but I somehow (allowance, I guess) managed to start collecting Rush on vinyl.  By the time high school was over I had every Rush studio album up to Hold Your Fire.  (Well, I graduated in 1987, and that came out in the fall, but close enough.)

Some time around then I became enamored of Wish You Were Here.  A local station would often play the entire album on Sunday nights.  When I got my first job I actually bought it as my first CD, before even buying a CD player!  I actually used it to "test out" CD players.

At some point around this time I discovered the "Stone Trek" radio show on KOME.  OH MY GOD!  This was my music!  Started collecting Yes, Genesis and King Crimson on CD.  Also Marillion and IQ.  Was pissed when I couldn't get in to a 21+ club to see Marillion in late '89/early '90 (just a few more months, please!).  Did get to see them a couple years later (Holidays In Eden tour, but hey.)  It all went downhill from there! 

Focused mostly on prog for years after that.  Actually started listening to new metal again only fairly recently.  Mostly "proggy" metal, if not strictly prog metal.  Also loving post-rock and post-metal recently.

So that's my story.

Probably during a Magma concert,after I started listening to King Crimson and Mahavishnu Orchestra and the trip had begun

An English teacher brought a portable turntable into school with a copy of "Very heavy, very humble. She played Gypsy and asked us to write anything that came to mind as an exercise. Well, that was it for me.

Really fascinating thread. I read almost every word on every page.

As for me, I was exposed to jazz, progressive, and classic rock when I was still in the womb!

In 1993, at 4 years old, I vividly remember car rides with my mom when she ran her errands, and regularly put on cassette tapes of Steely Dan, Santana, Yes, Pink Floyd, Queen, Zeppelin, etc.. Steely Dan's "Reeling in the Years" and "Do It Again" had an enormous impression on me then, and to this day, that smoking hot guitar intro to "Reeling in the Years" gets me every time. I was really fortunate to grow up in an extremely musical household, with my dad being a former semi-successful touring musician in several bands; one of which opened for Styx in the late 70's. Half of my earliest memories of my dad are of him with a guitar in his hands. He had an extensive vinyl collection including a lot of jazz like Coltrane, Mingus, and Joe Pass, and plenty of rockier stuff like Grateful Dead, King Crimson, and Dire Straits. So I was exposed to a lot of very eclectic music from the get go.

There were what I consider to be 3 major musical epiphanies in my life (I'll try to make it short!):

1. I was 11 years old and just picked up guitar after years of my dad trying to teach me and take lessons. If I remember correctly, I was listening to a lot of Zep, Hendrix, System of a Down, Dead Kennedys, RHCP, and the like, when my mom came home one day with a Pink Floyd compilation titled Echoes. It was a daunting 2 discs worth of music and I was already familiar with most of the Wall, so I decided to check out the title track (hah!), 18 minute "Echoes". Okay. Mind officially blown.

2. I was 14 years old, and listening to a lot of.. ahem... "emo" and "hardcore". (Brand New, Death Cab, Thursday, Sunny Day Real Estate, yadda yadda) A friend of mine wore a Mars Volta t-shirt to school one day, and honestly, the t-shirt looked so cool I had to check out the band! (Again, hah!) So I went to the MALL and picked up a copy of De-Loused in the Comatorium. This album made me think of music and the guitar in a completely different way than before, and I listened to the album from beginning to end enough times in that month to last the rest of my life.

3. I was 17 years old, and listening to a lot of prog and math rock (Later era Hendrix and Zep, Hella, Tera Melos, TMV, etc..). I was reading a Guitar Player magazine one day, and stumbled upon an article about a guitarist named John McLaughlin. The article categorized this as "jazz fusion" and  featured a transcription of the main riff from the song "Birds of Fire". I looked up the song so I could hear the riff to learn it and by the end of the song, my jaw was on the floor. From Mahavishnu Orchestra, I immersed myself in music from Frank Zappa, King Crimson, The Eleventh House, Soft Machine, and more recently, jazz guitarists like Kurt Rosenwinkel, John Scofield, and Bill Frisell.

Sorry that turned into a life story. Couldn't help it. Music is my life!

Edited by EchidnasArf - July 09 2011 at 03:18

In my late teens I was really into Tool, Isis and some other bands you might call "progressive metal."

I was reading stuff about Tool one day and saw that they cited some band called King Crimson as their biggest influence. So I looked this King Crimson band up.

I started listing to them. It took a while for me to get into them; I was kind of indifferent to them at first, probably because it was so different to everything I had ever heard.

Eventually it "clicked" and I was amazed. Naturally, that then opened doors and I dug deeper into the genre.


Rush and Pink Floyd have always been in my life, but, like others have said, they weren't "prog" to me. I didn't know what "progressive rock" was when I was a kid.