You left them behind, surprised they're here.

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 DavetheSlave wrote:

I remember being almost ostracised for my music taste in school for enjoying Yes, Floyd, Sabbath, Heep etc, - the other kids had the Stones, Donny Osmond, David Cassidy, the Beatles and later Kiss emblazened on their school bags etc. 
It was almost as if my preferences added a kind of mystique to me and my mates - lol. 
It was so easy to categorise music back then - Underground, Pop, Jazz or Classical.
The pop lovers were a different breed to the Underground music lovers.
Later it became Rock, Metal, Punk, Disco, Jazz and Classical.
Now - Holy Moly - Progarchives alone has more categories than their were types of music back then.

Trying not to be rude here, you're too young to make such generalisations Dave, and even though I'm 3 years older, I'm also a year or two too young aswell. Any kid in the 70s with Osmonds and Cassidy on their school bag would never have listened to The Stones, Beatles or Kiss ... as Bowie says in All The Young Dudes; "My Brother's back at home with his Beatles and his Stones, we never got it off on that revolution stuff, what a drag, too many snags" - there was an age gap, and younger siblings never listened to the music of their older brothers and sisters - the listening range was two to three years for each type of artist regardless of whether they were Pop, Rock or Underground. Access to music was similarily restricted to very narrow time spans, unless it was extremely sucessful an album released in 1969 would have been deleted from the catalogues by 1972, which made true underground music extremely difficult to obtain - take something like Capability Brown or Clouds - if you didn't buy it within 6 months of it being released then you'd never have seen it in the record shops. Even ELO's (very Prog) 1971 debut was nigh on impossible to find by the time they hit the big time with A New World Record in 1976

Similarily among kids that were into Progressive Rock (and yes, in England in 1970-76 that's exactly what we called it, just because it took the rest of the world 6 to 30 years to catch-up it's not our fault) and Underground music there was a hireachy of cool that would never have put Yes, Floyd, Sabbath and Heep into the same bag either. Groups of kids that were into one type of Underground music would never countenance their music being compared to another type of Underground music, just as they would never dream of doing that today. 

Time has blurred our memories - then was no different to now.

Your categoraisations from that time are a little vague and not exactly accurate - we had heavy rock, progressive rock, blues rock, progressive blues, psychedelic rock, acid rock, space rock, country rock, techno-rock (I remember Yes being called this and techno-flash at one point), head music, jazz-rock, glam rock, funk-rock, electronic, bubble-rock, stomp rock, pub-rock, etc., etc., etc.