Belated Intro

Hi, I’m Geoff!  I’ve been on this forum for a while, but always looked around in the sections at the top so I never noticed this section until now.  Thought maybe I should introduce myself, though it is belated. 

I grew up with two music snobs for parents, so I had listened to a lot of classical and jazz.  In my early teens I discovered Prog when I found Pictures at an Exhibition buried in a draw that had some of my Dad’s old records.  I was hooked, and quickly started buying up all of ELP’s albums.  I was also rebelling and listening to Classic Rock radio at the time….  I didn’t really understand Prog at this point and, while I had bought a couple Yes, Jethro Tull, and Kansas albums, I had only done so for the hits they played on the radio and thought some of these bands other songs were a bit…weird.  I later developed a fascination with guitarists.  This may be due to the fact that growing up, having had music snobs as parents, I hadn’t really heard much guitar music – ESPECIALLY not electric guitar.  So I was fascinated by the likes of Hendrix and Van Halen.  In my freshman year of college, I was hanging out with some guys downtown and our ride was playing Surfing with the Alien by Joe Satriani.  I was amazed at his technical ability, and started buying all of his CD’s.  I eventually bought a couple Steve Vai cd’s as well, but at first, once again, found much of his music to be…weird.  That summer, I went to the G3 show featuring Satriani, Vai, and… John Petrucci.  The semester after this, my roommate was the president of the film club.  One fateful day, I was listening to Satriani while studying, and a member of the film club came by looking for my roommate, and said “hey, is that Satriani?”  We got to talking, I told him about G3, and he asked me if I had listened to Dream Theater.  Well, I had listened to some of their samples on Amazon (this was in the early days of Amazon, immediately after they had began to even offer the feature of listening to samples of songs) and didn’t like the 80’s sound of the singer so I had never tried them out.  I politely told him as much, but he insisted I had to listen to them, and later on let me borrow Once in a Livetime.  On a side note: this guy who introduced me to DT is now my best friend, and I met my other best friend through him, who is also a DT fan.  Once again, as I’m listening I thought they were…weird.  But when I got to Take the Time, I enjoyed it very much, especially the part at the end where they played the instrumental parts from the end of Freebird.  This was enough to get me to buy the live album, and I decided to give it a bit more of a shot and bought the Live Scenes From a Memory album as well.  I discovered I liked these guys…but I still didn’t “get” Prog yet, though I might’ve thought I understood it.  See, up to this point, my understanding of Prog was that it was supposed to sound like a mix of Classical and Rock.  The day I truly began to understand Prog was sometime after I started listening to Images and Words by Dream Theater.  I remember HATING Metropolis Pt. 1.  But for some reason, part of the instrumental section stuck in my head and kept repeating over, and over, and over again.  So…I had to listen to the song again.  I HATED IT!  But I liked that section of the instrumentals for some reason even though it just seemed…weird.  After listening to this song a few times, just because of the darn thing being stuck in my head, I had an epiphany.  I began to realize that the time signature was unusual, that it kept changing, and that there were even parts where different members of the band were in different time signatures.  Wow…that’s really cool, I thought, and I had a much bigger appreciation for the song after that.  This was a major turning point for me, one that led to me going back and finding I really liked some of the stuff I had earlier found to be...weird. 

I eventually owned the whole DT collection at the time, and started searching for more music like this.  But in my search, I wanted bands to sound as close to DT as possible.  So I was always just a bit disappointed.  But I did discover a few things I liked, such as Symphony X, Pain of Salvation, Transatlantic, and I experimented with a few others during this period as well.  My second epiphany occurred as a result of a festival called ProgPowerUSA.  My two DT fan friends I told you about earlier had gone with me to a few concerts in Atlanta and we kept seeing ProgPowerUSA shirts.  We weren’t Prog experts, but knew some of the names on the shirts and thought “wow, Prog actually comes to the states?”  So we went to Prog Power VI, not knowing a single band on the lineup.  Seeing all the bands we didn’t know and really liking some of them, along with going to the vendor area and seeing just how many Prog and Prog related discs were being sold opened my eyes (actually, all of our eyes – meaning myself and my two friends) to the fact that there was a BIG world of Prog out there that we knew nothing about.  I began to experiment a lot more and over the years after, discovered a LOT of bands I liked.  My two friends and I have made it a tradition now to go to ProgPowerUSA every year.  As a result, you can tell from my signature image (made it myself, thank you very much) my tastes gravitate a bit more to the heavy side.   However, I have experimented outside my comfort range quite a bit and found bands that I liked, such as Anglagard.  Some bands I love that didn’t make it into my signature image include (but are not limited to):

Sieges Even
Zero Hour
Flower Kings
Transatlantic
Jethro Tull
Agents of Mercy
Ayreon
Ark
Beyond Twilight
Porcupine Tree