American Proto-Prog

Jimi Hendrix would get my vote on any list of American bands.

Where are the Grateful Dead?  Man, the anti-Dead backlash on PA is inexplicable....Jefferson Airplane and the Doors as progressive but no Dead?  Sweetwater?  I think maybe those who aren't from the US have a skewered idea of what the Grateful Dead are.

Hmm, was listening to some old stuff that I had transfered to CD years ago abnd ran accross The Advancement "Painful Struggle" . Google lead me here and found band members and track list. Pretty cool for 1969, got the album at a cutout bin at Zayers discount for .49. one of my best purchases.

What a song!

Iron Butterfly

Just an idle thought about Spirit, seeing as we have a "spirited" convo going here.  Thinking back to 1968, when Spirit's first album came out, at that time there were very few (if any) precedents for the combination of elements they employed on that album.  Progressive Rock as a genre didn't "really" exist yet (ok, maybe you think it did... but it certainly didn't have a lot of adherents yet if it did).  I think of Progressive Rock, in historical terms, as really "taking off" when King Crimson wowed everyone with their album in 1969.  That seemed to open the floodgates. 

Now imagine for a moment: what if Spirit's first album had "taken off" in a similar fashion?  What if lots of "Spirit wannabes" had come out of the woodwork and Prog with a Capital P had evolved from there?  Right now we would likely be talking about Spirit's first album the way we talk about ITCHCOCK.

My point is that what we generally agree here about what is "Prog" or "not Prog" is HIGHLY influenced by historical factors - how it actually went down in the old days.  Love them or not, Spirit kind of fell through the cracks and they arguably missed their chance to really shape the future of rock music, simply because they failed to capture the imagination of enough people.  But that is not the same as saying that their music wasn't progressive, or that they "shouldn't be" prog - indeed, they should have, if I could only go back in time and change history so that Spirit makes a bigger dent in our collective culture.  Their music remains as daring and original as ever - but the masses have spoken, and who are we to rewrite that history?

^Ok, I have no clue at the moment what you are saying Sventonio, so it's time for me to check out of this discussion 

Steve, it's getting that time of the week where I cannot think clearly 

earlyprog wrote: Svetonio wrote: earlyprog wrote: I don't find any of the songs on Spirit 's s/t full-blown prog, sections of them perhaps. (Revision: not even sections are full-blown prog.) Straight Arrow is perhaps best described as country music (with a jazzy section), Girl In Your Eye is a silly UK psyche thing, Gramophone Man is pop/R&B (with a jazzy section) and so is Topanga Windows, Water Woman is folk. This alone constitutes about half of the album. And then I'm not even mentioning the rest individually song by song which at best is 50 % prog per song. It's that early, 60s prog. The same thing is with e.g. English prog band Family. However, If you search for "full-prog" 60s albums on that ridiculously wrong way then you will hardly find even In the Court of the Crimson King as an "full-prog" album because I Talk To The Wind is a pop song (a great pop, though). And also, following that pretzel logic, one can say that 21 Century Schizoid Man is "heavy psych, not prog".   If you believe 30% prog on an album makes it a prog album it's fine with me. But there is a long way up say 90 % prog as on ItCotCK.

100%-30%=70%. No cheating now!

Svetonio wrote: earlyprog wrote: I don't find any of the songs on Spirit 's s/t full-blown prog, sections of them perhaps. (Revision: not even sections are full-blown prog.) Straight Arrow is perhaps best described as country music (with a jazzy section), Girl In Your Eye is a silly UK psyche thing, Gramophone Man is pop/R&B (with a jazzy section) and so is Topanga Windows, Water Woman is folk. This alone constitutes about half of the album. And then I'm not even mentioning the rest individually song by song which at best is 50 % prog per song. It's that early, 60s prog. The same thing is with e.g. English prog band Family. However, If you search for "full-prog" 60s albums on that ridiculously wrong way then you will hardly find even In the Court of the Crimson King as an "full-prog" album because I Talk To The Wind is a pop song (a great pop, though). And also, following that pretzel logic, one can say that 21 Century Schizoid Man is "heavy psych, not prog".