The Show That Never Ends

Parker's so-called "book review" is filled more with his own negative opinions of prog, rather than the qualities of said book.  He finishes his rant with this gem... "The proggers got away with murder, artistically speaking. And then, like justice, came the Ramones."

No surprise.  James Parker is the author of “Turned On,” a biography of the hardcore punk pioneer Henry Rollins.  So, a hard-core punk nut says he doesn't like prog rock!  His article speaks more about his own personal biases, rather then the book (or actually the whole genre) he is criticizing. His scathing criticisms were clearly an attempt to troll the prog community, as he wrote... "I feel you out there, prog-lovers, burning at my glibness.".  He's clearly just a punk-headed troll.  Ignore the troll.

The best of all these books, and it has an incredible amount of history in it ... from the bands and players themselves ... is undoubtedly "EUROCK" by Archie Patterson. It is mostly the whole collection of his magazines going way back to the first one, and the whole thing is so huge that it took me almost 3 months to read it and then ... how do you review LIFE? 

Sadly, it is not something that most folks in PA seem to appreciate ... a veritable Encyclopedia, though it does not profess, or use the term "progressive" a whole lot, and instead allows for the musicians to speak for themselves. And after you hear from folks that live in at least 30 countries ... you start getting the idea of where the whole thing started ... in everyone's heart, not in London!

There are, at the very least, about a dozen folks here at PA that can write something far better, and much more inclusive, than folks that hate the music, and think they can write about it, through a couple of bands that they like, and intentionally ignoring other bands around the world, and simply showing how ethnocentric they are, and how uneducated they are showing themselves to be. 

It's no secret, and you do not have to be a PA person, or fanboy, to know that the whole "progressive" story is not about 3 bands (so to speak) and does not involve just one place, and the ideas of a person that never heard that there was a world out there, and that there are many birds that sing in many other countries, whose names and song, you and I have never heard. Exploration in music, just like the arts, is not something that does not exist in just one pinpoint spot in this world ... it's something that happens everywhere, and it only takes our ability to listen to different things and acceptance for different musics, to appreciate.

As Carlos Castaneda once said, in speaking about a thesis, and I second it a lot for stuff like this ... "...you know what ______ do with paper, right?" My sentiments exactly when I see stuff like this ... just another fanboy of two or three bands, whose musical tastes are doubtful at best!