BS Sabotage Prog?

yes and also one of the reasons I have an issue with Dark Side of The Moon - that blues thing that so many musicians fall back on when it suits them. When I got into prog into the seventies , the keyboard dominated sound really made an impact with me. I didn't want to hear yet another heavy rock band doing a blues riff. I have also mentioned in other discussions how important I believe Iron Maiden were ( and still are). It's all about creating something that stands out at the end of day. For this reason I just can't get on board with Moshkito's point about 'loudness'. I mean ELP were often considered to be 'heavy metal' because they were as loud as any metal band and enjoyed being so!

Good movie and I reviewed it ... although since I was there for most of it, the only part missing for me would be the really early years in the mid 60's ... did they play ... I wanna be David Watts? ... instead of some other pop'y crap?

I was aware of pirate radio, though through my friend Guy Guden, who went on the air in 1974 in Santa Barbara with "SPACE PIRATE RADIO" and stayed there for more than 20 years, almost 25, and i think that he may be thinking about coming around again ... we really need his ability to show new music ... pretty much every day!

richardh wrote: ... As far as legal radio you had John Peel who was supportive of a lot of the more 'out there' prog artists such as Captain Beefheart.  ...

I think that KPFK (the famous/infamous station also responsible for THE FIRESIGN THEATER), and a few of the college stations ... remember that UCLA and USC were huge universities and both had a lot of courses in radio, tv and film. And a lot of progressive was, likely, played there, although I could not personally tell you that was the case, but if Santa Barbara did, you know those did an hour and a half away! There were a couple of other stations that helped make Nektar, Genesis, Golden Earring, Gentle Giant, Supertramp, and other bands really big ... way before the two big stations played them. I'm not sure that two big stations played GG and GENESIS at all until after PG had already left for GENESIS, when it became a big hit story.

Frank Zappa and even Beefheart is the greatest oddball story of all ... they did NOT get played on the air much, although I would imagine they were fun to play in most college radio because of all the fun stuff in it ... until OVERNIGHT SENSATION when all of a sudden Frank Zappa was PERFECT for the FM radio dial, and to send the FCC a big finger because they were paying old ladies to listen to all rock stations and file complaints about how many four letter words they used in the day, up to and including the words in songs!

And yet, FZ was selling a nice amount, although I think that OS sold as much as his entire catalog in one week more than likely!

richardh wrote: ... You would probably have got on with him! Auntie Beeb didn't catch up until 1973 when the noted Australian broadcaster Alan 'Fluff' Freeman was given his own 2 hour slot on a Saturday afternoon to play whatever he liked and generally he played ELP, Yes , Floyd etc. John Peel was very disparaging despite his earlier support for the genre and described Freeman as the man who discovered ELP when they were millionaires and turned them into multi millionaires. Quite a funny comment  although I'm not it was really true!

The great big sell off of all the "independent" FM stations did not happen until the last part of the 70's and it pretty much stopped the flow of a lot of new music. Space Pirate Radio was lucky, but then Guy's singular vision was not a 7 day affair, it was a Sunday Night affair, and I don't think that the station minded specially when a very nice article about it showed up on the LA TIMES one day ... many folks at that station did not like Guy, but he got the applause that many of them could not including at least one of the folks that had come from the SF area's biggest rock stations in the early 70's (KSAN) ... a big name ... but he was not exactly a progressive player at all, although he paid some attention to what everyone on the station was playing!

I do wish Guy would write a lot of this stuff down ... but his blog in many ways had a lot of that history ... 

....

There is one other person that also featured at the time in LA that could tell us a lot more about the music and in his case a wee bit more about the economic side of things ... Archie Patterson (EUROCK), I believe was a part of the early distribution of the LP's in the LA area and later moved north to Portland. And he would have a good history, as I think he was connected to one of the first import companies for LP's in America ... JEM Records ... but getting a hold of Archie and putting together something for PA, is not likely to be something of value to its members that are way more attuned to the top ten of it all, than they are the history that CREATED this music in the first place ... and one person even just wrote that he thinks all that history is crap ... I guess for him all the arts are crap ... and never EVER relate to life at all ... it's all top ten for him, even 150 years ago!