Whoa, there. Some punks were big fans of Gong (and Beefheart fwiw). I know John Lydon of the Pistols was a fan of VDGG. The Kennedys' Jello Biafra was a big fan of both VDGG and Magma. Other 'prog' acts punks liked included Hawkwind and Can. Punks hated bands like Floyd and Yes for the same reason they hated the Eagles and Fleetwood Mac: they were very popular. Just another example of 'if everyone else likes it then I don't.' 

Two reasons:

https://www.amazon.com/Love-Beach-Emerson-Lake-Palmer/dp/B0000033P6/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1464824843&sr=8-1&keywords=elp+love+beach" rel="nofollow">

Which is kind of dumb, considering that this means that a lot of the punks were just as willing to be dictated by popular opinion as the masses.

They felt that the artist's focus on technique and extravagant shows was contrary to what rock n roll was about.

People seem to think that Punk and Hip Hop and regular Rock songs are about the 'real world' while Prog is about the 'fantasy world'. So Prog is considered 'silly'. It's similar to how fantasy novels and sci-fi novels are not considered 'real literature'.

The same thing happens to Goth bands like Bauhaus and Sisters Of Mercy. People see the clothing of the band members and the song titles and immediately dismiss it without actually listening to the music carefully.

When I was a teenager, music magazines always dismissed bands like Led Zeppelin and King Crimson as bloated pretentious hippy fantasy music. So I never bothered listening to any of their albums. When I finally heard their music properly, I was amazed at how good it is.

Personally I don't trust any music critics at all, I've read so many reviews where it's obvious that they haven't listened to the music closely and they are just following the status quo of what other 'tastemakers' are saying.

At least half of the music I love to listen to is not 'approved' of by music critics or the general public.

Exactly.

I myself like the Sex Pistols, Clash, etc. far more than ELP, who are dismal and horrible.  90% of Yes is also not in my cup of tea, despite their masterpieces.

And I listen primarily to prog - RIO, Avant, classic, kraut, etc.  

Musical tastes are not about technique, except for some musicians.  The context, message, etc. all matter a great deal in any artistic consumption.

Throughout history, the vast majority of people have been interested in simple music, mainly with a good dancing beat and a catchy tune to humm around, while a small portion of the population has been interested in a musical listening experience. Obviously, prog would fit in the second category, and it is logical that music critics, who make a living of it, would not favor a genre that most people would not get into, so putting it down is a natural consequence.

Sorry, but I can't agree with that at all.  

I lived in the SF bay area and saw Jello and the Dead Kennedy's several times through the 80's and some historical perspective is necessary to appreciate what they were doing.  In the 80's, Jello's lyrics and the DK album artwork promoted an anti-Reagan political stance that was extremely relevant.  Many in the US felt that Reagan was just a couple of moments away from starting WWIII with Russia ("the evil empire") at his whim.  The DK's took that issue straight on...not to mention the hypocrisy of TV evangelists and our undeclared war in central America.  Also, the album artwork and 12" x 12" posters included in their albums (especially HR Gigers "Penis Envy" included in the DK's Frankenchrist album) put Jello at the forefront of the fight for freedom of expression and a direct target of lawsuits.  There were other US hardcore bands with similar political agenda's (The Minutemen, Millions of Dead Christians - aka MDC, etc) but Jello and the DK's were always the lead dog in the fight against Reagan conservatism...and as such the biggest targets.  

Decades ago ( early to mid 80's)  I interview multiple punk rockers.   One issue came up over and over again.   I'll try to distill and paraphrase the gist of their point of view.

A certain prog/punk guitarist told me something like this...

"In high school around 77 I played in a progressive band.   The keyboardist, drummer, and bass player were all band dweebs with whom I had nothing in common except they were the only people in school talented enough to play Yes covers.  Then punk hit the scene and I realized I could teach my best friends to play guitar, bass, and drums.  And so I did.   We had a blast because I was playing with my friends.  Punk allowed a massive group of untalented musicians to finally rock out!   We didn't need a Robert Plant or Freddie Mercury either.  Our vocalist screamed pissed off vocals.   We got girls, had fun, did drugs, and drank a lot of beer.  So of course we hated progressive music. "  

Like I said, I heard different versions of that story over and over.   Progressive Rock had to go because it's popularity stopped a whole generation of air guitarist from going electric. 

All these theories sound plausible but on closer examination ...? 

One premise is that Prog was middle class because the musicians and their audience were middle class, and likewise Punk was working-class because the musicians and audience were working-class. The big problem with that is the youth-population of Britain didn't suddenly go from being mainly middle-class to mainly working class in between the end of 1975 and the middle of 1976. Which raises two related questions: what were the working-class listening to before Punk? and what where the middle-classes listening to after Prog? For there to have been a class-divide between the two genres of music would have meant that they could have (and should have) co-existed without one affecting the other. That the (disaffected/unemployed) working-classes suddenly developed a music of their own would have had no bearing on what middle-class college students listened to when toking on a spliff in their halls of residence or student digs. Prog and Punk appealed to young people of all classes. The only "class" that hated Punk were the middle-aged, middle-class middle-Englanders - (aka Mrs Mary Whitehouse and her ilk) and they hated all youth culture regardless of what it was (and still do). [NB: the notion of race here (i.e. white middle-class) is irrelevant - neither Prog nor Punk had much impact on the non-white community who were content with listening to Soul, Disco, R&B and Reggae music]

It is a similar situation for the musicians, though the evidence of a class-divide among musicians is less clear. While it seems superficially true that to achieve a level of musical proficiency to play Prog requires a formal musical education that in the 1970s could be presumed to be only available to the middle-classes, we know that very few Prog musicians had this level of musical background and most of them were self-taught. So there were certainly many working-class Prog musicians and several well documented cases of middle-class punk musicians - Joe Strummer was the son of a diplomat, the 'Bromley Contingent' came from the same middle-class area of suburban Greater London as Peter Frampton and David Bowie, the Stranglers came from Guildford (probably the most middle-class town in middle England's stock-broker belt). It is estimated that nearly half the Punk musicians were middle-class and a third of them had a university education - Punk as was much a product of Art School alumni as Prog ever was, if not more so... And that's a significant point - Punk was not just music - it was an art movement - the Sex Pistols were manufactured by two middle-class Art students with a "product" to sell; whereas Prog (unlike Psychedelia before it) was just music without a subculture and Art-background to support, promote and maintain it. 

Of course, therein lies the problem with Prog and why we find it so hard to define, classify, and compartmentalise. Whether through accident or intent, it lacked that cohesive common-ground to unify and define it - so it was easy to ridicule Prog because anything chosen to illustrate how pompous and overblown it was automatically became representative of the whole genre, even when in reality it wasn't. For example Genesis taking hampers of food on tour with them is used to show that they were aloof and middle-class, whereas the truth is they couldn't afford to feed themselves in restaurants and bars every night. I would suggest here (and this is just a theory) that Prog musicians distanced themselves from any form of subculture in direct reaction to the post-hippy come-down and the death of the Summer of Love - Prog was a leaderless anti-hippy freakdom of music devoid of all that non-music baggage whose only ethos was individuality and self-expression. If Punk ever honestly rebelled against anything, it was that - Anarchists in name only, Punk was actually conservative and conformist - to be a Punk meant adopting the whole shebang: the art, the music, the style and the uniform dress-code - right from the tippy toes of their Doc Marten boots that Mummy bought for them to their tooth-paste spiked hair and the "I, Individual" tattoo drawn in biro on their foreheads - One cannot be simultaneously left wing and libertarian, and there the whole class-divide comes crashing down because class and politics are only loosely aligned - bands such as Sham 69 had as many right-wing skinhead followers as they had left-wing, no-wing punk followers... On the political spectrum what came after Punk was ten years of Thatcher and Regan Conservatism, not in reaction to Punk but as a direct disaffected consequence of it - the people who voted for them were the same people who pogo'd and gobbed to Anarchy In The UK and God Save The Queen four years earlier.

The "classing-down" of Punk and its musicians was a media invention that snowballed because it sold newspapers and (eventually) records. In retrospect it made bigger "stars" of the music journalists who wrote it than most of the Punk musicians they wrote about. Middle-class Punk musicians latched on to this because it was a lucrative bandwagon to climb aboard - all free publicity is good publicity and when the music press is "on your side" then it would be daft to deny that it was true. 

Similarly, the myth that they couldn't play their instruments, a put-down that had historically been levelled at any emergent music trend by established 'professional' musicians (this had been said of all pop bands from the Beatles onwards and still persists today), was turned-around and used as a battle-cry with such conviction that the public believed it not only to be true, but believed it to be a prerequisite for making this "new wave" of music long after the evidence presented by post-punk and all that followed after has proven it to be false. To be a Punk meant conforming to the ideal regardless of how proficient the musician really was - flash solos and musical self-indulgences were frowned upon (by the music-media) and musicianship was suppressed (by the musicians themselves).

[And seriously, I couldn't give a flying fart what Johnny-come-lately Jello Biafra said or thought three or four years after Punk had officially curled-up its toes and died...]

...and that was also the can't-play-guitar guitar-based 3-chord 12-bar blueprint to most UK Punk music that followed it. 

 

I listen to both Yes and the Clash.  I never saw any contradiction in doing so.

Are you absolutely sure?  

The reason most punks hated prog is because they weren't talented enough to play like that.

Mind you, some prog bands and solo artists did indulge in some appalling w*****y from 1976 onwards. Step forward Messrs Wakeman, Emerson.......!

Once again the Americans arrive late to the party. 

It was simply angry, distorted music and I am sure the lyrics were with meaning but it never made it thru the music for me.

I watch those 80's documentaries and when they talk about the punk movement, I really don't feel like I missed anything.

Prog...I am not surprised people feel it is the laughing stock....Some of this music is weird....

I get really sick of how many people think that punk was prog's downfall. Prog was prog's own downfall and punk was just a new kind of music that took over the underground music scene. 

I agree, changing tastes of recreational drugs played a very big part!  The '70s saw pot, hash, LSD, mescaline and all sorts of other drugs amenable to long, complex jams and compositions.   

Punk was fueled by huffing, particularly amyl or butyl nitrate; alcohol, speed and other stimulants.  Punks were not in a mood to be mellow and relax, they wanted to pogo-dance, smash stuff, be angry and vent pent up energy. 

Disclosure: I was a progressive bassist/guitarist in the early/mid 1970s, and easily transitioned to being a progressive punk/new wave bassist in the early 1980s.  There was a lot of common ground between punk and music like LTIA, Red etc.    Yes, ELP and Genesis, not so much.

People think rock and roll should be simple and hard driving and full of angst---and not "pretentious" or melodic or complicated. It's very simple---no real connection between ----I want to be sedated-- and Awaken lol

Having said that there have been prog acts that were accepted by the rock hipsters of the world---

That Wakeman concert is hysterical ----maybe he should do a concept album on Game of Thrones --that would be current. It does make me think that Europe and other parts of the world --other than the USA---accepted more types of music.

There is a connection between I wanna be sedated and awaken. nomeansno and Cardiacs.

Don't you mean No Earthly Connection? 

Correct interpretation!  I was there and saw the transformation. Classically trained musicians were attracted to rock because of the fame and fortune (and groupies, lets be fair) and created the prog scene. Untrained musicians were attracted to rock because of the potential fame and fortune (and groupies) , plus the fashion lobby (McLaren was a Soho fashionista and store owner , of I am not mistaken) . Steve Jones was a rabid Roxy Music fan (but kept that very quiet) . It was all a big marketing coup and nothing more . In fact, the musical punkers became new wave giants. But in 1977 there was a definite assault on the prog world , led by Lester Bangs and those idiot critics at NME and Melody Maker . 

 

Perhaps film music, soundtracks and all that 'filmy' stuff?

Au contraire, it is merely common sense and would be not very bright to think otherwise. Punk (and one must assume you mean the musicians who made it) did not appear in from vacuum so would they have spent their teenage years listening to the same music as the rest of us. They would probably like you to believe that they listened exclusively to The MC5s, The Stooges and the Velvet Underground but that is a fanciful bit of elitist propaganda... (in other words, it would be a big fat lie equal only to the number of people who claimed to have been at the Sex Pistols gig at the Manchester Lesser Free Trade Hall in 1976)... the inevitable reality is, if a band was mentioned in the pages of Sounds, The NME or Melody Maker, or featured at one of the outdoor festivals such as Reading or Glastonbury during the first half of the 1970s then it was listened to (and subsequently liked) by practically every white teenage male in the UK at that time even if they later went on to be Punk. 

Punk? lol

Its not even considered music

 

No.

You are correct.

Yes.
 

True, but it was also an unfortunate case of miss-booking. The Empire Pool Wembley was, as the name suggests, an arena sized swimming pool built for the 1934 Olympic games that could be converted to an ice-rink for ice shows that were popular in the 1970s. For one-off rock concerts the pool area was normally covered with boards for the audience and the stage arranged at one end (I saw Pink Floyd and Mike Oldfield concerts with this set-up). 

 

No wonder their same old rhetoric as that of the punk musicians, sorry but that's almost everything people always heard from them.

 

+1 on here.

Mostly true, however there was also a generation-change. 

While we tend to regard music in decades (the 60s, the 70s, the 80s etc.) it changes more frequently than that as illustrated by the number of different subgenres that appear within each decade that appealed to a single demographic (e.g. white teens). For example the early 60s were Beat Music (aka The British Invasion) and Rhythm & Blues followed by Psychedelic Pop and Blues Rock; the 70s had Prog Rock, Glam Rock, Blues-Rock, Heavy/Hard Rock, Pub Rock and Punk while the 80s went through New Wave, Synth-pop, New Romantic, Shoegazing/Dream Pop, Gothic Rock and many more besides (such as all the flavours of Metal that emerged in the 80s). 

The audiences for each of these came from a surprisingly narrow age-group (mainly early teens whose ages spanned roughly a 5-year period), it would be unusual for one age-group to "like" the music of the previous generation ("My brother's back at home with his Beatles and his Stones - we never got it off on that 'Revolution' stuff"). 

So when Punk arrived in late 1975 it attracted a younger audience even though the people who actually played it were somewhat older. As an 18-yo at the time I thought myself to old to be a Punk - despite being the same age as Susan "Siouxsie" Ballion and John "Vicious" Richie, a year younger than Johnny "Rotten" Lydon and David "Vanian" Left ... and much, much younger than Joe Strummer, Hugh Cornwell and Ian Dury (hence my contention that these Punk musicians listened to the same music as I did when they were younger).

The other thing to remember is Prog didn't go away - it soldiered on through the 80s - Neo Prog wasn't called "Neo" back then, it was just called "Prog" - a lot less popular than it once was, it still sold albums.

/edit: the pedant in me must comment on the "white elephant" metaphor - a white elephant is an unwanted gift that is expensive to maintain or difficult to dispose of without offending the person who gave it. Often this is confused with "the elephant in the room" which refers to a controversial subject that all can see but no one wants to mention. But that's just idle pedantry, we know what you mean ;-)

I was in the middle of the punk scene in Chicago, 1979 onwards, and saw this first hand.  There were even exchanges....I remember a fine jazz-rock band, "Apprentice," who channeled Brand X, yell "Punk SUCKS!!" during a concert. 

A friend of mine who, like me, got into both art forms just looked at each other and went "Huh??". 

There were some interesting attempts at fusion between prog and punk in Chicago....I was invited to try out for this band as bassist, and the very first song I threw out to the guitarist was "Larks Tongues In Aspic Part 2!"  He rose to the bait and we had a great jam session.  The Marquis were more of a hard-edged new wave fusion thing, with a punk attitude.  

You had to live through it!!  

Yep. The audience of punk was younger than that of classic prog, certainly so.

The other thing to remember is Prog didn't go away - it soldiered on through the 80s - Neo Prog wasn't called "Neo" back then, it was just called "Prog" - a lot less popular than it once was, it still sold albums.

Indeed, it did not go away at all! Sure, Marillion or IQ did not sell out stadiums, but at least Marillion were in the album charts, and some of their songs had airplay in Europe. Rush was quite a big thing in North America, I have been told. Then came the 90s and the Internet-connected prog scene we have today. Prog never died, it just shrunk back to more modest (and more healthy! - who really wants the stadium shows back? We can leave that to boy bands and girl bands!) proportions.

Also, while prog was a major current in the early '70s, it was not the leading current in terms of market sales, I think. Sure, it featured prominently in the album charts (the near total absence in the single charts has other reasons, of course), and there had been stadium shows, but bubblegum pop, glam rock, soul and the various kinds of bourgeois popular music (C&W, Schlager, chanson, etc. - depending on which country you lived in) were bigger (and they also were bigger than punk in the late '70s, of course). And people like Lester Bangs had been hating prog long before the first of the legendary three cords was even strummed! The "downfall" of prog in the late '70s probably was less deep than many of us now think.

I suspect they might not have been taking the whole punk thing entirely seriously.

No.

I don't hear much these days that I would call "classic punk."  The US punk movement followed the UK counterpart by five years or so....some cities like Minneapolis had very large & active punk communities, with mohawks etc.  

However, methinks these were disaffected, bored middle-class/upwards kids, not the real grimy Brit punks of the lower class.  

It was truly an interesting moment in musical history that influenced many, including Gabriel, Fripp, Belew, and many others.  Authentic punk had as much raw energy as King Crimson did during their LTIA period.  

I'd take authentic punk any day over the glossed-up garbage being foisted on us by the media companies!!  Stagefuls of dancers, elaborate light shows, and none of the good stuff (instrumental prowess, vocal harmonies) of prog.  

 

It's a simple fact.

What a bloody waste of time

 

With (full) artistic control over what he was doing (which is something he didn't have in the Pistols with McLaren in charge) he was able to put into action everything he had been saying as Johnny Rotten, which was not an attack on Prog but on the music establishment and pretentiousness, which at the time he thought Pink Floyd were the personification of, because like everyone else at the time he believed all that he read in the media: [In person, Pink Floyd are "not [pretentious] at all", Lydon admitted. "There was kind of a misreading and a misrepresentation in the press and they're not holier than thou ... Dave Gilmour I've met a few times and I just think he's an all right bloke." ~ The Guardian, Feb 2010  http://www.theguardian.com/music/2010/feb/18/john-lydon-pink-floyd" rel="nofollow - www.theguardian.com/music/2010/feb/18/john-lydon-pink-floyd  ]

Lydon said he loves Dark Side of the Moon, and two years ago, when the surviving members of Pink Floyd came to Los Angeles, "they asked me would I come on and do a bit of [it] with them". "The idea thrilled me no end," he said. "I came so close to doing it ... [but ultimately] it felt like I was trying to set myself up as some kind of pretentious person. I'm wary of the jam-session end of things."

and http://www.johnlydon.com/nordoff_robbins.html" rel="nofollow - from elsewhere (2006) : "But the biggest fun of the night was meeting Keith Emerson, of Emerson Lake & Palmer (laughs), I really got on well with him! It’s amazing how this music industry wants us to be enemies, and we’re not." 

I always thought that the studio version of 

"Phantom of the Opera" by Iron Maiden 

was the perfect example of a Prog and Punk combination... 

 

 

This whole album was made as one track:

It doesn't help that the guy on the right looks like Art Garfunkel. 

And, if you want to go further back, there's always "Sister Ray" by The Velvet Underground.

Yeah, that's what I always thought!!  

The band had some amazing talent....the guitarist, Todd, was a blazing-fast jazz-rock guy at heart, he could play anything.  If I had stayed on, I might have been able to force them in a new direction.  

However, I never regretted turning down the bassist chair and staying in graduate school!!  Cheap Trick's "Live At Budokan" came out and destroyed all of the Chicago semi-punk, power-pop posers like the Marquis, Off Broadway, Pezband and many others.  

p.s. I can't imagine myself jammed into tight leather pants!!  Gawd!!