But I guess I'd go with the Tornados song Telstar, released in 1962.

 

 

 

Also some of the sound effects for that record include someone running a pen around the rim of an ashtray, then playing the tape backword.  Certaintly the most Progressive thing (thats rock) that I've heard that came pout before The Beatles started experimenting.

 

(1963)

One from many different  ways into prog (in their sum) is non classic interpretation of classic music,

for example this piece sounds (for me) like proto -ELP

 

 

 

 

A lot of the prog you love so much makes people laugh too. 

^Indeed. (Edit: the indeed was for the post above the one about torch songs, although I agree with that as well)

Here's a '66 non soundtrack tune from Lalo Schifrin. If Ian Anderson had handled the vocals on this, it would sound like one of those early, jazzy Jethro Tull progfolk-ditties:

1958 - Music by Zdeněk Liška for Karel Zeman's film "Invention of destruction"

 

...that's really rather nice.

 

I think we have to be careful about making connections in retrospect that didn't exist at the time, just because something sounds like it is proto-prog it does not mean that it was proto-prog. By that I mean the song or composition in question had to have been influential on the emergent genre for us to see it as Proto Prog now. B. Bumble and the Stingers is pretty much self-evident as ELP covered it on Pictures but it is just a vamped-up piece of classical music done in a pop style, it isn't Prog or Proto-Prog, just as Dave Edmund's Love Sculpture version of the Sabre Dance is neither Prog nor Proto Prog.

 

One statement i think we can make without qualification is Barqoue Pop was one of the precursors to Prog Rock - The Zombies, Moody Blues, Procol Harum, The Move, Love, The Beach Boys and The Beatles all produced 3 minute pop songs that incorporated orchestral elements as an integral thematic part of the composition (as opposed to just the bland orchestral backing that was endemic at the time ... re David Bowie's first album and From Genesis To Revelation). I think it is a leap for Baroque Pop to be seen as Proto Prog, it's proto-Proto Prog - the seed that would lead to longer compositions and even more diverse influences that became Psychedelic Rock/Pop and then Progressive Rock.

 

But then (in the mid 60s), it all happened very quickly - music developed far more quickly then than it does now - from 1964 to 1968 the explosion in Rock music was phenomenal - In '64 we had Go Now, She's Not There and I Feel Fine (arguably the first proto-psyche song) all sitting comfortably within Pop Music and by '68 we were immersed in full-blown psychedelic rock with long tracks and musical "excess", concept albums, side-long suites (Love, Pretty Things, The Small Faces, The Who, etc.). Yet there is little linearity among all that - it was happening in parallel and often simultaneously or as near as it is possible to get - Piper at the Gates, Saucerful of Secrets, Sgt Pepper, Magical Mystery Tour, Days Of Future Past, In Search Of The Lost Chord, Ogden's Nut Gone Flake, SF Sorrow, Odessey and Oracle, The Twain Shall Meet, In-a-gadda-da-vida, Goodbye and Hello, Tangerine Dream, Easter Everywhere, Are You Experienced, Forever Changes, Their Satanic Majesties Request, etc., etc., etc. - were all released within such close proximty to each other it is impossible to say who influenced who and when.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Instrumental rock with a nod to Middle-eastern/world music (Misirlou is based on a rebetika song, and the single string lead mimics the oud, an Arabic instrument) . It contains both progressive stylings (It's more authentic 'Kashmir' than Led Zeppelin ), and psychedelia (tell me if several of Dale's riffs weren't directly lifted by Sid Barrett! ).

Featuring guitars, clavioline and finally Meeks eerie screams etc... Wiki informs that:The record was banned by the BBC as being "unsuitable for people of a nervous disposition" when released on the Parlophone label... (maybe posted on that Joe Meek thread Dean mentiones)

Check out Szabo's own composition, the 13 minute+ Lady Gabor (from Passin' Thru same year, same lineup. Bonus on CD version of The Man..) for more in a similar vein. 

 

All the songs you mention are really great songs but nowhere being near proto-prog IMO. I would agree with Ian Macdonald of King Crimson when he says the Beatles, 'Yesterday', was 'the beginning of progressive-rock' with its inclusion of strings as an integral part of the texture, and 'suggested to me how classical elements could be brought into rock music'

 

Moondog is fking awesome- I have heard a lot of great stuff come from weird recordings i have found on youtube.

 

 

Also, The Ox, composed by John Entwistle (RIP), from  My Generation album, 1965; imo, nobody did do a proggy song like this before :

 

 

 

 

If we keep pushing the envelope back to some of the early electronic oddities,  and other jazz musicians mentioned then we start straying from rock as someone mentioned above and it becomes progressive music in general and not prog rock imho.

For me when The Beatles did songs like Tommorrow never Knows, Strawberry Fields, and I Am The Walrus that's as proto prog as it gets....along with all the other  psych rock and psych pop bands back then who had many early prog elements in their songs.