Black Sabbath, the unsung prog trailblazers

Rush have always been a Hard Rock band to me and not a Prog-Rock band, but I'm glad they're here on ProgArchives.

So did Deep Purple but I would argue that LZ had just as many if not more. Come to think of it all three had prog songs but that doesn't make any of them prog bands. It's not like they all put out full blown prog albums like even Pink Floyd, Kansas or Rush(bands who some say aren't prog). 

Nobody calls LZ prog, although they had a few prog songs.

LAM-SGC wrote: If you call LZ a prog band, then so is every other rootsy blues rock band of the 60s and 70s.

Not at all: 

- Cream was not a prog band (simple,quick songs; almost no emphasis on complex arrangements or technicality) though they had a big influence on proto- and heavy prog.

- Janis & the Holding Co. was not a prog band for the same reasons Cream wasn't, though they contributed greatly to both Psych and Heavy Blues.

- Johnny Winter, Blind Faith, Canned Heat, same thing

Zeppelin were a totally different animal: much more interested in, and capable of, high musicianship.   They progressed blues/blues-rock rather than just celebrating it like everyone else, and recreated their music almost every night.   The other bluesrock artists of the time can't really say that.

If you call LZ a prog band, then so is every other rootsy blues rock band of the 60s and 70s.

Slow your roll there, Chachi. I wasn't referring to copyrights and catalog ownership, which has always been a deplorable near-slavish aspect of the record industry ever since Jellyroll Morton was plinking the ivory,  I was referring to the blithe release of material that was decidedly anti-establishment, creative-in-the-extreme, and about as non-pop as you can get, and said material was inexplicably (how else can one define it?) allowed to compete with your aforementioned cookie-cutter and knock-off assemblages of bands emulating the more crazy stuff in a more sedate and politically correct manner. And for a brief period in music history, the crazy sh*t was marketed well enough and appeared on enough underground FM stations to sell as many or more units than the conventional crap. As I inferred previously, Zappa makes clear the modus operandi of how this incendiary material made its way on the airwaves:

 

That the record industry was welcoming to oddball acts was just due their own drive to find the next big thing, when there was an era in pop music when the old "cookie cutter" musical trends of 50s were temporally put on hold until new "cookie cutter" trends evolved and took hold in the late 70s. A practice that still exists up to this day, albeit with different music trends.