Great ELP Debate

Ahhh but I am a progger - owning the collected works of genesis, floyd, rush, tull, yes etc as well as key works by a host of other prog bands from Tangerine Dream to well list any one you want - even ELP!! And au contraire I think my view of prog's place in the grand scheme of popular music is very enlightened - enlightened by 30 odd years of serious consumption of popular music and also by a very catholic taste that takes in everything from punk to pop, goth to electronica, country to world music.

I own quite a bit of vinyl from Brubeck, Miles Davis and a few other jazz artists, but I don't call myself a jazz fan.

It's just my personal take on mid-70s prog, I sincerely believe it had become a horrible lumbering monster and needed to be, if not killed off, then at least relieved of its more gluttinous, bloated attributes.

Sort of proves my point!

Oh and, as an aside, ELP largely did not play the same form of music on their studio album in 1977 as they did before but this was most certainly NOT as a result of the '70s Punk movement. They took the orchestral route, did it beautifully, and still sold sh!tloads more albums across the world than any Punk band.

A similar point was made elsewhere, saying that punk had little impact on prog's success in 77. very true but what I actually said was that it had a severe impact on prog which was left to slowly bleed to death in a forgotten corner (though i think I said exsanguinate). A year on, prog was barely registering a heartbeat. By 1979/80 it was dead. By 1982, a prog band couldn't get arrested in the charts - unless it was on the grounds of being criminally out of touch. And I'll wager that the Clash might have something to say about album sales.  Don't think so, I've seen it charted... during that whole debate a few years ago.  And actually I laugh when people call the Clash punk... Thats a pop group if ever there was one... "Yeah rock the casbah"

I love progressive rock but it is not the be all and end all. Some of it's terrible and nowhere near as good as some of the best punk and new wave or grunge or dance or whatever. Compare Pictures at an Exhibition with Talking Heads' 'Remain in Light' or the Police's 'Regatta de Blanc' or The Clash's 'London Calling' and I know which ones I would rather have in my collection.

I'd rather have Pictures before most other prog albums.. but I'd even prefer Yes's Tormato or 90125 before any of the Clash, the Police or the Talking Heads... I think I'd even prefer Genesis's W&W before those... Actually I'd even prefer something by Triumvirat before those.....

Just because you put your hands over your ears and sing Jerusalem at the top of your voice doesn't mean that nothing else of merit exists.

You wouldn't say that if you'd ever heard me sing Jerusalem!! 

arcer wrote: A similar point was made elsewhere, saying that punk had little impact on prog's success in 77. very true but what I actually said was that it had a severe impact on prog which was left to slowly bleed to death in a forgotten corner (though i think I said exsanguinate). A year on, prog was barely registering a heartbeat. By 1979/80 it was dead. By 1982, a prog band couldn't get arrested in the charts - unless it was on the grounds of being criminally out of touch. And I'll wager that the Clash might have something to say about album sales.

Werent Rush getting TOP 5 albums all through the early to mid?

Didnt Tom Sawyer get to No 23 in 1982?

Weren't Marillion pounding the charts as well as Genesis,PF and erm......

A similar point was made elsewhere, saying that punk had little impact on prog's success in 77. very true but what I actually said was that it had a severe impact on prog which was left to slowly bleed to death in a forgotten corner (though i think I said exsanguinate). A year on, prog was barely registering a heartbeat. By 1979/80 it was dead. By 1982, a prog band couldn't get arrested in the charts - unless it was on the grounds of being criminally out of touch. And I'll wager that the Clash might have something to say about album sales.

Never noticed that before>>>>>>>>>>>>>&a mp;a mp;g t;>>>>>>>>>>>>>>&a mp;a mp;g t;>>>>>>>>>>>>>>

Maybe Linda's right, I could be brain dead!

Anyway..

I distinctly remember seeing ELP playing in London in the Eighties.

It was outside Marks & Spencer's.

They had a lovely little dog with them too!

In fact here's my picture of Keith in action:

this is good fun. provoking lots of analysis of elp's relevance and their place in the downfall of prog. After slating the poor old codgers (just not my cup of tea) I'll go further and offer my tuppene worth on their place in the downfall of 'classic' prog...

I firmly believe prog's demise was occasioned by a two-pronged attack, one self-inflicted and the other via the natural culling that occurs in popular music.

I sincerely believe that most of the world-class proggers (Yes, ELP, less so Genesis) had crawled enthusiastically up their own backsides my 1975. Prog, always a somewhat elitist marque (music for the intelligentsia/musicians) had climbed into an ivory tower of self-regarding narcissism that forbade any gainsaying of its right to probe the innermost depths of its own navel. Tales,  anything ELP did (), possibly Lamb (tho I think it's their finest work) were impossibly extravagant pieces of self-involved do doo that to a greater or lessr degree excluded all but the most dedicated (I particularly think this of Tales).

Locked away in splendid isolation, prog's elder lemons deserved to be brought done. And their own inaccessibility was ultimately their undoing. The social and political climate of the mid-70s (in the US and UK) had no place for such rarefied self-indulgence. It NEEDED a revolution. That revolution was punk in the UK and it's descendant new wave in the US (for I don't think punk ever really permeated the American zeitgeist.

I love aspects of punk - its visceral aggression, it's three-chord thrashery, and I love what it did to some of the prog and rock dinosaurs. It gave Floyd a vicious, angular edge on Animals after the (admittedly beautiful) lush meandering of Wish You Were Here. It led Jimmy Page to incorporate all sorts of brittle, icy guitar magic into the criminally underrated Presence. It led Peter Gabriel to walk his own path and produce some stunning fusions of art rock, new wave and world music. Bowie decamped to Berlin and gave us the beautifully fractured Heroes and Low. Elsewhere, it gave rise to the Pretenders, Blondie, Talking Heads, The Buzzcocks, New Order, Joy Division, Echo and the Bunnymen, Television, PIL, the Stranglers, Joe Jackson, The Police et al.

Those who couldn't adapt failed to survive - good. Out with the old in with the new. The same thing happened in 1991 with the snarling, mewling arrival of Kurt Cobain's Nirvana. Bye bye tired old college rock as typified by the awful likes of the Spin Doctors or Hootie and the goddamn Blowfish, hello Queens of the Stone Age, Pearl Jam, etc. The same thing had happened in the UK in 1986 with the advent of the second summer of love with dance music and the nascent madchester scene which severely impacted on the increasingly unbearable reigns of Madonna, Michael Jackson, Sting, the Eurthymics and a whole host of dismal 80s monoliths.

The same thing, hopefully will happen again soon so we can lose the current crop of hopeless new wave regurgitators and find something new and exciting.

Progressive is about progressing. maybe ultimately that's why I dislike neo-prog so much. It does not progress at all. It is rooted in the early 70s, slavishly replaying Close to the Edge and Fanfare for the Common Man and The Musical Box with marginal shifts in structure.

As a very young teenager I was possibly blessed to straddlle the death of prog and the birth of punk. I feel that I have a greater affinity to the prog camp but I am very attracted to the energy and dynamism of punk and new wave (and its decsendents). I can distinctly remember listening to both PIL's Metal Box and Lez Zeppelin's Song Remains the Same in the same week and being blown away by both.

The death of prog in 1977-78 was a function of teenagers growing increasingly disaffacted with the unapproachability of the music their older brothers and sisters clung to. And like all rebellious youngsters they sought out something to make their own - and at the 100 Club in the shape of the Clash, they found it.

I recognise the role played in this by the music media, but while there was a year zero feeeling about the whole thing, however I would also add that many of the journalists of the time were young themselves and utterly entranced by punk's rebellion and alienated by prog's self-satisfaction in its fascination with musical and technical exclusivity.

Prog wasn't killed by either itself or its rivals, it was wounded from all quarters and left to slowly exsanguinate in a quickly forgotten corner.

There is some fantastic prog out there, oddles - but by the same token there is much that is overbearing, overblown and overdone. Some will call the explorations on Tales etc 'questing' or 'the attempted perfection of their art'. Me, I just call it self-indulgent tripe, a world away from the tight, focussed objectives achieved on Yes's first three albums.

Then again, it's all down to personal taste innit

And i still think ELP are crap