Joe Walsh - Prog or not?!

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 FuzzyDude wrote:

 Intruder wrote:

I'm starting to wonder how we define "prog"....I've never thought Styx, Rush and Kansas were very progressive, actually just the opposite - what the music world has dubbed "arena rock".  From what I've heard, Joe Walsh would fit right in with the arena rock crowd.....although definitely in the upper tier.

The first two James Gang LPs and the Barnstorm trio LP Joe Walsh put together after the James Gang split are excellent rock albums.....just not very progressive beyond some extended solos....is THAT what defines prog?

The biggest problem with progressive rock is that it's not really an objective genre. Blues is blues, jazz is jazz, pop is pop... the word 'progressive' is misleading. It creates the mindstate that something is somehow better than other styles of the same medium. Robert Fripp very often publicly denounces the day he ever coined the term. Because there is no clear description, people spend decades trying to decide whether a band is progressive, even when that band spends the majority of their tenure unaware of the prog underground in the first place.

Oh, Kansas and Styx put the 'Er...' in progressivE Rock. Rush is decent though.

I agree. Look at the constant debate going in this forum about whether The Beatles were prog. If you want to take the word progressive literally, you could say they were when you look at the difference between Love Me Do and Strawberry Fields. They did literally progress. I think the same thing applies to Rush. They started off as a simple hard rock trio and gradually moved right into much more complex pieces. 