Prog Books

Prog books in general but Bradley Smiths Billboard Guide to Progressive Music in particular.

I think this is an excellent book which stetches the boundaries of prog and writes very convincingly about hundreds of wonderful albums. I've discovered many new and interesting artists as a result.

What are your thoughts on this book and other prog books?

-----------

Chris

Hello Dick:

I have the other three 'prog' books you mentioned and I would basically agree with your view of them. I also have Bill Martins Listening to the Future and Paul Stumps The Musics all that Matters. The former book is a major disappointment being a lengthy essay trying to connect various philosophical debates with prog music. The latter title is an enjoyable read but very negative in its tone. Kinda funny in a nasty kind of way.

Archic Pattersons Eurock book is a massive tome and quite good. It gathers articles from his magazine so its quite comphresive on European prog.

Yeah Sid Smiths KC book is outstanding.

Chris Welchs Yes book was okay. Generally I find the Yesstory done to death and this book didn't shed any new light for me.

The Pink Floyd book I read years ago and I enjoyed it. I've been meaning to read it again.

Brad Smiths book ruffled some feathers when it came out in 1997 but I personally think its the best prog music guide out there at the moment.

-----------

Chris

Personally, I have very mixed feelings about Bradley Smith's 'Billboard Guide to Progressive Music'. In the words of a friend, it seems not so much a real guide to progressive music as a guide to music that he likes. That said, I did like the way in which he took a broad view of 'progressive' which allowed the inclusion of lots of interesting stuff you wouldn't normally see included in a book about progressive stuff. One of my problems with this book comes down to differences in taste; Smith's tastes seem to be a bit more on the 'cultured' side of things and he doesn't seem to like much of the older psychedelic progressive stuff that I love. Also due to his tastes the way in which he described things could be very misleading to me - eg. his descriptions of things verging on heavy metal are way off to anyone who listens to a lot of heavy music.

[To be clear on where I'm coming from, I like all kinds of stuff as long as it's interesting and done reasonably well, but I have an aversion to poppier stuff, country, overtly symphonic late-70's prog, and much 'neo-prog'; my loves tend to lean towards psychedelic/experimental and early heavy stuff but of course that means 'Larks Tongues in Aspic' is a big fave for me, so I'm not just a psych head masquerading as a prog fan!]

I also found him needlessly fussy over details such as whether or not he likes the cover art. One bit which always annoyed me was this, under a description of the wonderful 1st album by Algarnas Tradgard - "The cover art, however, is terrible and should have been redone for the reissue." To me that sums up the attitude of Smith's that faults this book - myself and friends agree the cover art is great and can't see what his problem is - he doesn't seem particularly objective as far as realising that his opinions may not be shared by everyone. There's lots of stuff in his book that he trashes and I simply can't agree with him - he seems to assume that his reviews are a definitive statement. I also disliked his style of attempting to describe the music on each album blow by blow - it came across as dry, often very personally subjective, and a bit pretentiously highbrow. Some of his reviews clued me in to worthwhile albums, but that's the main reason I still keep this book around, not because I like the way he's written it.

'Scented Gardens of the Mind' by Dag Erik Asbjornsen [Borderline Books, 2000] is a decent-sized [nearly 550 pages] softcover encyclopedia covering fairly comprehensively psychedelic and progressive music from most European countries circa 1968-1980. Austria and Switzerland are left out because the author covered them in his earlier book on the German stuff [see below]. It's a useful but disappointing book - useful because it's the only half-decent guide to this stuff I've been able to lay my hands on, disappointing for a variety of reasons which I'll go into.

Firstly, although he's made a pretty good effort to include everything relevant there's still lots he's left out that should have been included. There's lots of typos, and he consistently mis-spells Philippe Besombes' name [as Besombres] despite having a scan of his 'Libra' album with the correct spelling clearly visible [this only pisses me off because I'm a big Besombes fan]. Most of the cover images are black & white and of very poor murky and dark quality. For a book of this size and cost there's a miserably small middle section of colour cover images, also of poor quality. The author doesn't seem to be very into the more experimental stuff and tends to write off albums as trash which are much loved by others [eg. the Visitors album]. He also seems to have an exaggerated idea of heaviness, as numerous albums he's described as being raw and heavy were barely so after getting to hear them. He also has a tendency to hype some of his faves far beyond what they actually are, such as his review of 'Could You Understand Me?' by Yugoslavian group Fire, which he finishes by saying "This album turns your heavy metal albums into dust as THIS is the real thing!" Well, hardly, it's a good album of violently fuzzed basic hard psych garage rock, but certainly not heavy metal. Not that this is of much interest to many of you prog heads I suppose, but it goes towards describing his personal biases.

Another problem is that his discographies are often inaccurate regarding dates of release, and are also often incomplete. His descriptions of many artists leave a lot to be desired. For some he goes into a lot of detail, for others he has barely a single sentence, most others somewhere in between. Despite the problems I've learnt to read between the lines and still be able to use it as some kind of guide to my purchasing/searching efforts.

Another problem is that the index to this book is arranged alphabetically within each country, which is how the book is ;aid out anyway, making it of little practical use - that is, you have to know what country the band you're looking up is from, or else you need to look through the whole index. At the end he has a brief listing of stuff from Turkey and Israel, but tells the reader nothing about them, making this also fairly useless.

There are other Borderline books that are of some interest, mostly (I think) by Vernon Joyson.

'Fuzz, Acid & Flowers' is mainly an encyclopedia of US psych up to 1975, but there's also lots of beat, garage and pop stuff of much lesser interest, as well as some early progressive rock. Unfortunately the author doesn't seem to get into the progressive stuff as much, and sometimes describes things as progressive when I can't really see how they are at all. The entries on the progressive bands usually go into very little detail, so it may be of use only as a pointer [it seems to me that most US progressive rock of the 70's is very obscure so I've taken any help I could find to figure out what's out there].

'Tapestry of Delights' covers UK stuff up to the same time, but you'll find reasonably-sized entries for lots of progressive bands in here, as well as the psych etc. [well, for me often the best stuff is psychedelic and progressive!]

'Dreams, Fantasies & Nightmares' covers the same sort of stuff from Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and Central & South America. There's lots of gaps in this one, especially for Australia, New Zealand and Latin America, and the more progressive stuff usually doesn't get much attention [though it's in there]. The Australian section had lots of mistakes, for which I forwarded corrections on to the author years ago [I am an Australian btw], but they were never added despite the fact that the Borderline web site says they welcome comments, corrections and additions.

Most of these Borderline books have pretty crappy album cover art reproduction, whether it be black & white or full colour. 'Dreams..' is perhaps the worst done in this regard. Also they share a tendency to not describe the music very much, but rather to go to lengths talking about historic details and single/album releases. Despite these they've been useful to me to some degree, as a springboard to go searching for better information.

The Borderline Books web site has been off-line for a while, though I think they'll be back on-line soon, and in the mean time cached versions of the on-line books can be found on the net. That's one good thing about these books - being put more or less in their entirety on-line as well as being for sale as actual books, because due to the quality considerations mentioned, 'Scented Gardens of the Mind' is the only one I've felt it worthwhile to actually buy [that one isn't on-line].

I would like to buy a comprehensive book on Prog Rock. A definitive book on the subject would be nice, but I suppose that is asking too much. Can anyone recommend something new? Looking at Amazon there seem to be lots of possibilities, but are they worth the money and do they offer anything that the Web doesn't? These are a few titles listed on Amazon. Some have been covered already in this thread. Any more views?

The Progressive Rock Files, Jerry Lucky

20th Century Rock & Roll: Progressive Rock, Jerry Lucky

Rocking the Classics: English Progressive Rock & the Counterculture, Edward Macan

Scented Gardens of the Mind: A Comprehensive Guide to the Golden Era of Progressive Rock 1968 - 1980, Dag Erik Asbjornsen

Listening to the Future: The Time of Progressive Rock 1968 - 1978, Bill Martin

Lovers, Buggers & Thieves: Garage Rock, Monster Rock, Psychedelic Rock, Progressive Rock, Johnny Strike

The Music's All That Matters: A History of Progressive Music, Paul Stump

A Progressive Rock Portfolio, Ken McAleer (out of print)

Uncle Joe's Record Guide: Progressive Rock (out 30 May 2005)

The Billboard Guide to Progressive Music, Bradley Smith

Any others you'd recommend?