UK vs. USA

 nice!

I have to agree with you. Also there are great bands in both countries but I think that most of the best prog bands (Camel,Genesis,KC,Mike Oldfield,VDGG,Yes, Pink Floyd, Jethro Tull, Renaissance) were from UK. 

moshkito wrote:   Which came first? The Chicken or the egg?

I've already answered this one - the egg - eggs appeared in the evolutionary tree long before chickens: fish lay eggs, reptiles lay eggs, dinosaurs lay eggs - birds didn't evolve until the Jurassic period, chickens much later than that.

Nathaniel607 wrote: I haven't read all of this, but can I just say that I think it's a stupid question/argument. Musicians don't make music according to where they come from. Just because people are from the same country doesn't mean they are somehow "Mind Linked" and will create similar music, or music of similar quality. Sure, sometimes the traditions and situations of where they live will effect their composition or playing, but I don't believe it's really noticeable when looking at all artists from that country.

This is only partially correct - music evolves in a "scene" and that scene is limited by geography, bands that tour together and see each other perform live on a regular basis will cross-fertilise ideas and create a new "style" of music between them - this is why Grunge began in Seattle, Math Rock in the Mid West and Thrash Metal in the Bay Area even though there are Grunge, Math Rock and Thrash bands from other regions - it has to start somewhere.

 

The San Fransisco Psyche scene was separated and isolated from the London Psyche scene by geography - any cross pollination was by select (ie popular) studio recordings, not by continuous touring. This is highlighted in Nick Mason's Inside Out: A Personal History of Pink Floyd where he comments on their puzzlement at being put on the same bill as USA Psyche bands when they first toured USA that to them sounded more like country-rock. And that was after they had toured the UK with Hendrix (who adapted his take on US psyche to an English accent through Soft Machine, Clapton and The Beatles). That's not to say there weren't British bands with a decidedly American flavour to their Psychedelic Rock - The Animals are a prime example of this - a heavily Blues and R&B influenced band whose forays into Psyche resulting in something that sounded "American" when compared to similar excursions of The Stones, The Who or The Beatles. Another major difference between USA psyche and UK psyche was improvisation vs. jamming - were the structured improvisations of Soft Machine and Floyd are of a different approach to song development/evolution to the looser jams of Iron Butterfly and The Greatful Dead. The former results in tracks that while being "free-form" maintain a structure of beginning, middle and end that can be seen as the forerunner of the side-long epics of progressive rock, whereas the latter has no room to evolve and develop into anything so formal and replicatable so the jambands of today sound much like the jambands of yesteryear.

 

I don't know - he did mention US Prog Metal, which is a much later event, and others have cited other subgenres which again, are later creations, or at least subgenres that were later brought into the Prog fold that weren't part of the 70s scene at the time. It does appear as he was being unspecific and more generalised. If we take that 70s peak (69-75) out of the equation then it looks a lot more balanced, not only USA vs UK, but America vs. Europe, Latin-America vs Anglo-America, Scandinavia vs USA, Germany vs Italy and all combinations thereof.

 

Even Neo Prog, which appears to be dominated by UK & USA bands, wasn't a UK event as such - I'm not fully convinced it was a single event at all - If memory serves me, Marillion, IQ and Pendragon didn't consider themselves part of any Neo Progressive movement in the 80s, but simply a continuation of the (by then) ailing prog scene; the name came much later as an after the event categorisation, along with the bulk of the (now) Neo Prog bands.