When were you infected by Prog?

Sounds like you're exactly the same age as me, but fortunate enough to get a 5-6 year jump on the Prog ladder!

A1971 or thereabouts, our ailing English teacher (Mr Chalk would you believe!) tired of trying to drum literature into us invited us to bring in records instead. My next-desk neighnour brought in Stackridge's eponymous first LP. Not exactly classic prog-fodder I know but he played the 12 minute Slark which is defiitely prog - swords and sorcery lyrics, flutes, violins - the lot!

hi . new to the forum, thought i would start here .. my folks are heavy prog fans, to this day my mom and dad wax philosophical on all things prog .. so i come by it honestly.  my real first date with prog was when my dad gave me "in the court of the crimson king" and "godbluff" for my 5th birthday in '76 .. two of his favorites at the time ...

additionally, my mom bought me a bass the next year because i would mimic Chris Squire's bass riffs (Close to the Edge, Fragile ... ) because i loved the sound so much.. a few years later i had the opportunity to thank him personally for getting me into playing bass .. it was an epic moment in my life..


Edited by hughmilitee - November 01 2011 at 03:58

My parents only listened to classical music, so they couldn't give me any help in discovering rock music. But when I was around 7-8 my mother bought "1" by The Beatles. We always listened to it when travelling. The next step was Modena City Ramblers (an Italian folk-rock band) "Viva La Vida, Muera la Muerte". This was awesome indeed.

Then, when my sister was 13, she had a punk classmate. He introduced her to punk and hard rock music, so I got a chance to get into AC/DC and Guns N' Roses.
With the help of the Internet, I discovered more and more rock bands. One day I listened to "Another Brick in the Wall Pt. II" by Pink Floyd and I thought "Hey this is quite good". Another day I decided to listen something else by Pink Floyd; i knew that they did some very long songs, but this really didn't scare me. So I put on my iPod what seemed to be the best: "Shine on you crazy diamond" (the Echoes version, that is only parts I-VII).
That night i decided I could just spend a bit less time reading and giving an half-hour to that song. It completely striked me. I listened it many and many times in the following days and I understood what they mean by "get into something". The song slowly grew over me. When I thought I knew it well enough, I started listening to a lot of Floyd. I got into 6-7 albums, and I discovered that stuff like "The Wall" (that was my favourite album at that time) was not Psychedelic; it was a different genre called prog rock. So I listened to some classics: "In the Court of the Crimson King", "Fragile", "Selling England By the Pound"... after knowing Floyd, Yes, Genesis, Crimson, Banco del Mutuo Soccorso and Area quite well, i discovered this website. It changed my life.

I can't remember when the zombie bit me.

It seems to me that I have always had an affinity for music; I recall being three years old, and there were all these days when I would march around the room and pretend to be a trumpet player while listening to Herb Alpert. (The irony is that the first instrument I took up was trumpet)...

But, I think that the Prog  "infection" began for me in 1969 with a little known song called "In the Court of the Crimson King", by this obscure and forgotten band called (oddly enough) King Crimson. 

It appears to me that the "disease" remained dormant until 1972 when a song called "Roundabout" happened, and then the floodgates just entirely burst forth...
After that; I was ENTHRALLED by just about anything Prog.

And so it remains to this day...

I love so very many forms of music, but I have almost always considered myself first and foremost a "Progressive" Guitarist". (This was before we had umtpy-nine g'jillion sub-genres).
And while I find myself listening to so many forms of music, Prog remains my favorite.

Dumb story, but it's true!

I initially got seriously into music around the age of 12 listening to Mott the Hoople, but the first real shock came with hearing Street Life by Roxy Music with all the weird noises and discordancy, after which I was more interested in finding something out of the ordinary than being tied into any particular genre. Punk and New Wave at the end of the 70s gave me plenty of new and experimental music to explore, but I never saw any reason to reject the older stuff and some of the prog rock has stayed with me since then, such as Curved Air, Van der Graaf Generator, King Crimson, Amon Duul 2, Can and Tangerine Dream. Having been through Heavy Metal, Goth, Psychedelic, Thrash / Death Metal and Industrial, I stumbled across an article on Krautrock in Record Collector magazine in the early 2000s, followed by the Krautrocksampler book and found this type of music most to my taste. In the last year I have been listening to the Krautrock - music for your brain box sets - all 24 CDs of them - and buying more of the early 70s German rock music featured. This has been a wonderful experience - hearing all this 70s music, but for the first time, like being transported back through a time warp. Having discovered this site, I am also looking forward to checking out some of the other material that has evaded my attention for the last 30 or 40 years, and having another listen to music I didn't particularly enjoy back then, but may now be in a better position to appreciate.

My dad had a somewhat similar introdution. His older brother had been a fan of Rush for a few years but he was too young to really like it. But in 1980 he braught home Premanent Waves and he showed it to my dad who instantly fell in love with it became a HUGE Rush fan and then got into more bands like Yes and (Phil-era) Genesis. Then, as I got older I got into that stuff and now i'm a bigger prog fan than he is.

looking through my father's LPs I recognised "Tubular Bells" as something special from its cover, and listened to it three or four times in a day, diligently turning the disc over every time it finished until I was asleep.

Now i like spikier, more vicious music, but Tubular Bells always stays with me, stays important.

I think the first time I really was left shell-shocked, amazed, speechless, well, whatever you call it, by prog music, it might have been in July 1975 in Kaustinen, Finland. The concert wasn't a part of the famous folk music festival, but was arranged while it went on, in the Kalliopaviljonki Hall in Kaustinen.