Losing interest in prog

Pet 'n' house  Freudian slip, internet style?

 

It's a Sugden PDT-4 Masterclass, recently rated one of the three best CD players irrespective of price.

 

There IS nothing much better, but it's up against possibly the most realistic vinyl player ever made. It's so good, I need a better listening room.

 

Sometimes I think the process of this musician who can't bare to NOT play like Tony Banks is pathetic. All musicians need to do is experiment more. If you want to invent a more interesting innovative prog style of composition you have to play Classical music and Jazz daily as a practice and then you might come up with an idea which differs from the typical prog music formulas which are constantly used. Gentle Giant based on counterpoint, Yes, Genesis, and ELP based around Classical music and so musicians tend to keep their spirit alive by concentrating more on what these bands created from Classical and not what they..themselves could create from the style. Prog needs Jazz and Classical on the menu so you should create the music yourself by investigating those styles first and listening to your innovators second.

How do you think Fripp or Banks came up with these unique ideas? It's a stupied concept because musicians today emulate the sound of these characters instead of locating the original influence which was period music or Avant Jazz. This is what has killed prog for me. You can even cop a line from Penderecki's sacred choral works, reverse it, change it's structure around and it becomes a beautiful complex signature line for a prog piece...but no, musicians would rather run to the recordings of Fripp and steal his ideas...and trying different reverse procedures of those ideas ...which it all starts to sound the same.  To be influenced by a Classical composer does not mean that your end result will sound like "A Passion Play" or "Selling England By the Pound". Or to say that the essence of the Classical music combined with a prog rock mentality will always sound like the music of the prog innovators is incorrect depending on how creative you are. A structure of notes written by yourself can differ from what people in the past have written. Some ideas for prog songs are un-explainable... however when musicians write the idea they also must come up with a structure of their own for the piece to sound original. If they can't create that on their own..it's because they need to go back and study more and stop the nonsense of playing along with "Fracture" 3 times a day. That will destroy your creative mind and you will find yourself writing things that sound like Fracture most of the time. Do you see how ridiculous this is?

 

That is why I archive all my albums from my Pink Triangle Anniversary/SME V/Lyra turntable onto a very high quality Pioneer cassette system (not the high noise, no treble cheapo version, but a £1000 superdeck which is almost indistinguishable from the original) and I use cassettes for normal listening to preserve my vinyl.

 

It still outperforms my CD player with ease.

Many of those reviewers in the 70's had their favorite pets and so I for one cannot agree with any of them. In the 70's I could hardly take the YES fans. Long-haired drug induced ....eyes rolling in their head....cosmic riff-raff, soft spoken or jabberbox spiritual put ons. They were in the HIGH NUMBERS and they mostly developed a hate for King Crimson and ELP. Especially on the east coast and headquarters was Philadelphia where YES were promoted weekly and along with special presentations of the band through radio shows...influenced a lot of people in my age group. They had attitudes about a style of music that was structured in the opposite direction from Yes such as King Crimson. I mean.....when you meet a person over a beer and the 2 of you discuss prog ...it should be about individualism, respect for each other, and teaching each other about music out of a personal interest and not about climbing on board to a Yes ship that sends King Crimson fans adrift.

The Jon Anderson image had become a mixture of drugs and spiritual vibe to bring a person to a level when seeing Yes live. I lost interest in the God Jon Anderson around the time of Relayer although I continued to collect every Yes album. In High School almost every teenage pancake make-up faced girl loved Robert Plant. It was a fact. He was like a long-haired sex symbol of the 70's for teenage girls. It has a lot to do with why they sold more than Deep Purple during Purple's outstanding 3 year profit run with Warner Brothers. By the time Jon Anderson came to visit they were acting out a more extreme cosmic personality at concerts. The whole thing was a turn off for me .....man    I loved C.T.T.E. and the Yes Album but growing up with this was a phony situation. The only reason why these critics where raving over Yes and using the chopping block for ELP had to do with not making waves in the 70's when Yes had this hippie wanna-be following. If you are a journalist and you desire to go against the grain...you must be willing to suffer the wrath of Yes fans. All these surroundings developed my hate for prog.

I'm having much more fun exploring Jazz, alt rock and avant scenes now. No more endless marathons of 70's albums. I'm listening to modern stuff, new stuff and plenty of stuff i'd always avoided. I don't regret getting into prog or my endless Genesis marathons, but i'm glad that I won't be doing that for a long time.