The first article is ok, funny ... but it says nothing! I will listen to the lecture when I get home.

 

My perspective is California ... not the music they mention, btw! Which I tend to think is a problem for the real definition and dedication to a lot of this music.

 

Interesting to see some things mentioned in the synapsis that I have also said. I have not used Dave Brubeck, and most of my comments were steered towards the DVD about Tom Dowd ... and Dean, you have GOT to see that ... as it has a fabulous history of music in America from an engineer's perspective ... not a fan, or musician! His examples and work suggested that a lot more of this music developed from the free form black music ... which went on to come up with things like Miles Davis in its somewhat more extreme form ... however ... we tend to look at that as highly individual/personal work, and sometimes it has a tendency to not be thought of as important ... but I believe it was a logical extension of that period ... though I believe that Tom wanted to suggest that there was much more in there than we ever heard!

 

Dave Brubeck, for my tastes, was the blend that was jazz'ier in music style that was closer to the ear, when compared to film music and classical music. It was much easier to pick up and also had some beat and cute hooks for you to get attached to, which was very much within the frame of "popular" and "film" music of the day! I think that some of it even fits the "Easy Listening" label like Glen Miller and such!

 

As to worthwhile? ... we had these things in Santa Barbara, we were playing it at home, my roomie was running rampant with these things on the radio (Blobfish, btw!), and it was not a "big deal" per se ... but it was not the "top ten" and it was NOT what most of the girls called the station for when they wanted to get laid or picked up (so to speak!), and/or get freebies from the station! In the first of our apartments together, I had Thick as a Brick, Yes Album, Close to the Edge, Led Z 2 and 3, Pink Floyd ATM and Ummaguma. And it was a bit later, by accident, that we found Edgar Broughton Band, Kevin Ayers, Roy Harper and the like which led us to follow the Harvest label in its entirety for years to come.

 

That's not to say, that Guy was not already aware of some of these things. I believe he was -- as he was from LA and probably had heard some of these things before in these stations! -- or he would not have taken to them so easily ... and above all ... have an inate understanding for the music, which the majority of radio disk jockeys and personalities, rarely have, as they are simply playing "the dots" , or the what the Billboard (or Top of the Pops) wants "you to hear" ...  which to me, helps clarify and makes you realize what an important "fight" we all had to get this music appreciated!

 

But it was selling! Probably not as much as Earth Wind and Fire, or Michael Jackson, or Led Zeppelin, or The Who, or Rolling Stones that dominated the airwaves at KTYD and LA.

 

The hard part for KTYD, being 90 minutes from downtown LA (then ... more like a 3 hour fall asleep and get tired drive now!), meant that we picked up KLOS and KMET and KPFK ... and these stations had a massive reach -- almost half of California, and their pull and strength of what sold was usually major ... but you knew that there were people at KMET and KLOS that wanted to play different things, and they were not happy that they were not allowed to play enough of it ... Jim Ladd has that story ... which is also told in Radio Kaos very clearly and down to the last details of bs and corruption and everything else you can think of. You can almost guess who wanted to play King Crimson, and probably couldn't because they were not blue dots or bullpucky dots! KPFK had other "connections" and one of them was The Firesign Theater, for example, which was also very "progressive comedy" compared to the stand up and basic stuff out there. But it was not as "intelectual" as PC and DM could be, for example. So, "progressive" was in the air, but not discussed as such.

 

At KTYD, Guy took that step, and played a lot of things ... the combination of which, by comparison to 99/100 of the "progressive outlets" today, sorry ... those 99 are not about the music! And they are not "progressive" ... which Guy WAS.

 

It's a fascinating history ... and it's too bad that Blobfish can only glog and gluk and not grok his experience, because he probably could say a lot more about all this stuff ... but his sainthood in the Saint Guido's Cathedral ceilings and sisterns ... that's another story and tickle!

In santa Barbara, Rush and Jethro Tull were being played ... but Guy had been playing Gentle Giant for several years before others played it ... it probably was not until "Freehand" came out that other folks in the station played something, which was more "radio friendly" ... than the earlier GG.

 

That ought to give you an idea ... and of course ... right after ... here's the new Elton John song ... so it tells you that most of those folks couln't handle the music and really didn't care!

Finn ... did you happen to record that by chance?

 

But Show Business is a fake world built around mythology, selective memories and prejudiced myopia, and (whether we like it or not) serious Rock music is as much a part of Show Business Tinsel Town Tinpan Alley razzmatazz as any (supposedly) manufactured Pop or teenie-bopper iconology, idolatry and hero-ology. Even in the realm of serious Progressive Rock, the Biz prevailed and the machine rumbled on creating mythologies populated by rock gods and guitar demons and keyboard wizards to cloud and forge the memories and perceptions they wanted to create. So those individual perceptions and memories are biased and tunnel-visioned to produce the answers they want you to find (and those you wish to find), rather than uncover any truth or validity in an account or "history". Everything in popular music is transitory, nothing was meant to last forever so nothing was retained "in perpetuity" - the history was lost before it was fully documented and recorded. And nothing has changed - no one is writing the history of contemporary music as it is happening - in forty years time people will be arguing the story of today's rock and pop bands through the same rose-tinted spectacles that we currently use to argue the Prog of yesteryear.

 

So how do we obtain "perspective" from all these disparate commentaries? Well, it's not by discarding those that disagree with our own perceptions that's for sure, nor is it by extrapolating those ideas that support our ideas either, because all that does is mold all the information to fit our own preconceptions, which adds nothing new to the pot.

 

By overlapping and overlaying in a huge abstract Venn-diagram of consensus we can arrive at a version of events that a majority will agree upon, but is that still a biased account built upon inaccurate preconceptions? Because no matter how often, or how many, conclusively demonstrate that the maxim "Punk killed Prog" is a fallacy, the myth continues. And so it is with so many personally held beliefs: that Prog is Euro-centric; that Prog is this that or the other; that one person knows the true answer; that one version of events is more "real" than all others; that the views of one person from within the system describes the homogeneous view as seen from space. These are all pieces in the puzzle but none of them describe the whole picture. Some are more valid than others but that does not make them more important, more truthful or a more accurate reflection of reality. If a respected band member or pillar of rock society has said something profound and interesting it does not mean it is a universal truth that can be liberally and indiscriminately applied, it may be an anecdote that accurately described a particular philosophy or moment in time and space, but that's all it is and it is only applicable to that person in that moment, even if it appears to fit a different person in a different moment. Yet it remains a valid observation worthy of recording and documenting and perhaps even commenting upon, but we need to balance that in light of all other anecdotal observations. In one BBC documentary Ralf Hütter described Kraftwerk band members as "Music Workers" much to the annoyance of Wolfgang Flür, who insisted he was not a music worker [but a musician], so even within one band one man's anecdote is not universally accepted by all members of the band so cannot be a general philosophy. And so it is within a genre and therefore within music in general.

 

We need to sperate the real cold and hard facts from the half-remembered, rose-tinted, idealised and romanticised facts; the truth from what we would like to be true; and the bands that are Progressive Rock from those we would like to be Progressive Rock. But perhaps that is too progressive an idea for some to accept, the notion that if what one person holds to be Progressive Rock is not shared by everyone else doesn't automatically make everyone else wrong.

 

In his lecture Professor Birzer pointed the documented origins of "progressive rock" as a descriptive term as far back as 1968 - and in a way he is right, but oh so very wrong - in that 1968 article, (and other's like it in the music press from that time), they were not referring to a genre of music, but a conceptual notion of what serious rock music was about - that all rock music was progressing from one era to another, whether that was Iron Butterfly or The Beatles or Cream or Grateful Dead or Pete Brown or John Mayal or The Move or Pink Floyd or The Nice or Renaissance or King Crimson. They were using the word as a descriptive adjective, not a naming noun. The adoption of the word for naming a genre of music came later, and some would argue after much of the music itself stopped being "progressive" as a descriptive adjective, (and I'm talking about 1970-71 here, not 1978-79 or any other later, or earlier, date). He continued to use "progressive" in its descriptive form to describe music that is not "progressive" in its noun form - The Cure's Disintegration (featured in the album cover montage) is not Prog Rock (n.) ... it is post-Punk and very "progressive" (adj.) and art with a capital "A" (but not Art Rock or Art Music, or just Art for Art sake, but music as an artistic endeavour) just as the Edgar Broughton Band was "progressive" music in its descriptive adjective form, but never entered the named genre of Prog Rock - it was an interesting and valued branch of psychedelic rock that diverged from the course that Prog would take, music that progressed out of the Rhythm and Blues Beat music of the early 60s and Psychedelic pop of the Summer of Love. Yet they are both very valid examples when discussing Progressive Rock as long as their use is qualified and not used to shoe-horn one person's favourite into everyone's idea of what Prog is - if you want to show how Progressive Rock influenced and was influenced or to illustrate parallel or tangential developments then that's valid  - not all the progressively minded musicians of the 60s and 70s produced Prog Rock or influenced its development and not all of the progressively minded musicians of the 80s and 90s produced Prog Rock or were influenced by it.

 

There will always be free-thinkers in the world of music - those that push the boundaries and stretch perceptions - and as broadminded free-thinking listeners they fall within our field of hearing, it is our remit (as those that shun the Billboard Top-40) to recognise and acknowledge their achievement, to wave the flag and carry the banner, and moreover, find the appropriate pigeon hole to file them away in to ensure the next generation of free-thinking musicians, composers, performers and listeners know where the edge of the envelope is so they can push it further or into another direction as yet unchartered. We can be very broadminded and accept all those into the cannon of Progressive Rock, but then it would not be Progressive Rock and we would need a new Name for this all-encompassing genre of serious and erudite boundary-pushing experimental rock music ... Pantheon Rock perhaps.

 

In many ways, what we are considering "progressive" do not usually list a lot of American things at the start, and based on plain history -- encyclopaedic style -- you're right ... it's almost impossible to consider the American version of things "progressive" ... but in reverse, I'm starting to think that the advent of FM radio, was also the one thing that helped validate the London scene with massive sales to help take all of this further. None of the bands, other than ELP's Lucky Man had a hit in the waves ... which begs the question ... how could these things sell? ... in places like America ... and the FM radio thing really helped it come alive.

 

AM radio in 68/69, had the small version of Light My Fire, Foxy Lady (because in Madison that was a lot better than talk about drugs) and All Along the Watchtower, Piece of My Heart, Me and Bobby McGee for example ... but then you got to the new FM station at the University of Wisconsin (first radio station in America, btw) and you heard ... The End, Ball and Chain, Axis Bold as Love ... and all of a sudden, you went out and got the album because ... that's pretty damn good ... and it helps speak for what you believe.

 

In Santa Barbara, being a rich spot, that didn't like derelicts (hahahaha!), so the town would appear richer than it really is (the federales later ruined it!), it was very hip, to know more "artists" than just popular musicians. And the tastes were ecletic and sometimes strange. But the two main FM stations, one was owned by the local newspaper, Santa Barbara News Press and it only played takes of top ten FM from Variety! and the other was KTYD, that was free form up until it was sold in '76 or something like it, to Texaco ... at which point, it reamined still the strong station that it was, but all of a sudden the hassles were not as much fun to hear or put up with as far as my roomate is concerned, not to mention the Mexican wages and benefits and insults! ... but the music? Kept on coming!

 

So, you can see how some of this music that we like is so important -- at least how I describe it ... but you are no stranger to it! 

 

How the freedom of speech and scowling attack from Edgar Broughton Band is not a fluke, and how the words in KC's album are not flukes, and how Greg Lake's wording in ELP, is not a fluke ... it is, mostly a serious comment and understanding of things, and I believe that it spoke just as well for us in California, as it did for us in Madison, as it did for you in London, and that the IRA thing which was just as scary and an issue as the VietNam War protests were at Hyde Park that some of these bands played in  ... so, just like the snapshot in the very first part of the Krautrock special, with All Along the Watchtower, the unrest was global ... and a lot of music came out of that unrest. As you stated, not all of it was "progressive", and I agree ... and perhaps that is the part that we probably could clean up some more ... not to make sure that the divisions are stronger, but to ensure that the musical period is better remembered.

 

But,  as you can tell, it is not that there was no "prog" in the 80's or 90's ... in general one could say that the socio-political upheaval was not as important or strong world wide ... in order to help ceate something that is as valuable as the time and place we were a part of.