Punk: A Logical Extension of Prog?

Dean wrote: ExittheLemming wrote: I'm still unsure what deserting Prog fans started to listen to instead between then and the end of the decade? Bob Marley, AC/DC, Thin Lizzy and Aerosmith probably. Exodus was as ubiquitous as Dark Side Of The Moon in student digs during the later quarter of the 1970s I would gauge what was popular among that particular demographic by the various festival line-ups as that tends to be a pretty accurate barometer. Before The Reading Festival became a corporate shindig, it was a fairly good grass-rooted affair initially set up by the people who ran the Marquee and later The Mean Fiddler 1976: Gong, Rory Gallagher, Osibisa ... Pub-rock arrives in the lone form of Eddie & the Hot Rods, Friday night is roots dub reggae night. 1977: Golden Earring, Thin Lizzy, Alex Harvey ... Punk represented solely Gloria Mundi and art-punk by Ultravox!, the rest of the line up is Prog and Southern Rawk, Reggae is conspicuous by its absence. 1978: The Jam, Status Quo, Patti Smith ... Friday night is mainstream punky Power Pop night. 1979: The Police, The Scorpions, Peter Gabriel ... All hail the New Wave.

Probably right on the money. Festivals, despite being lazily associated with Prog hippy baggage, were probably an astute guide given the eclecticism on offer, the audience were in the main yer discerning rock fan circa '75 to '80

The UK festival most associated with "hippies" would probably be Glastonbury (after the Stonehenge Free Festivals of '74 to '84 of course) yet there were no Glastonbury Festivals from 1972 to 1978 (an unplanned event occurred on Worthy Farm in 1978 which was essentially a relocation of that year's Stonehenge festival). The "hippies" of the 70s were just long-haired youths in denim and a far cry from the hippy movement of the 60s, few (if any) of those became the New Age Travellers and Crusties of the 80s and 90s, some of them became stock brokers and real estate agents, the rest got proper jobs and mortgages.

SteveG wrote: ExittheLemming wrote: SteveG wrote: ExittheLemming wrote: Tom Verlaine felt Television were not part of any so-called punk movement. "We felt outside of that," he says. "I don't think any of those bands (Patti Smith, Blondie, Talking Heads, Voidoids) were punk and everybody knows they're not punk so it's kind of a dead issue. Nobody calls those bands punk, outside of maybe the Ramones." I'm aware of the distinctions between the spirit of the law and the letter of the law, Ian. Simply put, Television has to be categorized. So what category would you place them in? I wasn't being pedantic.  If they have to be categorized, Television are a rock band who stripped away a lot of the habitual blues vocabulary from their music which gave it a somewhat unique sound for the time.  No more, no less. Unfortunately Ian, all music has to be categorized. I'm not being condescending, it's the curse that we live with. I'll use the numerous subgenres in PA as an example.   Television has to be categorized for practical reasons under a defined genre. How you or I care to describe the group's music or sound is beside the point.   The aim of my question to you was to emphasize that categorizations are just too limiting for something as diverse and broad in application and scope as music. Any music. Any genre.

Again, many words by yours truly without getting to the point, which is simply that Television fell into the improper Punk classification, IMHO, due to their early seventies formation and late seventies peak.

Edited by SteveG - March 08 2015 at 13:06

Being somewhat removed from the dress-me-up Punk scene (in 1976 I was 19 and tipped the scales at 85Kg  ... too old and too fat to be a Punk), I was only concerned with the music, and yes, I eschewed the flavour-of-the-month bandwagon-jumping trendy faddism of spiked-haired, safety-pinned, gobbing, pogoing prefabricated Punk and all the media hype that surrounded it. I was 19, I grew-up listening to The Beatles, The Move and The Moody Blues; I became a Pink Floyd and Van der Graaf Generator fan when I was 12; while still in high school I found the electronic music of White Noise, Tangerine Dream and T.O.N.T.O to be the most captivating music I'd ever heard; during that time I got into Le Orme and PFM, yet still held dear Glam Rock albums by T Rex and The Sweet, I knew my own mind and knew what I liked. In 1976 I discovered 'In The Region Of The Summer Stars' and instantly fell in love with the unfashionable musicianship of The Enid. The following year I saw Gloria Mundi and Ultravox! hit the stage at Reading with so much intensity and passion that The Sex Pistols and The Ramones seemed pedestrian and stale by comparison, (anyone who thinks that either Gloria Mundi or Ultravox! were just punk bands needs to explain to me how bands that included keyboard, saxophone and violin in their line-ups are Punk). Simply put: if the music was interesting I listened to it regardless of what tag it carried or which pigeon-hole it was neatly slotted into, and following the maxim that 90% of everything is crap (Sturgeon's Law), there were, without question, some nuggets of gold to be found in that emergent scene but not much, more could be discovered in what followed.

Edited by Dean - March 08 2015 at 14:28

SteveG wrote: ^I agree with you except on this one critical point. No Post Punk artist would have been caught dead if they even hinted that their music was Prog or Prog inspired. There seems to be some other factor involved then just avoiding sounding like an old music trend. Being labeled Post Punk, however, was quite alright. Even for the more arty and experimental artists who requested not to be labeled at all, the Post Punk moniker seemed to cause them little discomfort.

^ Indeed the connections are known to a good few minds in this prog circle.

Dean wrote: So for me, punctuated equilibrium (no it wasn't a pun, but now I see it, it is quite amusing) is a more logical explanation: 1976 did not suddenly produce a wealth musicians whose ability, skill-level and technical competency was at the barest minimum required to thrash out 3-chord 12-bar for two-and-a-half minutes while some nasally snot-nosed yob whined on about how tough life was living on the dole. Nor did it suddenly render unemployable and redundant any musician who could actually play their instrument. Sure, there were a few who achieved a little fame and notoriety for being unable to play their instruments, but their moment in the spotlight was short-lived. In the main, Punk was made by musicians who understood music and knew how to play, and those musicians grew up listening to and playing music that was far more complex and involved than Punk Rock. We can only speculate as to what kind of music those musicians would have created had Punk Rock never existed, but it is evident that once the Punk bubble had burst they quickly gravitated to a new level of complexity and musicianship that wasn't present in Punk Rock. That post-punk wave of music may superficially bear little resemblance to the progressive music scene that preceded it, until that is you scratch beneath the surface and start to think about where that music came from, Post-punk is Prog Rock (or some other pre-Punk Rock music) seen through Punk-tinted spectacles if you like.

Very perceptive post certainly, with this bit especially so re the inconspicuous and rarely acknowledged kinship between Prog and Post Punk. (I still don't understand what punctuated equilibrium is though)

Dean wrote: ExittheLemming wrote: I'm still unsure what deserting Prog fans started to listen to instead between then and the end of the decade? Bob Marley, AC/DC, Thin Lizzy and Aerosmith probably. Exodus was as ubiquitous as Dark Side Of The Moon in student digs during the later quarter of the 1970s I would gauge what was popular among that particular demographic by the various festival line-ups as that tends to be a pretty accurate barometer. Before The Reading Festival became a corporate shindig, it was a fairly good grass-rooted affair initially set up by the people who ran the Marquee and later The Mean Fiddler 1976: Gong, Rory Gallagher, Osibisa ... Pub-rock arrives in the lone form of Eddie & the Hot Rods, Friday night is roots dub reggae night. 1977: Golden Earring, Thin Lizzy, Alex Harvey ... Punk represented solely Gloria Mundi and art-punk by Ultravox!, the rest of the line up is Prog and Southern Rawk, Reggae is conspicuous by its absence. 1978: The Jam, Status Quo, Patti Smith ... Friday night is mainstream punky Power Pop night. 1979: The Police, The Scorpions, Peter Gabriel ... All hail the New Wave.

Dean wrote: SteveG wrote: ^I agree with you except on this one critical point. No Post Punk artist would have been caught dead if they even hinted that their music was Prog or Prog inspired. There seems to be some other factor involved then just avoiding sounding like an old music trend. Being labeled Post Punk, however, was quite alright. Even for the more arty and experimental artists who requested not to be labeled at all, the Post Punk moniker seemed to cause them little discomfort. Oh - I agree, (John Lydon's later praise of Peter Hammill and VdGG not withstanding), and that fear of "not being caught dead" was wholly attributable to how they would be perceived in the music press rather than any audience counter-reaction to such a claim. Being tagged Prog was (and to some extent still is) an anathema to many and an albatross to be hung around the neck of any musician who dares to mention its name.

I'm not an expert on this area, as I've stated numerous times, but I would like to bring up one of my favorite Post Punk bands, The Stranglers, who were certainly on their own Psych-Post Punk (pop?) train but maintained the Punk ethos of being brawlers, having an adoring fan base that were their shock troops, and the fact that the band even partook of heroin to gain insights into that lifestyle and used those insights to create songs. (Shades of the Velvet Underground?) Was this all done merely for how they appeared in the press? I don't necessary think so. I believe that the Punk ethos and aesthetic was deep seeded in this group, as it was with many others, their actions were not always commercially based.  Of course, some were only in it for the money, as Mr. Zappa once stated.This is why I feel that Punk split the later rock music era (the Beatles split it first in the early sixties) into two distinct sections, before Punk and after (Post) Punk. Seeing this movement as solely media hype, or  as artist's pandering solely to the media, strikes me as being extremely restrictive. I feel that the aversion to the Prog tag By Post Punk artists was, at times, an aversion to one old music genre, among many, that was "defeated" by the "Punk revolution".  Regardless if that "revolution" was real, contrived or both. I feel that, as with most recorded events in history, both is the correct answer.

Edited by SteveG - March 09 2015 at 14:42

Since you are a songwriter who teaches others I would have thought that Sting's 'articulate song about being inarticulate' would have been regarded as serious enough subject matter.