Nicely Done

Not even close. They did fine at rocking the classics but they followed both The Moody Blues and Hansson & Karlsson as far as symphonic prog is concerned and there's nothing space rock about them. There were dozens of psych space rock bands before them.

Heavy metal? Seriously? LOL

I made an Ultiamte Timeline of Metal Music beginning with proto-forms from the 50s and The Nice isn't on it.

I can't say i get that excited about The Nice. They were definitely instrumental in adding the classical keyboard parts to the prog world but other than a proto-prog standing i can't say they were nearly as innovative as you seem to believe.

Nogbad_The_Bad wrote: The Nice were a great band but you overrate their influence.

That was kinda the point, get a few raised eyebrows.

Thoughts of ED  is great proto-prog album and one of the very first one too.

But TBH, it's the only album of theirs that I kept for any length of time in my shelves and I still own it - thpough I made sure the bonus tracks on the CD were including the America recorded with O'List). However, I got rid of Ars Longa (my entry moint) and the other three during the later 80's before crossing the pond (they were all first pressings, too) and never got them back.

As for their "symph" roots (they were really more psych with their first two), FBS and ALVB are both "very symphy", and not some "rocking the classics"' like all those Dutch bands or Sky would do later on. Elegy and their s/t are more of a mixed bag of live and bottom of drawer stuff, though.

Nogbad_The_Bad wrote: The Nice were a great band but you overrate their influence.

Well, certainly not in the range of their contemporaraneous Velvet Underground for sure, but Nice were influential enough (if only to ELP and all of their clones), if only because of their place in the Prog timeline. But it's obvious this never translated into mega sales (ELP-scale).

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Hi,

The sad thing, is folks looking at this music, and specially the time and place, with today's eyes and ears ... in which case a lot of it seems poor and not very good, but we forget that at the time it was all that there was about it. No one, really was playing the keyboards full throttle, and the Moddy Blues you could say only used one instrument for keyboards, which was not in tune many times, btw, depending on where they were playing. In LA at the old Sports Arena, it was not bad, but poor!

I think of Nice/ELP as more of a classical attempt at doing things, but the real issue is/was ... how can we get the fans into the stand when you don't do fun stuff? And this ended up being a lo of the material that a lot of fans wanted to hear from ELP, namely the hits and the fun song about the sheriff! Always a crowd pleaser! The rock audience will never be the quiet bunch that never does or says anything until the end of the concert when they walk out whispering, lest someone takes offense to the comments! That's exactly what you see in the colleges and universities these days with over rated classical musicians that aren't half as good as many of the rock folks out there!

Serious music began taking a serious hit in the late 60's, as soon as the "rock media" took hold, probably starting with Melody Maker and the other one, though in America, the only thing we got was the bunch of fanzines, and not many of them wanted to show faces of people that did not look good, or did not have some make up! All of it, added to the "fan-driven" market as the record companies insisted and tried hard and harder to get even more folks into the concert.

Sadly, you can see in the REFUGEE album some of the "classical" motifs that the other two members of the NICE likely wanted to do, and both of them, as much as the whole album were excellent, even with Patrick Moraz kinda adding something different from Keith Emerson, though I am not sure that PM was as highly educated in an academic musical sense, compared to Keith Emerson. Thus the more "classical" pieces would be better represented on ELP, than the NICE, although at the time, there was a major need for these to sound as close to the pop/rock idioms of the sales, in order to get something from it. 

We can say that THE NICE did really well, and it is still doing well these days, courtesy of the Internet and a thread like this. The only sad thing is the understanding of where/now the music integrates to THEN in its time and place, as opposed to hearing it out of context completely in most of today's listeners.

It's the part that will make or break "progressive" music, though many don't want to bother and think that having "numbers" show more than any intelligent definition and appreciation of the music itself ... and this is the part that we're missing ... I call it "the soul of the music"! (Since it likely would not have happened as it did otherwise.)

I recall both Genesis and Yes name checked them heavily early in their career.. I think its not so much that their style of music itself influenced, i think it was more because they (amongst a few notable others such as Family and The Pentangle) showed the next tier of bands coming on the scene what COULD be done, what could be achieved particularly Live.

^ Which was my point.   It's the musicians that witnessed what the Nice were doing regardless of whether that player went on to do "Prog" or "Heavy" or whatever.

One aspect almost completely forgotten (but that I like to occasionally annoy everyone about) is that heavy metal was considered a part of the progressive rock movement, or at least was welcomed as an iteration of the new spectrum of Rock, being born of the psych and prog of the time. Hard to believe, I know, but if you look at the British music scenes, or if you were to ask Ozzy if Sabbath was creatively influenced by a band like The Nice, I'd bet good money he'd say "Definitely".   It wasn't just the Beatles and Hendrix and Floyd and Zappa that were moving rock music forward, it was a kaleidoscope of guitar and organ-based music.

^ Mahavishnu, huh.  Interesting.   I certainly would say they were on the same influential level as the Nice, maybe even larger in the grand scheme of Rock as Art.