The intergenerational appeal of progressive music

moshkito wrote: This also changes over time. With the advent of FM radio in America, the long cut starte superimposing the Radio AM band and its hit stuff. And with "Woodstock" it helped bring out a generation that was not afraid of the longer cut.  THAT, more than anything else, helped the music get exposed, or it might have been way harder than we think. Byt the mid 70's when the Corporate buyouts started, the first things to go, were the FM stations that had made it big and were eating up the radio profits big time. Ten years later, it was TV's! Musically, I think that a lot of these were much more influenced by the market conditions than they were by the music itself. There were many bands that had hits but did not sell well, just like the reverse ... and the Grateful Dead was a perfect example ... they were not on radio anywhere and they sold more, even in bootlegs which they allowed, than almost 50 or more % of all the bands out there. But as much influence as radio could/would have, or any social definition we can find, that band was not to be a commercial juggernaut like Led Zep, The Who and the Rolling Stones, which most record companies were hoping like crazy to get their hands on ... and tried hard to do so with massive advertising for anything that might at any second pop loose! I think the "musical" this and that detail, is less of a factor, although in America one could say it was more blues and jazz oriented, but then, saying that Soft Machine/Pink floyd/Canterbury was not jazz influenced and "composition" influenced, is nuts and crazy, although they enjoyed their freedoms when they were available.

I've heard the same thing, that the FM radio format contributed quite a bit to popularizing progressive rock because it meant that longer compositions finally got played played on rock radio. The entire business angle is obviously very important here, and the fact that the mainstream record industry was finally willing to give more avantgarde/experimental music a chance was as much of a motivation behind the rise of progressive rock's rise to popularity first time around.

Then there is how the decline can be traced back to the music business losing industry forcing a lot of artists to get more commercial, except the really big names like Pink Floyd and their associates. (maybe PF aren't that good an example, always being more "normal rock music" than the other British groups)  Perhaps also Frank Zappa and company, since he had his own series and network of record labels (Bizarre/Straight/Barking Pumpkin) as well as those circles who had their own independent music infrastructure set up which the Rock In Opposition movement was a very strong example of.

Yes, no and maybe. Like everything else in this world, yesterday's news have a tendency to get lost and not even thought about it, and in some cases, people even go to the extreme of completely destroying the history as a way to make a point about it's very own nature. Music, and specifically the history of all arts, is ... sometimes ... the worst about this. Absolutely the worst. You can go as far back as the first millenium that was almost exclusively destroyed in the Europe by the Church. And now, you are finding that other folks around the world are doing the same thing, be it on the Hymalaias or Africa or somewhere else. History, would have all of these "sub-cultures" and sometimes there are/were many of them, and all of them either aided the confusion, or helped kill it, but we know that up to 1400 or 1500, Europe was systematically cleaned out of its history ... to preserve one religion! One can only hope that the lack of a "written" format, is not the reason why almost all of the arts disappeared and eventually gave rise to one of the biggest animal hunt( hate to say humanhunt - but it is what it was!) in the history of this world, by punishing people that did not fit, or felt and thought differently. Heck, this still happens today, despite the internet trying hard to create a "single" entity all over the world! "Sub-cultures", in many ways, are also the minorities and the ones that are ignored the most. They are also, the first victims of extermination or least amount of attention. TODAY, this is not as easy, because the internet has a way of making big look small and small look big ... but it still will have a hard time getting attention, as is the case here on PA when folks, STILL, only know a top ten concept and society! AND, they base most of their thinking and attention to that concept and society, since it is all they know ... I'm not quite critical of that, except for one detail ... do you really think that "progressive' would have come alive with people thinking like that?  ... the answer is blatant and loud. NO. And sometimes, I think that we're afraid to look and study some of these things ... the "truth" in them is sad ... no secret that the Spaniards raked all of Central America, the Portuguese adn Dutch raked the Brazilians ... and so on ... not to mention what some white settlers did to American Indians ... in all of these examples, their cultures were almost single handedly destroyed and little is left of their world. it was, some can say, in a sort of Jung'ian symbol, a case of the might makes right ... and the rest is gone. Arts are not different.

Yeah. I imagine that when you look at it, most major "subculture" categorizations are really multiple movements and communities generalized together split across many different regional scenes and with their own internal subdivisions. (in the case of progressive rock, as Raff once said does an Art Zoyd fan really belong to the same music fan as a Marillion fan?)

I wager that a good deal of the unification of them under a single banner is as often done by outside journalists and marketing trying to appeal to the demographic, to the point that the creation of a subcultural identity might then be done by outsiders. See this article by Thomas Frank about how much the 1960s counterculture was shaped by marketing to the point it's difficult to say exactly when it was co-opted if that's even a useful way to describe it, then how much of punk's visual aesthetic was put together by Malcolm McLaren if from the jumping point of the early/mid-1970s UK glam rock movement.

Of course, I'm also somewhat tired of the cynical tendency in some quarters to dismiss a specific subculture out of hand because of the inevitable commercialization or the fact that maybe most members don't really follow it on more than a superficial level, because that doesn't still mean that good art can't come out of it or that its self-image (however out of touch with reality) isn't a good ideal to actually live up to in reality. Then again that might be hypocritical of me to write, because I'm in some aspects too jaded myself (or too academically distanced?) to really identify with that kind of idealism as I used to and I kind of wish I could go back to that state. See also this thread I found while lurking on RateYourMusic, where the user HorseMouth points out that the later media canonization of psychedelic music actually meant that a lot of the less mainstream-friendly and more genuinely radical and experimental to this day has been pushed underground out of public consciousness as a result.

I just realized that in the above paragraph, I have just summarized what I get the impression was Frank Zappa's relationship to the 1960s counterculture as documented by his gradually increasing disillusion across the first three Mothers of Invention albums. He still respected some of its proclaimed ideals, but found parts of it dangerously naïve and didn't like how it worked out in practice.

Started way before that. Please go read Robert Wyatt's book. It goes back 10 more years, and they are much more important to the eventual work that was done. Those years "were" the inspiration that helped KC and many others stand out. It DID NOT, start with those albums!

I enjoyed his contributions to Syd Barrett's solo albums, and have been meaning to get into The Soft Machine and Robert Wyatt's oeuvre overall so maybe I'll finally make good on that promise.

For the record, I do kind of wonder how much historical consciousness you need to really understand music this ambitious. My somewhat basic and superficial level of familiarity with classical and jazz, not to mention academic music theory which I know a bit about but only the barest essentials, means that I'm kind of curious how much compositional content in much avantgarde/progressive/technical music goes over the head of me.

Then again, I think that's not accomplished easily because in my experience it takes a handful of years at least to form a working knowledge of a music genre on more than an entry level and where it's coming from historically as well as which sources it developed from again. All that stuff I think is easier said than done.

By comparison, few of the bands I have heard that try to "copy" krautrock, suceed, because they are missing the one little detail that is required to make it work ... and that is ... you go for the sound and the feel, not just the notes ... and this is what separates Ax Gernrich from others in Guru Guru or Amon Duul 2 in the early days, and the "trips" in AshRaTempel and Klaus Schulze ... it was about the moment, not the "music", and we are forgetting that vital detail, even if it does not sound right! Sometimes, the "wrong" part, or thing, becomes the right moment, even if it is not "musical". We, STILL, do not know how to credit and appreciate the amount of work (and rehearsal - if such existed -- which CAN did have!) that it took to achieve what those folks did ... which was "communication" ... instead of just a bunch of SOLO stuff in the jazz style.

Are you referring to something like K-X-P's update of Neu! and Kraftwerk, or what bands like Acid Mothers Temple and Colour Haze do with Ash Ra Tempel and Guru Guru-type space rock? That's the thing with trying to revive a music style that's very distinctly a product of a specific time and place, you'll often end with an end result that's very different for better and for worse...

Then again, I might not have picked the best examples since the bands I listen to the most who are in that vein less seek to revive than "reconstruct" their inspirations for a contemporary audience's sensibility.

Hi,

(read it again ... lots of little things!)

Toaster Mantis wrote: I've heard the same thing, that the FM radio format contributed quite a bit to popularizing progressive rock because it meant that longer compositions finally got played played on rock radio. The entire business angle is obviously very important here, and the fact that the mainstream record industry was finally willing to give more avantgarde/experimental music a chance was as much of a motivation behind the rise of progressive rock's rise to popularity first time around. ...

FM, from my own understanding (Guy Guden might be better about this part), did not "start" out in the Corporate world at all. Like many businesses, it was a new venture that many folks took on. it was later that the Corporate buy out in America pretty much took out the freedoms that many of these stations had, and it made a difference. NOT that any issues and problems with playing hits were not in place, or at least as demanding as a top ten station like the AM station that another friend of mine was on a lot (Tom Payne). He could not even play the things he liked!

Toaster Mantis wrote: ... I just realized that in the above paragraph, I have just summarized what I get the impression was Frank Zappa's relationship to the 1960s counterculture as documented by his gradually increasing disillusion across the first three Mothers of Invention albums. He still respected some of its proclaimed ideals, but found parts of it dangerously naïve and didn't like how it worked out in practice. ...

I'm about to read one bio on Frank ... and might have more on this, although I would think that Guy Guden would be a much better authority on the LA area than I can since he was there during that early time.

I think that the previous "underground" finally "made it", and that was the end of it ... and another "underground" replaced it. Something like it. However, I do believe that the counter-culture thing was more of a satire than a reality, and perhaps we're taking it overly serious. But it's hard to argue with the colorful side of it in print and art, although I have this feeling that Frank was trying to see if he could do the same thing musically as any "picture" with all those weird colors.

Hi,

I'm not sure that you can differentiate the situation in Santa Barbara and the FM stations in the late 60's and early 70's, at least in how I see and know it, from your experience at the BBC, one of the most controlled environments ever, that even Spike Milligan had many issues with that are documented. At least in how it relates to a lot of Southern California, although I might exclude KMET and KLOS in this mold (Roger Waters and Jim Ladd), because they were big, but not representative of what we talk about. They probably WERE the first BIG corporate stations that helped kill the FM stations that helped bring all this to the front!

THERE WAS A FREEDOM, that allowed, as Guy mentioned on another post, likely 90% of all the material we list WAS played, and you could only do that if that freedom was allowed, and it was!

Trust me, when I say, as a listener, that since I left Santa Barbara in 1982, I have NEVER EVER EVER EVER EVER EVER EVER NEVER EVER found anything that came anywhere near what Guy did, which was ... for your thoughts and many of the folks here ... totally insane and outside the realms of possibility since no one here can imagine it.

Please, if you can, and you already commented once something rather impolite about it all, re-check the thread on SPR, that despite a slipup between Paul and I (we went to SBCC at the same time!), what most folks remember and share about the show, is not your conventional radio show, or something like many of the other radio shows that everyone knows, and is used to listening to.

This is not only different, I would love to say that it invented the word "different", and I wish I could share the amount of shows I have (over 400 hours in wonderful quality all of it now on mp3), but I will forever respect one of the best friends (he probably would only call me a portuguese dayglo cook!) I have ever had the chance to meet. The shows will die with me, unless I have written permissions. But our trips down "Ventura Highway" in the sunshine ... to Moby Disk and Tower and Westwood and that magazine stand that I could get Melody Maker ... still ... some of the greatest excitement ever ... and I wish there was a way for you to experience it!

Now to get on "thread" with this ... yes, it could happen today, but I think that we need someone that is not afraid of being pisted on (intentionally mispelled!) by an audience that is somewhat afraid to hear things they do not know, do not understand, and does not always have lyrics to explain it to them in Cliff Notes style!

And now ... time for more music more music more music more music ...