out these claims and to grapple with them. After all, we are interested in progressive rock because it is a thoughtful music.
Alright—I realize that I am asking a great deal of you, dear reader; I hope that you will take this in the same spirit as progressive rock itself, which also asks a great deal (and therefore isn’t something that thoughtless rock music “criticism” has any time for). Just to be clear, I am not arguing that there is any single progressive rock “ideology” or political “agenda,” or something on that order, but rather that there is a fundamental connection between thoughtfulness and care in art and an engagement with the possibilities of human flourishing.
Now let us turn to a brief tour of the rest of this book.
Chapter 2 will deal with what I call the “prehistory of progressive rock.” Here we will discuss the history of rock music from the founders (including, for instance, Ray Charles and Chuck Berry), up through the Beatles, as well as other more experimental forms of rock that prepared the way for the emergence of progressive rock. This will necessarily be a skewed and slanted history; I do not believe that the only raison d’être of other kinds of rock music than progressive rock was to prepare the way for the latter, but in chapter 2 I will proceed as though this were the case. In addition to those already mentioned, I will discuss the Beach Boys, Hendrix, Cream, the psychedelic movement, and then four groups that are very important for being close to the edge (to coin a phrase!) of progressive rock: The Who, Led Zeppelin, the Moody Blues, and Pink Floyd. Obviously, I will need to explain why I do not place the Floyd, especially, in the category of progressive rock, and this will require the construction of definitions. Some of this work will be done in the second chapter, some in the third. Finally, I will discuss a group that was truly transitional to progressive rock, namely The Nice.
In taking up this somewhat channeled history, I will foreground the experimental tendencies that have been around since the beginnings of rock music in order to show what larger cultural and social forces shaped these tendencies, and, ultimately, how these tendencies underwent, in the late sixties, a transformation of quantity to quality such that a distinct trend in rock music, progressive rock, emerged. I will argue, in a dialectical but I hope not a too-overdetermined way, that the seeds of progressive rock were always already present in the music of the “founders,” especially Ray Charles, Chuck Berry, Little Richard, Jerry Lee Lewis, and Bo Diddley. (When I say that I hope to avoid overdetermination, I mean that there was no absolute dialectical necessity that these seeds blossomed—which is again where there is a need to go beyond merely formalistic analysis.)
In chapter 3, “The time of progressive rock,” I will discuss the definition and the conditions of emergence of the phenomenon itself. I originally took up some of these questions in a section in music of Yes (pp. 37–45); here I will rearticulate these themes and expand on them. Definitions can be dangerous, they can be confining (“by definition,” this is what definitions are all about)—and this is especially a problem where such an expansive phenomenon as progressive rock is concerned. My aim will be to generate a definition that is enabling, that helps rather than hinders understanding. To this end, in the second chapter I will also take up a rather large group of bands that are not ordinarily grouped under the heading “progressive rock”—as that term is understood or, in fact, badly understood, today—yet were clearly a part of the expansion of rock music’s possibilities in the early seventies. This is a large set of groups—I’m thinking of such exciting and innovative artists as Traffic, Chicago, Steely Dan, Santana (to name some of the famous ones). My aim will not be to say anything definitive about these groups (though they are all deserving of extended treatment), but more to deal with the expansion and contraction of the phenomenon and definition of progressive rock itself.
In the third chapter I will also deal with the fact that, although not all progressive rock bands are from England, by any stretch, there is something about the progressive trend that is very centered in England.
Finally, in chapter 4, I will turn to the bands and their music. As the subtitle indicates, chapter 4 is meant as a kind of annotated discography. Even though the chapter is quite long, my aim was to create something that the reader could move through at a fairly quick pace, mainly in order to get a sense of the rhythms and dimensions of the larger progressive movement. In my final chapter, I will take up developments in progressive rock beyond its “time.” In the main, however, I limit more extensive discussion to groups that made important albums in the years 1968 to 1978. (Admittedly, even this choice of years is somewhat conditioned by the desire to present a nice, even decade.) I will deal with both the famous and the obscure—making it plain that, just because some groups such as Yes or Emerson, Lake, and Palmer became quite famous does not mean that they were necessarily more “commercial” or “watered down” (I don’t know who could call Tales from Topographic Oceans “commercial” or “Karn Evil Nine, 2nd Impression” “watered down”). There’s a tendency to punish some of these groups for their fame, when, in fact, they were also making better music than some of the more obscure groups. At the same time, some other groups were undeservedly obscure and were certainly as creative as the more famous groups. In other words, I focus on quality, not quantity of albums or concert seats sold.
In what, I am sure, will be a controversial move, I divide the discussion of groups in chapter 4 into three categories. First, I make a distinction between what I see as the “first-line” and the “second-line” groups. The first line consists in what I will argue are the most consistently innovative contributors to the genre. Of this list of thirteen groups, about five or six of these would be in the category of less famous, while the others are fairly well known (of course, most of them will be familiar to long-time followers of the genre). In alphabetical order, these are the “first-line” groups of progressive rock: Caravan, Emerson, Lake, and Palmer, Genesis, Gentle Giant, Gong, Henry Cow, Jethro Tull, King Crimson, Magma, Mahavishnu Orchestra, PFM, Soft Machine, and Yes.
My second category will also be controversial. Within the category of “first line,” I will identify two groups in particular as the pillars of progressive rock, namely King Crimson and Yes. This does not mean that these groups were or are absolutely the best of the lot—though, in my opinion, they are. Instead, the idea is that these two groups, taken together, give us something like an “archetype” for the genre.
A smaller, but still significant, part of the fourth chapter will be devoted to a much longer list of groups, approximately fifty of them, that are both less well known and are among the less “heavy hitters” and are more peripheral to the progressive trend. They constitute, in other words, the “second line.” This category includes groups such as Curved Air, Greenslade, Egg, Nektar, Jonesy—to name a few. Here I will not attempt to be exhaustive, but I will try to give readers/listeners access to this easily forgotten chapter in rock music (and even a forgotten chapter of progressive rock music). In the resources section, I will also give some sources where listeners can obtain albums by these groups. In every case, these groups have made at least one important album and therefore a real contribution to progressive rock.
In making the “first-line”/“second-line” distinction, I will undoubtedly rankle a few readers. My hope is not only to make some judgments of quality, but also to provoke further discussion. If a disgruntled reader wants to launch a campaign to demonstrate that, in fact, Grobschnitt should have been considered within the first line, then let’s debate it out in the newsletters, journals, and other forums. I should say, as well, and by way of preparation, that just because I think some of these bands are more important does not mean that I wish to diminish the contributions of the others. On the contrary, I hope to show that progressive rock in the seventies was a very diverse and vibrant trend. At the very end of chapter 4 I present a list of fifty-nine of the most noteworthy albums, which would form a solid basis for a progressive rock album collection.
Finally, in chapter 5, I will discuss the fate and possibilities of progressive
