If listenable is the highest praise I can come up with for these, why make a list about progressive rock? Honestly, me and the genre have never been best pals, I’m not the kind of fan the genre attracts or creates. I want to be able to sing along badly, bang my head or tap my toes, possibly even think about wiggling my behind while I listen to rock records, and prog ain’t that. In fact, prog kinda reminds me of a guy you’d want to get away from at a party when you realize he only has one excruciatingly long story to tell, tells it over and over, and every time he tells it, it gets longer and more convoluted. You start looking at your watch, wondering what the cooler looking people on the other side of the room are talking about. No way to tell, but you’re sure it doesn’t include indecipherable fantasy novel references, and they actually seem to be having fun, and possibly dancing.
I’ve been watching some guys on YouTube lately who are obviously bonkers level progressive rock fans. They fit the fan demographic, white guys who were likely isolated teenagers in the 1970s, turned on by a level of musical navel-gazing never before seen in rock music. Danceable? Who cared about that, these guys didn’t go to dances. It hooked ‘em, they stayed hooked, and now they’re in their 50s passionately explaining how a Van Der Graff Generator 25-minute prog rock “suite” is better or worse than one by Camel or Gentle Giant (hint: it’s neither).
To my ears, the only real difference between a ton of prog albums is whether there’s a flute involved. Flutes were big with these bands and were always the momentum breaker. Don’t get me wrong, I love me some flute but, trust me, if you’re playing loud, electrified rock music, the second you toss in a flute it sounds like Tiny Tim singing lead for Black Sabbath. Ian Anderson thinks he got away with it in Jethro Tull, but he really didn’t. There are a few decent Tull albums, but I listen to them around the flute, myself. If you put your fingers in your ears and sing “la la la la la” really loud during the flute solos, some Jethro Tull albums are okay, in a demented forest elf kinda way.
But I digress. What hit me as I watched the guys on YouTube is that they were mentioning a few prog rock bands that I actually like. Okay, maybe not “like” like, but they put out at least one album that, while I wouldn’t go all the way with it, I have let it get to third base with me over the years. If you put a gun (or flute) to my head, I can come up with a few records that fit the genre that I can highly recommend to any rock and pop fan. And that’s what I’m here for, music fans, doing the deep dives and letting you know what’s out there worth your time. There might even be more than these three, but others don’t come to mind in the amount of time I’m willing to spend hanging out with that guy at the party.
• Yes – Close to the Edge (1972) – I call it the “blueprint.” Dozens, if not thousands, of prog rock albums follow the same general format. The title of the album is usually the title of the longest song on it. This so-called “suite” has movements (always labeled with Roman numerals on the album cover), shifting time signatures, and dense (like concrete) instrument interplay. If there are times when I can’t tell if the musicians are all playing the same song, it’s progressive rock to me. Other than the big epic, the record has two to four shorter songs. There’ll be the softer ones, which the bands, the fans, and the record company like to refer to as “pastoral.” Having spent considerable time on a dairy farm growing up, I get the word’s connection to bullshit. And one song has to be in 4/4 time, have a little bit of radio-friendly hook to it, and a chorus that makes some kind of sense verbally, so that when non-obsessives hear it in their car there’s something familiar they can hang their hat on and possibly remember it.
The problem for 99% of the groups following the blueprint is that Yes defined it, nailed it, and perfected it on this record. Case closed; the rest of you guys look elsewhere. Three songs; the intricate title cut “suite” in four movements, the melodically lovely four-parter “And You and I,” and the hooky, but head-scratchingly named, “Siberian Khatru.” The record is dense and pretentious for sure, it’s Yes for crying out loud, but also overflowing with brilliantly melodic passages, masterful instrumental prowess, and the band’s not-so-secret weapon, Jon Anderson’s angelic alto tenor singing voice. The album was a huge hit, a massive world tour ensued, and the resulting pressure fractured the band into multiple timelines moving forward. This was the peak, the Everest, of 70s UK progressive rock, and for a brief, shining moment, I believed.
EARWORM: Yes, “Siberian Khatru” – Propulsive and hummable, pounding but surprisingly light on its feet, like the whole record.
• Supertramp – Crime of the Century (1974) Then there’s the other side of the coin, the shorter, friendly, supremely hooky progressive music that Supertramp perfected on one album. Two complicated and tedious albums preceded this one, financed by a Dutch millionaire. They bombed critically and commercially, and the creative partnership of Rick Davies and Roger Hodgson realized that to keep the money flowing from their sugar daddy, they had to introduce some kind of sales-generating pop element into their songwriting.
They knocked it completely out of the park. Crime went gold in the US and UK, platinum in France and New Zealand, and reached the exalted diamond status in Canada. The double A-side single “Dreamer”/”Bloody Well Right” was a smash everywhere. The shorter hits fit perfectly alongside the longer, more complex cuts and the album is an eargasm from start to finish. Of course, success begets overkill, so the band became more poppy and less proggy from here. They remained a laser-focused singles band for a good many years, but never made another album with as perfect a blend of their two impulses again. A crime, really.
EARWORM: Supertramp, “School” – A killer album opener, regardless of genre.
• Al Stewart – Past, Present, and Future (1974) Progressive folk-rock music. Now there’s a yawn-inducing description for you. Wait, it gets better. Progressive historical folk-rock music is more accurate. The album has a theme, like all self-respecting prog albums. Here it’s a song each about a specific decade of the 20th century. The man’s full first name is Alastair, for crying out loud, he was born to be a history professor in his native UK, right?
But what we, in fact, have here is one of my long-time favorite records. Sure, there are songs about the 29th President of the United States, Warren G. Harding, retired British naval officers, the Nazi invasion of Russia during WWII, and the prophecies of Nostradamus that should be a snooze, the album relegated to being studied in a sparsely attended British sociology class. But I’m here to tell you, every song on this overlooked beauty is immaculately crafted and impossibly catchy. Side one is more traditional, if you can say that while considering the subject matter. Shorter, acoustic-based, curiously winding songs with instantly memorable hooks. Side two is where he goes full prog with three much longer and more complex songs; not quite “suites,” but as close as folk-rock should ever get. All three are mesmerizing and transcendent, with Mr. Stewart’s lightly floating voice handling every musical left turn and surprising lyric like a boss. Past, Present, and Future didn’t bring him fame, “Year of the Cat” would take care of that two years later, but it got him a cult following and I’m a card-carrying member. Pass the Kool-Aid, please.
EARWORM: Al Stewart, “Post World War Two Blues” Side 1’s closer, before he takes a turn for the trippy on Side 2. The definition of earworm.
I am intimately familiar with the first two, but never thought of Al Stewart as Prog.... I will give it a listen.