An Embarrassment of Prog

Dramatic vocals! Songs about sharks! Lonely lighthouses and tormented psychodramas—powered by double saxophones and an organ played in a cathedral that orbits the moon. Welcome to Van Der Graaf Generator , an influential English band bursting with musical ideas and daring listeners to keep up. This week we become Progonauts on a voyage into the Inner Space created by Peter Hamill, David Jackson, H...

Much like the artists who recorded the great live albums of the 70s, we needed a double-sized session to handle our ambitions for a tour through prog rock's monumental in-concert LP sets. In the second part of our Live Prog discussion (picking up from our previous episode),  Rick Wakeman heads for the center of the earth with an orchestra for support, Bryan Ferry storms through the north with Roxy...

The same musical environment that allowed prog rock titans to rampage through your headphones like strange and colorful beasts also proved the perfect climate for the flourishing of a once mighty species that has all but vanished: the live rock LP.  For prog acts, the live record could offer a showcase of stage virtuosity, the atmosphere of the band performing in communion with its audience, or ju...

  Hello darkness, our old friend!  This week, we've turned out all the lights (except for one blood-colored bulb) and turned up the volume on the trio of albums recorded by the band King Crimson in 1973 and 1974.  For "Larks Tongues in Aspic," "Starless and Bible Black," and the culminating "Red," Robert Fripp gathered a collection of musicians willing to push themselves into strange, magical new...

Put down your double-disc concept albums and 25-minute musical fantasias. Everything you love about prog rock lives in the Top 40 and FM radio hits of the 70s. In this episode we're putting our collective foot on the (classical) gas and sailing away to the point of know return. There may be a little hocus pocus involved assembling this Frankenstein of an episode, but we sure felt like three lucky...

Picking up from the conversation started in our last episode, Charlie, Bill and Henry head for a visit at the Colony of Slippermen and the second half of "The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway," the trippily majestic 1974 album that was Peter Gabriel's last outing with Genesis. Sunny high notes, facing down death, taking a few moments for a jazz odyssey, meeting (and eating) new friends...will Rael make...

The prog-rock podcast you didn't know you needed is back for a new season of concept albums, long-form musical odysseys, sci-fi scenarios and occasional calls to the Rhyme Police. We're starting out big, with a 2-part journey into the last record of the Peter Gabriel -era of the band Genesis , 1974's double album "The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway." In a departure from their previous songwriting prac...

The English keyboardist, violinist and composer Eddie Jobson has a career that has touched nearly every corner of prog rock's strangely shaped universe. A prodigy who joined the band Curved Air at the age of 17, he went on to play with Roxy Music and Frank Zappa before becoming part of UK , prog's first "supergroup," in 1977, alongside bassist/vocalist John Wetton, drummer Bill Bruford (both ex-Ki...

If there's a single record that might be said to occupy the heart of prog rock, there's a good case to be made for Genesis's 1972 "Foxtrot," a record that begins with the cinematic, Mellotron-drenched "Watcher of the Skies," comments on rapacious landlords in a mixture of Dickens and dystopian sci-fi with "Get 'Em Out by Friday" and then winds up with "Supper's Ready," clocking in at almost 24 min...

"The Musical Box!" "Harold the Barrel!" "The Return of the Giant Hogweed! "You may be asking "Could these possibly be the titles of enduring classics that no home should be without?" You might already suspect that we'd answer that question in the affirmative, but whether you're already a fan of the 1971 Genesis album Nursery Cryme or just want to increase the amount of joy in your life, in this ep...

"Have you walked on the stones of years?  When you speak, is it you that hears?" If these lyrical questions are familiar, you're one of thousands of prog fans who looked at the crudely rendered, mechanical tank-armadillo creature on the cover of Emerson, Lake and Palmer's TARKUS and said "I want to know more." Did you ask yourself "What is the 'Endless Enigma', anyway" as you gazed at their fused...

In a voyage to the borderlands of this podcast's announced subject, this week we listen to three records that might not be your (or anyone's) idea of prog rock, but which all share something elusive with the music that more comfortably flies the Mellotron Flag.  We start with the Incredible String Band's 1968 psych-folk opus "The Hangman's Beautiful Daughter," cross an ocean and a continent to the...

King Crimson's 1969 "In the Court of the Crimson King" stands for everything familiar about prog rock—the fantastical lyrics, the eerie ghost-choir Mellotron atmospherics, a brooding atmosphere of Heavy Tunes for Bookish People. But when guitarist Robert Fripp re-formed the band in 1981, after a long personal quest for spiritual and artistic renewal, the sounds that came out were from another univ...

Is there any purer expression of the prog-rock moment than the one-side-per-track "concept album"?  How about a double concept album?  This week, Charlie, Henry and Bill  say Yes to the excess and set sail across the four sides and 80-plus minutes of Yes's 1973 "Tales from Topographic Oceans." Conceived when vocalist Jon Anderson got his hands on Parahamhansa Yogananda's "Autobiography of a Yogi,"...

Lace up your fringed boots, grab your favorite woodwind and your ticket for the Renaissance Faire: this week, Charlie, Henry, and Bill dive into the anti-cool heart of prog rock via a pair of mid-70s Jethro Tull masterworks: 1974's "War Child" and 1975's "Minstrel in the Gallery." Turning from the hyper-extended musical excursions of "Thick as a Brick" and "A Passion Play," the band's return to so...

Charlie, Henry, and Bill begin their journey into wild musical excess with a voyage to 1976 London, as the band Genesis records its first album ("A Trick of the Tail") after the departure of its flamboyant lead singer Peter Gabriel and follows it up with the most Englishly-titled album in rock, "Wind and Wuthering."  Discussed: the music of loss, putting your overture at the end of a record, Phil...