What's wrong? Listing Led Zeppelin alongside prog rock bands.
Who does this? Only prog rock fans
Why? No bloody idea.
Any other hard rock band? Oh yea, a lot of them do it with Queen and Black Sabbath as well.
What's wrong? Listing Led Zeppelin alongside prog rock bands.
Who does this? Only prog rock fans
Why? No bloody idea.
Any other hard rock band? Oh yea, a lot of them do it with Queen and Black Sabbath as well.
How long has this been eating away at you, Peter?
There are a lot of bands people here call prog rock who I have a hard time thinking of in that way, no names mentioned, but rather than stress about it I'd rather just shrug it off. If a band makes good music, or even just good music some of the time, that'll do me.
Only the last couple of days actually, with LZ being referred to as prog in 2 separate threads, or the inference of the context being that LZ were a prog rock band.
They were certainly not a prog band, although they could and did do some prog (Achilles, Carouselambra, Kashmir, In The Light). Zeppelin tackled everything during their 12 years but, to call them a prog band is a bit of a disservice.
Bill
She'll be standing on the bar soon
With a fish head and a harpoon
and a fake beard plastered on her brow.
I don't recall ever hearing/reading that bands like YES were called Prog in the early 70s. I always heard and read the term "Art-Rock." Led Zeppelin were not Art-Rock. If anything, they may have been called Heavy Metal (even though I don't remembering hearing that term - Heavt Metal - until maybe 1976). Too me they were as "metal" as Sabbath and/or Purple. Led gets the prog label retroactively. They were progressive but the foundation was always heavy, overdriven, blues/rock.
Certain bands have gotten a pass at PE ever since I've been here. They either get threads on the main board or applauded for being progressive with a small p. I have no disagreement with that concept but some do. They're often the same ones that insist that Pink Floyd and Jethro Tull aren't prog either.
Led Zeppelin
Black Sabbath
The Who
Steely Dan
Little Feat
Deep Purple
and numerous fusion and jazz performers
I don't like country music, but I don't mean to denigrate those who do. And for the people who like country music, denigrate means 'put down.'- Bob Newhart
Vic, I'm talking about references today not in the 70s. That said, you're right. In the 70s in London, I clearly remember Pink Floyd, Yes and King Crimson all being part of the heavy metal scene.
Uriah Heep and the Grateful Dead have been argued as well.
I see the early '70s as a time when progressive rock was the zeitgeist in which many bands took part. Some epitomized the zeitgeist, others only partially so. Much of the zeitgeist was following what The Beatles did: write your own material, go high-concept when you want, reinvent your sound perennially, blaze a trail, try and deliver the highest quality product you can in the studio.
Prog rock as a genre focuses on those who really went for the trail-blazing, high-concept stuff, but there were plenty of other bands contributing to the overall movement. It might be a few songs, or an album, or an over-all approach that never-the-less still kept inside the pop-rock bubble, or transformed into something, like heavy metal or new age, that isn't much associated with progressive rock at all.
Wake up to find out that you are the eyes of the world.
I would argue that some bands only got the prog rock tag by the accident of time and place e.g. Jethro Tull, Mike Oldfield, Caravan, Soft Machine.
I never understood the prog tag for Uriah Heep,Deep Purple or UFO, they all went from psychy-bluesy-pop straight to hard rock.
But all that said, Uriah Heep, deep purple, Ufo, etc,. All of them had far more of a claim to the prog tag than LZ. Zeppelin did nothing that even remotely approached prog rock. They were a hard blues and hard rock band.
The album Houses of the Holy has all the markings of a prog-rock record except the weird time signatures. Yeah, prog is a stretch for them as a band, but they had their moments.
Wake up to find out that you are the eyes of the world.
The closest LZ ever got to prog for me was The Battle of Evermore. In the same kind of spacey, fantasy, dungeons & dragons, demons & Wizards way that UH and UFO were doing in the early 70s.
Progressive Rock is a retroactive term that popped up either in the late seventies or early eighties (factions still argue over this and always will) and was definitely not around in the early seventies. Believe it or not, Floyd, Zep, Yes and Jefferson Airplane were all considered as Rock, and few people actually knew of Genesis in the States or heard them on FM radio in the early seventies, at least not until Follow You Follow Me hit the charts in 1978!
To be or not to be? That is the point. - Harry Nilsson.
Hey, they had songs about Hobbits, Mordor and Gollum! That gives 'em some prog points! They even used mellotrons and double-knecked guitars. There's some more prog points!
Last edited by Guitarplyrjvb; 12-21-2015 at 10:49 PM.
There are 'weird time sigs' in both "The Crunge" and "The Ocean", and "The Rain Song" is arguably more of a 'prog' tune than anything Uriah Heep ever did.
But no, none of the British hard rock groups were 'prog' as such; not DP nor BS or LZ or UH or Free or UFO or Budgie. There were individual borderine cases in their song roster, but even then they were obvious anomalies. With acts such as Atomic Rooster, Rare Bird, High Tide and Quatermass the odds were on opposite ends, and these were primarily "(proto) prog" groups toughing out with some fat chord circuits and volume once in a while.
"Improvisation is not an excuse for musical laziness" - Fred Frith
"[...] things that we never dreamed of doing in Crimson or in any band that I've been in," - Tony Levin speaking of SGM
The diversity of music on Led Zeppelin III was quite progressive, with the time. Stairway to Heaven was one hell of a composition, too.
"Always ready with the ray of sunshine"
Not "Prog," imo, but certainly progressive, given what they did within the fairly limited constraints of "blues rock."
Hell, they ain't even old-timey ! - Homer Stokes
Yeah interesting point Steve, FYFM and IKWIL were immediate hits here in Brasil too, but then it was already too late for Prog to hit the charts here, as in the seventies pretty much of what was heard in the States' FM radios was immediately heard in my contry: Stevie Wonder (Isn't She Lovely), Donna Summer (McArthur Park, Last Dance), Lionel Ritchie (Easy), Rod Stewart (Tonight's the Night), Elton John (Island Girl, Don't Go Breaking my Heart), Bee Gees, Marvin Gaye, Barry White etc. I remember that people in the late seventies were much more into Disco, Soul etc. than kind of moving themselves with Rock, but just a few out of those that I recalled really hit me strong back then, as far as the international ones I can remember I prefered Billy Joel, Al Stewart, John Lennon.
Last edited by Rick Robson; 12-21-2015 at 06:01 PM.
"Beethoven can write music, thank God, but he can do nothing else on earth. ". Ludwig van Beethoven
I agree with your first statement about rock bands simply being rock bands, not prog rock bands. The only caveat I would add was there were rock bands, and then great rock bands, and in addition to Floyd, Zep and Yes, you could add Tull, Sabbath, The Allman Brothers, The Who etc. No one said "This is prog, that is not." King Crimson's first album was important in that it was a quintessential album to get stoned with.
As far as Genesis in the U.S. in the 70s, I can only go on what was being listened to in my high school at the time. The Lamb and Trick of the Tail were both huge and listened to a lot when they were released, as well as Peter Gabriel's first solo album. It took a while to backtrack to Foxtrot and Selling England.
"And your little sister's immaculate virginity wings away on the bony shoulders of a young horse named George who stole surreptitiously into her geography revision."
Occasional musical musings on https://darkelffile.blogspot.com/
The truth will set you free, but first it will piss you off
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