Any fans? I've always loved Chappo's voice.
Love Family's Fearless album. Tokyo Rose on the Streetwalkers debut album is a great track. Some very well known friends helped with the Streetwalkers debut album.
Any fans? I've always loved Chappo's voice.
Love Family's Fearless album. Tokyo Rose on the Streetwalkers debut album is a great track. Some very well known friends helped with the Streetwalkers debut album.
Steetwalkers
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=31kUGO5DOFw
The excellent 1972 Bandstand album from Family
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kxb7IPYit38
Chappo & The Shortlist
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r4niluqD-UM
RC
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GzXGaCs1LRM
No one likes the proggy blues rock of Family? Wow, I'm surprised, especially with all the Gabriel and Hamill fans here that no one is a fan of Chapman's voice.
You're probably posting on the wrong forum; Family belong in the main section, and this is where people would expect you to feature them. Since I initially joined PE back in 2004, there have been countless - numerous - highly enthusiastic discussions on Family in here. But "proggy blues rock" is not the way they are perceived.
Progressive rock at large was/is not limited to or synonymous with "symph" or those "big five/six/nine". Personally, I rate Family way higher than anything Gabriel was ever involved in. But that's just me myself (no pun).
"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
There have been numerous threads devoted to Family over the years, the most recent only some months ago; most who participated are likely simply burned out on the topic, at least for now. The first thread I started here years ago was "Family". (You might be able to find that most recent thread through the "search" function).
I dig Family enormously--particularly Doll's House, Fearless, and Bandstand--and was fortunate enough to have seen them in their prime ('69). A great band....
Hell, they ain't even old-timey ! - Homer Stokes
got the first 5 family albums in my record collection, and like them a lot. I agree with mogrooves above those are 3 great ones. Streetwalkers didn't do as much for me, but Chapman solo record not bad at all.
The recent reunion appeared to go quite nicely. Search out the YouTube videos for the evidence. Chappo was in good form. There are talks about more shows.
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Okay, understood, already enough Family threads here. BTW, I put it in OT because Family weren't a prog band.
If you really want to go there, be my guest. But the fact remains that you'll find that 3/4 of Family-enthusiasts will insist that Family was every bit the progressive rock band that any casual late 60s/early 70s group sporting a tedious mellotron could ever be. Now it's getting all the more obvious that something quite sad has happened to PE since the shift to ver. 3, but this place used to be about progressive rock music in general, not about "artists with some level of similarity to Genesis, Yes and ELP".
And FWIW, there are countless books on rock history denoting Family as not only a progressive rock group, but as seminal to the development of that very concept.
"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
te he te he....naughty me...I thought that might elicit a response
"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
Don't worry man, you really shouldn't. I'm a "prog" allrounder myself, so there isn't much I don't care about discussing (except for given artists that I just do not like), but I accept that this is indeed not the general tendency with participants in here. But Family were unequivocally one of the essential so-called "proto-progressive" groups, in that they both existed before the notion/concept of "progressive rock" had fully taken hold AND that their artistic/aesthetic appearance is suitable to retrospective debate on that very same notion/concept.
Remember that back in 1970 similarly undefinable UK names like Edgar Broughton Band, Patto etc. were also regarded as having appeal with what was considered a "progressive" audience - an estimate which offers angle to how certain terms come about and develop.
"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
Yea, totally. I mean proto-prog and all that great mix of progressive underground music from about 67 onwards has always been much more my bag than a lot of the later classic period prog and fusion prog stuff anyway - Pink Floyd, Gun, Black Sabbath, Blodwyn Pig, Nice, Hendrix, Traffic, Cream, Nirvana, Tomorrow, Soft Machine, Spooky Tooth, Roy Harper, Spirit, Free, Ten Years After, Family, Medicine Head, Thunderclap Newman, Deep Purple, Canned Heat, Steppenwolf, Focus, Pink Fairies, Jethro Tull, Focus, Fairport Convention, Incredible String Band, Hawkwind, Arthur Brown, Procol Harum, Uriah Heep that kind of stuff is more my cup of tea.
Family was described--at the time--as "progressive" in the original sense of the word, coined circa '66: as an adjective, a term of description, rather than the nominal "Progressive rock" ("Prog" for short) of some years later, which--now functioning as a noun--named a supposed genre of rock music whose early exemplars included KC, ELP, Genesis, and Yes, bands with whom Family is not commonly associated, merit aside. In short, Family was progressive rock but not Prog[ressive] rock.
Last edited by mogrooves; 03-27-2013 at 08:53 PM.
Hell, they ain't even old-timey ! - Homer Stokes
All true. But the interesting question is: when and by whom was the term ever coined as a noun? It never happened; someone simply just "decided", and FWIW I think this actually took place with full force in retrospect, when it all was essentially over as far as a "rock-cultural manifestation at large" was concerned - for example with the limited rise of "neo-prog" in the 80s (whose adherence to a very strict interpretation of the term was due to them seeing it as embodied in perhaps only a handful of 70s names).
"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
BIG Family fan here and amongst my top 20 bands of all time.
Be a loyal plastic robot for a world that doesn't care... Frank Zappa
I agree 100% with that. I first heard the terms prog rock and progressive rock in the late 80s or early 90s, I can't be exact. We all know what we called various music back in the day (70s), so I won't bore anyone explaining them all again, a list will suffice: underground, symphonic rock, art rock, space rock, acid rock, psychedelic rock, art school rock, heavy rock, glam, electronic, AOR, MOR.
In the U.S. the original term was "art rock", late 60s/70s; it was supplanted in the mid-70s--when those "art rock" bands were still contemporary--by the over-arching generic term "Progressive rock". The music to which the former term referred would become sub-categorized as "symphonic rock" (diminutively, "symph"). ("Art rock" would reappear in the late 70s, only now with regard to pop-with-smarts bands like Talking Heads, Roxy Music, etc.).
I can't say by whom the term "Progressive rock"-as-noun was coined, but I recall its general usage as a genre term in the mid-70s; I didn't come across the diminutive "Prog" until I began to re-investigate the music in the late 90s.
Hell, they ain't even old-timey ! - Homer Stokes
Getting off the subject a bit here. I had first heard the term "art rock" in a review of the first Spirit album in the Providence Bulletin in early 1968, and then again at the same time in reference to the just released Autosalvage album. Wasn't long after that that the term was also used on "underground" radio to describe the first Family album, which I had to get after hearing cuts on a local Providence AM (!) station at around three in the morning.
It wasn't until 1977 that I first heard the term "progressive rock" when a friend was gushing over National Health whom he had seen the night before in Boston. The more I thought about the terms, the more I thought, whichever, Family belongs under that term.
Wasn't too crazy about Streetwalkers even though I loved Roger's voice.
Lou
Looking forward to my day in court.
Interesting. I never heard or read the term "art rock" applied to these LPs back in the daze. While all have "art"-y touches--which was not unusal at a time when the byword was "eclecticism"--they were routinely described as "psychedelic". Contemporaneously, I do recall Ars Nova, the NY Rock & Roll Ensemble--both names allude to "art" music--called "baroque rock", as was the Left Banke.
Hell, they ain't even old-timey ! - Homer Stokes
Fearless, Bandstand and It's Only A Movie are my favorites, perhaps because I was exposed to them before Entertainment and Dolls House. Really liked the Streetwalkers albums and the Chap Whit album. Never heard Shortlist. Chapmans voice always worked for me, the slippery edge of control, power and emoting. These days I find hints of Chappo in Gord Downie of Tragically Hip. Family only ever came within 60 miles of me once and I wasn't aware of them at the time, Family and Streetwalkers are high on the list of bands I wish I could have seen (Stackridge, Focus, BJH, Misty's Big Adventure )
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