Let’s oversimplify a bit, and say that “prog rock” began in 1967, with the Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper and (shortly afterward) the Moody Blues’ ***Days of Future Passed ***. I KNOW there are Zappa or Beach Boys fans who’ll say it started earlier, but humor me a bit! Sgt. Pepper made it possible for bands to achieve commercial success and radio airplay with lengthier, more ambitious songs featuring orchestration and unusual (for rock and roll) instrumentation.
Not coincidentally, heavy metal more or less arose at the same time. I’ll oversimplify once again and say that metal began in 1967 with Jimi Hendrix’s Are You Experienced. At any rate, all the features that came to define heavy metal (feedback, fuzztone, etc.) were present on that album. ) Yeah, I KNOW the Kinks, the Yardbirds and other bands were using similar sounds earlier. But Hendrix, Cream, Beck and Led Zeppelin created the metal vocabulary in the late Sixties.
Between 1967 and the late Seventies, a lot of prog rock bands (the Moodies, Procol Harum, King Crimson, genesis, Yes, ELP, Gentle Giant, et al) had a fair amount of success. But by 1978 or so, the leading prog rock bands had run out of creative gas.
Similarly, Hendrix and the former Yardbirds had a lot of commercial success and inspired successful imitators like Black Sabbath and Deep Purple. By the late Seventies, however, the leading metal artists were either literally dead (like Hendrix) or running out of gas.
So, why did prog rock die out almost completely in the late Seventies while metal thrived for decades longer? Because kids who liked metal found it very EASY to start their own metal bands. A kid who loved Sabbath or Purple in 1974 could learn to play a few hard, fast metal chords and start his own metal band. It was pretty easy to learn to play “Smoke on the Water” and “Iron Man.”
However, it was HARD to learn to play the organ like Keith Emerson. It was HARD to learn to play guitar like Steve Hackett. It was HARD for young drummers to learn the tricky time signatures of King Crimson’s Bill Bruford.
So, when the original prog rock bands petered out,m the movement largely died with them. But the original metal acts spawned loads of imitators who kept the genre thriving.
I was, as you can guess, a huge fan of BOTH the leading 70s metal acts AND the leading 70s prog rock acts. How do I feel about them now?
Well, as I’ve observed before, NOTHING gets old and stale faster than the stuff we THINK is profound when we’re precocious, intellectual teens. Books, movies and records that were never meant to be anything but FUN tend to hold up better than works that are intended to be deep and arty. KC and the Sunshine Band were never TRYING to be artists- they were trying to make catchy dance songs. So, when a deejay whips out “Shake Your Booty” on Trash Disco Night at a dance club, a 50-something woman (like my wife) will squeal with delight and start doing the hustle.
But if her husband digs up an old prog rock 8-track from the Seventies and plays one… well, the good stuff will still hold up marvelously. But some lyrics that once seemed deep will often sound silly (“Jon Anderson was smoking a lot of weed and reading a lot of Tolkien, I see”). Some solos that seemed exciting will now seem to drag (“Geez, Fripp, this jam was getting boring 5 minutes ago, and you’re just getting started!”).
I still have loads of old prog rock CDs. SOME of it is still great. Some of it makes me wonder what the hell I was thinking.
Again, it’s not just music. When you’re 15, Kurt Vonnegut may seem like a genius- when you’re 35, you may start to suspect he was a wise ass rather than a Wise Man. When you’re 15, you may think Holden Caulfield was YOU; when you’re 35, you may find Holden a whiny, self-absorbed asshole.
