Over the last six decades, progressive rock has undergone a great evolution. It’s not only changed sound but also its form and appearance. But which albums have been the most important in its progression? Prog has gone through its music collection to discover the albums that helped develop prog’s sound.

Words: Jerry Ewing

Before we start, a word about what this list of albums is, and what it probably isn’t. It’s not a list of the best prog albums of all time. Although many of these records would sit quite happily in such a list. Rather it is a list of albums that we here at Prog, along with musicians as diverse as Steven Wilson, Pete Trewavas, Carl Palmer, Mike Portnoy, Magenta’s Robert Reed, Mastodon, Tim Bowness, Ihsahn, Alan Reed and more have debated and see as being pivotal in the ongoing development of progressive music.

So albums that probably inspired the originators of progressive music. Many of the high points of the early classic era of the genre. But also, as progressive music has developed over the years, other albums force themselves into the equation, which we think at least makes the whole list an even more intriguing proposition. Not simply great records, but those that have acted as a signpost to where the music would inevitably head.

Of course, how you react to the list depends on what you think progressive music is. Some might say it’s easier to discuss what progressive rock is not, but even then, you could easily become embroiled in a week-long debate and still not reach a logical conclusion. What prog - used as an abbreviation of progressive, not to suggest a subgenre of the music as a whole - is or isn’t is a topic that clogs up the many progressive music forums on the internet and Prog Magazine’s letters page. Indeed, one of the leading prog websites list no fewer than 23 different sub-genres of progressive rock. In reality, there’s probably even more than that.

The bottom line is that there is no strict rule as to what progressive music is or isn’t. Rick Wakeman says, “I always say that it’s about breaking the rules. But the secret of breaking rules in a way that works is understanding what the rules are in the first place.”

“What we do have in common with those bands is the freedom to do what we want, musically.”
Colin Greenwood, Radiohead

True, there’s a school of thought among fans of progressive music that essentially it has to sound like it was made between 1970 and 1974, arguably the glory years of the first wave of the genre, who hold rigorously to that view and woe betide anyone who suggests otherwise! And yet again, is that not a regressive conclusion? Stanley Clarke, jazz fusion bassist extraordinaire told us a few years back, “See, if you use the word ‘progressive’ properly, it’s about stretching boundaries, about stepping outside yourself and inviting something else to happen.”

This latter quote has far more to do with the majority of the music that you’ll read about in these pages. Admittedly there are some bands who will fall into the earlier category, but that’s okay too, because if progressive music is that which plays by no rules, as it most certainly did as the genre took form at the end of the 60s, should there be any hard and fast rules as to what it is in the first place?

In essence, as the imaginations of musicians became fired ever more, as popular rock music evolved, first from beat pop to the more imaginative psychedelia, propelled by the ever-creative force that was The Beatles, so the sounds that were emanating from stereo speakers around the world were becoming more evolutionary and imaginative. As a case in point, were one to listen to the Fab Four’s Rubber Soul, Revolver, Sgt Pepper’s… and The White Album back to back - four records recorded over the space of just three years - the advancements made, not just in sonic texture, but also in songwriting and recording techniques are quite formidable. And it was against this backdrop of creative change, not to mention the social evolution that swirled like a tornado through the 60s, that progressive music found its feet.

Of course, it wasn’t just The Beatles who were responsible for the evolution of progressive music. Other artists at the helm of radical change included Frank Zappa and the Mothers Of Invention, the Beach Boys, The Doors, Captain Beefheart and Jefferson Airplane. It wasn’t just rock music either. In the classical world, composers as varied as Bach, Vaughn Williams, Gyorgy Ligeti and Karlheinz Stockhausen were becoming increasingly influential, and from the jazz world the likes of John Coltrane, and more importantly Miles Davis, whose experiments with rock and jazz began with 1969’s In A Silent Way, would prove equally influential. One can even look at the work of Bob Dylan as having some influence, with his use of literary influences through to his early experimentation with song structure, as on the 11-minute Desolation Row from 1965’s Highway 61 Revisited or the first ever side-long rock song in Sad Eyed Lady Of The Lowlands from Blonde On Blonde merely a year later.

Any of these musicians would have had the effect of imprinting on the minds of those who followed in their wake that the original orthodox practices in which popular music had been made were rapidly becoming a thing of the past. That where previously the idea of fusing folk music and classical music with rock was not the done thing, or that melding jazz and rock music might create some wonderful sounds would be scoffed at, the late 60s oversaw a period of musical creation wherein, it seemed, all bets were off. Hence the birth of the musical form we now know as progressive rock.

Mike Portnoy: loving the golden age of prog.

WILL IRELAND/FUITURE OWNS

“When you can’t define something, what you’re referring to is pushing the envelope. And isn’t that the whole point of prog?”
Steven Wilson

Steven Wilson: taking us on a musical journey.

This writer has been quoted as saying that “prog is not just a sound, it’s a mindset”, while adding that Dream Theater guitarist John Petrucci points out that it is “defined by its very lack of stylistic boundaries”. This is where the essence of progressive music comes from - the ideas behind how the music was and is created, not some obsessive fan’s desire to hear the same similar sounds over and over again (even if this latter attraction is something that crops up with fans of almost any musical genre).