Matt Wilson wrote:You guys are gonna have to school me on the exact distinction between those two terms again. I use them as synonyms.
I'll try Matt.
In the late 60s and early 70s you could walk into record shops and they would have records in various sections as many still do, so there might have been pop, blues, jazz, etc. and one that started to creep in was underground. Underground came about as an amalgam of the British Blues Boom and psychedelia. Anything really that John Peel wanted to play on his Perfumed Garden radio programme really. In this section you might find bands find bands like Cream, Jim Hendrix, Family, Tyrannosaurus Rex,Ten Years After, early Jethro Tull, Taste, Jefferson Airplane, The Doors, Keef Hartley Band, Colosseum, Pink Floyd etc.
However, underground fairly quickly mutated into progressive, perhaps as a result of a number of record labels starting to put progressive on the spines of record covers I guess to help stockists and the music press. So these bands then became progressive because they were being experimental in their approach. As an example, the first two Fleetwood Mac albums would have been listed under Blues, or even Pop as they sold well, but the third would have been under the term progressive because to took the music beyond straight blues, it went further than the blues, it progressed, so was progressive.The first two Yes albums were progressive, same as the first two King Crimson albums, the first three Jethro Tull albums, John Mayall's Bare Wires and Laurel Canyon, Floyd's Atom Heart Mother, TYA's Ssssh, Free's albums, Atomic Rooster's first couple, Arthur Brown's Kingdom Come, Groundhog's Thank Christ and Split, Led Zep's albums, Beefheart's albums, Sabs', Deep Purple's, Fairport's, all these would have been termed progressive, although after a while some of them mutated into other genres but for a while there were progressive.
The 'Prog' nomenclature really came into its own around the time of The Yes Album when the music was taken to another more complicated, longer tracks, symphonic level, an extension of progressive. The Nice were progressive but ELP became prog which is a pretty good example. Close To The Edge was prog, the Yes album would still just have come under the banner of progressive. Aqualung was progressive, TAAB became prog.
I don't know if this helps Matt, C. might want to come in and add more but, briefly and hurriedly, this is how I understand the two terms and I think C. and I understand it in the same way. Hopefully he might shed more light. Others of course might completely disagree but this is how I remember it to be.
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