I'm with Justin on this one. In our devotion to the ProgRock canon, we've forgotten a heap of mainstream or 'otherwise' bands that were clearly progressive and experimental at one point.
Like The Velvet Underground, for instance. Go for
TVU + Nico and
White Light White Heat if you want some proto-punk noise. Lou said that they were trying to do for rock what Ornette and Company had done for jazz. 'Can't get no more prog than that. Go for the delightfully quiet
The Velvet Underground for very proggy acoustic riffs.
I haven't seen anybody mention Roxy Music yet. I might have missed it, but I did look.
Last, offered with a bit of contemptuous defiance, ELO's early albums,
Eldorado among them, are quite progressive and remain pop goldmines. I'm no great advocate of "The Battle of Marston Moor," but then it takes all kinds, and Levellers must have their early-70s prog-pop too.
**It's a Fact!**: Son of Sergei Starostin, who was Russia's foremost authority on comparative linguistics, Georgiy Starostin "has worked at the Center of Comparative Studies at the Russian State University for the Humanities, where he also teaches, as well as serves as head of the Department of Far Eastern Philology at the same institution; specializing in Dravidian, general Nostratic, Sino-Tibetan (mainly Chinese), Yenisseian, and Khoisan studies." More to the point, George Starostin created the fabulously opinionated, incomplete, but voluminous source of 60s, 70s, & 80s online rock criticism,
Only Solitaire. Georgie is like the cool but infuriating older brother you thought was god in 1979: his site is a remarkable goto guide for all things classic rock. You may vehemently disagree and curse his foolishness to the high heavens, but you never walk away from Only Solitaire without having learned something new.
From the Intro Overview to ELO:
Electric Light Orchestra is certainly the world's readiest candidate for 'Most Grossly Misinterpreted And Most Unjustly Despised' band of the past thirty years. And that's a fact, baby. I can't even say that this happened because of the world not being properly acquainted with ELO - most of their hit singles that used to 'pollute' radio waves for years on end were pretty typical of their material, and a normal 'greatest hits compilation' would be able to give any listener a pretty adequate, if certainly incomplete, picture of the band's identity. But somehow, based essentially on the critical disillusionment about the band, their image has been dirtied up so much throughout the last decade that nowadays, ELO often stands for the ultimate example of 'cheesy boring sappy crappy pap' or something like that. It might be possible that this also has a lot to do with obvious gaffes like Xanadu or that idiotic parody on the band, Electric Light Orchestra Part Two, that have been dicking around for a large part of the Nineties, but let's face it with dignity - the world actually listened to 'Evil Woman', 'Telephone Line', 'Sweet Talkin' Woman', and other songs of their type, and intentionally turned away from them.
Which was a dreadful and unforgivable mistake. With all sincerity I state the following: Electric Light Orchestra are, in fact, one of the best, most creative, inventive and productive bands of the Seventies, a band of truly giant stature and nearly limitless potential; no other band in the Seventies could put out excellent records with a minimal amount of filler as consistently as ELO did since about 1973, and even in the Eighties they managed not to suck entirely.
Genesis is my favorite band of the bunch
