What are your Progressive Rock Roots?

[Mike413]

I was born in 1970 so I missed the first wave of prog as I was way too young to know about it let alone listen to it. My dad had a copy of "the Yes album" which I'm pretty sure I remember seeing and possibly hearing as a young kid but I also remember other albums he had such as ones by The Doobie Brothers, Steely Dan, Santana, The Beatles, GF(RR ), The Doors, Janis Joplin just to name a few. I did like the Beatles starting from about age 7 but for the most part I mostly only remember what was played on the radio and it was mostly pop stuff. I first got into music in a major way around the age of 11 1/2-12 years old. I was mostly into buying top 40 singles at the time and distinctly remember hearing and buying "heat of the moment" when it was a hit but I had no clue at the time about the history of the band members. A few months later I got more into rock and pretty much abandoned top 40/pop stuff altogether. At this point I was buying cassette copies of stuff like Duran Duran, Rush(signals), Journey, Foreigner, etc. I bought Yes's 90125 when it came out and like it but didn't think of it as prog at the time. In the summer of 84 at camp a couple of brothers who were into Yes kind of got me more interested in the group and I subsequently slowly started to buy their stuff. I also had a cousin who was(is)a huge Genesis fan(he liked Yes also)so that helped a lot too. Remember this was the mid 80's and was not the best time to be getting into(or discovering)prog. I distinctly remember my cousin saying to me something like "if you like the earlier Genesis stuff you will like this record called "in the court of the Crimson King." I subsequently bought some KC stuff on cassette. It was a gradual process for me but to me this music was more adventurous and interesting than most regular rock that I heard on the radio. It was special to me then and it still is.