The Beginning
On July 5, 1969, King Crimson played their second-ever gig, opening for the Rolling Stones at a free concert in London’s Hyde Park. They had no album, no singles, no reputation. An estimated 500,000 people had come for the Stones, and King Crimson hit them with “21st Century Schizoid Man”: seven and a half minutes of distorted Mellotron, free-jazz saxophone, and guitarist Robert Fripp’s precise, violent riffing. The crowd rose to their feet during Ian McDonald’s saxophone solo. Three months later, In the Court of the Crimson King arrived, and rock music split in two. One half kept playing blues. The other decided to become something else entirely.
The groundwork had been laid. The Moody Blues’ Days of Future Passed (1967) was arguably the first true concept album in rock, a journey through the hours of a day scored with the London Festival Orchestra, complete with spoken-word poetry and orchestral interludes. The Nice, featuring a young Keith Emerson, were rearranging classical pieces for a rock trio. Procol Harum had already welded Bach’s cantatas to pop songwriting. But King Crimson’s debut was the moment the genre announced itself as something distinct: rock that borrowed its ambition from classical music, its spontaneity from jazz, and its technology from the space age.
The Instruments
The Mellotron made progressive rock possible before the synthesizer did. Built in Birmingham by the Bradmatic company in the early 1960s, it contained banks of pre-recorded tape strips, each eight seconds long, triggered by a keyboard. Press a key and a tape head reads a strip of flute, string, or choir. Release it and a spring pulls the tape back. King Crimson bought two when they formed in 1968, having heard what Mike Pinder did with one in the Moody Blues. The instrument was notoriously unreliable: temperature changes between cold storage and hot stages made the tapes stretch and stick on the capstan, and humidity could warp the entire mechanism.
Then came the Moog. Keith Emerson of Emerson, Lake & Palmer was the first artist to tour with a Moog synthesizer. His modular system, nicknamed the “Monster Moog,” weighed 550 pounds, stood ten feet tall, and required four roadies to move. During the Brain Salad Surgery tour in 1973–74, a sequencer in the Moog was set running at an increasing rate while the entire instrument pivoted to face the audience, emitting smoke and deploying a pair of silver bat wings from its back. Rick Wakeman of Yes took a different approach, surrounding himself with a wall of keyboards: two Minimoogs, two Mellotron 400s, a modified Hammond C-3, an RMI Electra piano, and a grand piano. He got his first Minimoog from the actor Jack Wild, who gave it away because he thought the monophonic instrument was broken since it couldn’t play more than one note at a time.
The Albums
The early 1970s produced an extraordinary density of ambitious records. Jethro Tull’s Thick as a Brick (1972) consisted of a single 43-minute composition split across two sides of vinyl, conceived by frontman Ian Anderson as a parody of concept albums, then executed so thoroughly that it became the definitive one, reaching number one on the U.S. Billboard 200. Its packaging was a twelve-page fake newspaper presenting the music as the work of a fictional eight-year-old poet named Gerald Bostock.
Yes recorded Close to the Edge (1972) at Advision Studios in London, where engineer Eddy Offord had the road crew build a full stage inside the studio so the band could perform as if playing live. Drummer Bill Bruford’s kit resonated with the wooden platform, giving the recording a physicality that most prog albums lacked. Then came Tales from Topographic Oceans (1973), a double album of four side-long tracks inspired by Paramahansa Yogananda’s Autobiography of a Yogi. Wakeman hated it. During a performance at Manchester Free Trade Hall in November 1973, his technician passed him foil trays of chicken vindaloo, rice pilau, six papadums, bhindi bhaji, Bombay aloo, and stuffed paratha, which Wakeman balanced on top of his keyboards and ate on stage. It was a protest. He quit the band shortly after.
Pink Floyd’s The Dark Side of the Moon (1973), recorded at Abbey Road Studios over roughly sixty days, became the genre’s commercial peak: 45 million copies sold worldwide, 937 weeks on the Billboard 200. Engineer Alan Parsons, who had assisted on the Beatles’ Abbey Road and Let It Be, shaped the album’s meticulous production.
Genesis pushed the theatrical dimension furthest. Peter Gabriel appeared on stage during the Foxtrot tour in 1972 wearing his wife’s red dress and a custom-made fox head, without warning his bandmates. For Supper’s Ready, a 23-minute suite, he changed costumes mid-song: a crown of thorns, a flower mask inspired by the children’s TV character Little Weed, a black cloak with a triangular headpiece fitted with glowing eyes. When Genesis recorded The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway (1974) at Headley Grange, the former workhouse had been left in such disrepair by the Pretty Things that the band spent days cleaning rat-infested rooms and removing human excrement from the floors before they could start writing.
The Fall and the Afterlife
The conventional story is that punk killed prog in 1977. The reality is more complicated. Pink Floyd’s Animals, Yes’s Going for the One, and Genesis’s Wind & Wuthering all charted in the Top 10 that year, and prog continued to outsell punk on both album sales and ticket revenues through the end of the decade. Pink Floyd’s The Wall (1979) was one of the most commercially successful albums of the era. What actually eroded the genre was a combination of critical hostility (the press called it “pretentious” and “overblown”), internal exhaustion, and a shift in audience taste toward shorter, more direct songs. Robert Fripp himself said the progressive movement had gone “tragically off course.”
But the influence never stopped. Dream Theater, formed in 1985, built progressive metal from King Crimson’s angularity and Yes’s compositional ambition. Tool toured with King Crimson and cited them as a primary influence. Radiohead’s OK Computer (1997) drew on Pink Floyd and King Crimson so heavily that Rush’s Geddy Lee called it a continuation of the prog tradition. Porcupine Tree, the Mars Volta, and Coheed and Cambria carried the form into the 2000s.
The original bands proved durable. King Crimson reformed repeatedly, with Fripp treating each lineup as a distinct entity. Yes cycled through over twenty members across five decades. Genesis evolved from Gabriel-era theatrics into one of the biggest pop acts of the 1980s. The genre that was supposed to die in 1977 never stopped mutating.
Essential Listening
- King Crimson – In the Court of the Crimson King (1969)
- Yes – Close to the Edge (1972)
- Pink Floyd – The Dark Side of the Moon (1973)
- Genesis – Selling England by the Pound (1973)
- Emerson, Lake & Palmer – Brain Salad Surgery (1973)
- Jethro Tull – Thick as a Brick (1972)
- Gentle Giant – Octopus (1972)
- Yes – Fragile (1971)
- King Crimson – Red (1974)
- Pink Floyd – Wish You Were Here (1975)
- Genesis – The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway (1974)
- Van der Graaf Generator – Pawn Hearts (1971)