Again, progressive is a horrible name. Was "Elvis" prog? It was progressive, was it not at the time?
I think "complex" is a key ingredient. Complex rock might be a better definition.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Frownland
Is the term progressive rock really appropriate if you're just playing the same old ****e that Steve Howe did thirty years ago?
|
His guitar playing was very complex. Still is. It's still much more original that a typical modern metal shredder who is just running chromatic scales all day with lightening speed.
The great prog guitarists were very artsy, stylistic, but also playing over much more complex rhythm sections.
Take Ritchie Blackmore. He certainly could have been playing in any prog band at the time, but the drumming was very rock, it did't have much jazz movement to it very often. If Bruford or Collins was drumming their style in Deep Purple, it would have been much more of a prog band. Certainly DP did some proggy stuff, "Pictures of Home, Lazy, Burn" but most of it was much simpler rock rhythms.
Same thing with Page. Zeppelin start toying with Prog on their 4th…. (Stairway etc) then Kashmir, Achilles, In the Light, those were certainly Prog tunes. But not enough of their material was prog. Maybe 50% of the material should be prog? I don't know.
Elton John's "Funeral for a Friend" how could a song be more prog? Big keys, complex rhythm section, long epic build. He just didn't do a lot of that stuff. He actually auditioned at one time for Gentle Giant from what I heard.