9
often associated with the classical rock concept are the Moody Blues, the Electric Light Or-
chestra, the New York Rock Ensemble, Procol Harum, and Renaissance.
The term "progressive rock" is one of the most useful yet exasperating within the rock orbit.
The term gained currency in the late 1960s and early 1970s among rock critics and audiences,
it meant, essentially, rock music with substance, rock music that was more than just enter-
tainment or Top 40 pop, rock music that was serious, with something serious to say, whether
that "something" involved a political or artistic message. Progressive rock music was heard
on "underground," progressive FM radio stations in the United States stations whose disc
jockeys did not have to follow some corporate line or the weekly dictates of the charts but
could play what conscience and sensibility demanded typically not singles, but cuts from
albums featuring musicians thought to be in a creative or political sense above the rough and
tumble of the music industry and its merely commercial demands. Progressive rock could be
the brutal, straightforward rock and sexual-political posturing of the Rolling Stones, the ma-
jestic, finely produced sound-tapestries of the Beatles, or the hip honesty and moralizing ver-
bal pyrotechnics of Bob Dylan. It could be the uncompromising musicality and innovation of
Gentle Giant, Jethro Tull, King Crimson, Queen, Traffic, Blind Faith, Steely Dan, or Frank
Zappa.
Bound up with the history of progressive rock it is a term not much used since the late
1970s is the rather startling realization, by many critics as well as by some of its leading
musicians, that certain "progressive" musical tendencies within the genre were too closely
allied with classical techniques for comfort in other words, that unbridled "progressivism"
in rock could and did lead to a strange situation in which rock was risking its status as a new,
innovative musical form and symbol of the youth culture through its increasing reliance on
the harmonic, formal, and orchestrational trappings of the music whose cultural base it was
supposed to be rebelling against. Thus progressive rock ultimately involved, and for many
observers was epitomized by, the grandiose synthesizer gestures and elaborate formal layouts
used by the groups that some commentators pigeon-hole separately under classical rock
groups like Yes, Genesis, and Emerson, Lake & Palmer, one reference source defines the
genre as "a form of rock music in which electric instruments and rock-band formats are inte-
grated with European classical motifs and orchestrations, typically forming extended, intri-
cate, multisectional suites."
10
The excesses of classicized progressive rock constituted one of
the major reasons why many creative rock musicians, Eno among them, felt so refreshed
when the development of the new wave genre in the late 1970s seemed to offer a progressive
musical alternative outside the confines of the increasingly manneristic and self-stultified
genre of progressive rock itself.
I shall refer to the music of Eno's early solo albums as "progressive rock" because in the his-
torical matrix of rock genres in the imperfect yet functional typology accepted by many for
workaday purposes that is where it belongs. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, before the
allegedly counter-productive tendencies of the classicization of rock had run their course,
great possibilities were glimpsed by a number of musicians, who at the time were unflinch-
ingly referred to as "progressive." Eno stands among the few who, in retrospect, succeeded in
compositional "derangement" of the melody, and as having recorded with the Portsmouth
Sinfonia (which really had nothing to do with rock music at all).
10
Jon Pareles and Patricia Romanowski, eds., The Rolling Stone Encyclopedia of Rock & Roll
(New York: Rolling Stone Press/Summit Books, 1983), 447.