What was the first prog-rock album to reach number one?
In 1966, John Lennon teased The Beatles’ next record by saying it would be “very different” from everything they’d done before. The record, of course, was to be the ambitiously transformative Revolver, the one many credit with being the first real proto-prog material that changed the rock landscape forever.
However, while Revolver was undeniably revolutionary, many claim that the first real iteration of prog was actually their next record, the wonderfully weird collection of complete and utter genius that was Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band.
Now, before we get into all of that, it’s important to recognise that prog – both as a term and a musical genre – has become one of the most mythological concepts in music history, making it difficult to define, and even more difficult to trace back through time. However, all of it makes a hell of a lot more sense when you realise that all it was was essentially boundary-pushing rock.
As Peter Gabriel once argued, that was, in essence, the entire point. It wasn’t about reinventing the wheel, or doing more of the same, or just trying to play it safe to survive the next period of societal uncertainty. It was, to borrow Gabriel’s definition, “Extraordinary musicians trying to break down the barriers to reject the rules of music”.
All things considered, then, that’s also probably why it’s inherently hard to define. After all, music that breaks down barriers and winds up setting a new standard could be attributed to countless groundbreaking albums across history. And when you narrow that down to just rock, somehow it all becomes far more nuanced, and it depends entirely on where you draw the line.
So, what was the first prog record to reach number one?
Which is incidentally why it’s nearly impossible to also pinpoint the first-ever prog record that went to number one. However, if we’re to look, really look, into the depths of everything prog is and where it came from, there really is only one definitive answer, and once again, it’s the Fab Four’s extensive conceptual masterpiece, Sgt Pepper.
The Beatles might have displayed prog sensibilities as early as Revolver, but there’s no denying that Sgt Pepper is really where it all shaped into something more concrete and familiar. As Jethro Tull’s Ian Anderson told Far Out, Sgt Pepper was as good as “one of the precursors” to prog before it became more of a catch-all term. That, along with Pink Floyd’s The Piper at the Gates of Dawn, was, to him, a sign of things to come. Or rather, signposts that read, “Progressive rock this way!”
That said, Sgt Pepper wasn’t only an early glimpse of what would ensue when the prog genre took flight in the coming years, but it also showed just how commercially successful boundary-pushing rock could be, especially for an offshoot that wouldn’t necessarily always perform well when it came to charting position or other sales figures and metrics.
But as we know, the record spent an unimaginable number of weeks at number one in the UK – 27, to be exact – and 15 in the US, and also sparked a major cultural moment for both the concept album in a broader sense and the wider Summer of Love of 1967. It might technically fall into the earlier proto-prog categories, but it still stands as the biggest turning point in the history of the entire genre.
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