Ian Anderson once picked the “big four” of progressive rock
No one can really pinpoint when progressive rock came into being. The art of progressing music forward has been around ever since someone thought that two notes played together sounded nice, and plenty of artists both then and now are still trying to find ways of twisting around those same few chords and get more musicality out of them.
Although Jethro Tull remained on the fringes of progressive music for the longest time, Ian Anderson thought that there was a definite gold standard for where the genre could go. Anderson was one of the first to see the genre’s potential, and he helped to launch it into a new space.
For a band like Jethro Tull, confining them to a genre seems to be something they both loved and hated. It might have been nice to be associated with a genre responsible for pushing the boundaries of rock and roll, but how would you assign a style to a band that creates on such an epic scale?
The band may have had progressive tendencies on ‘Aqualung’, but there were also moments where they would just dive headfirst into classical music, like making an arrangement of Bach’s famous ‘Bouree’. If anything, the band seemed to be taking the piss out of progressive music half the time, considering Thick as a Brick was meant to be an inside-joke concept album that insinuated that a kid wrote the entire thing.
By that time, prog had gotten stale, and Anderson had said that if someone really wanted to learn about the genre, there were four bands they should follow, telling Vintage Rock, “I have a preference for those that aren’t trying to clone early Genesis, let alone King Crimson, Emerson, Lake and Palmer or Yes. And I guess you really have the big four there that I just mentioned”.
The idea of a big four can be felt in a few different genres. Punk and metal both have their selections, but few times has anyone proclaimed prog rock’s big four. Here, Anderson, the genre’s most legendary lead singer, has made his decision and it is quite hard to disagree with.
While each band may have fallen into the prog category, it would be difficult to categorise where they all fall on that spectrum. Genesis started by making episodic songs, but whereas Peter Gabriel approached the music like a theatre piece, King Crimson brought a sense of doom into the genre, as evidenced by the terrifying sounds of ‘21st Century Schizoid Man’.
Although Emerson Lake and Palmer and Yes made the kind of music one would expect from typical prog bands, the Big Bang for Anderson actually came from the mind of Syd Barrett, explaining, “The archetypal, prog rock band that preceded all of them was, of course, Pink Floyd who, back in 1967, performed songs from Pipers At The Gates Of Dawn. That was progressive rock music by any definition”.
Considering the genre wasn’t even invented yet, Barrett’s way of bringing fanciful characters to life in songs and stretching out tracks with longer parts was unprecedented at the time. This was prog’s unintended Bible, and the rest of the world needed to follow suit. For all those five bands that broke the mould for prog rock, there was much more to explore beyond that.
Rush would continue down a progressive path with even more extravagant arrangements, and it’s hard to think of bands like Radiohead existing today were it not for progressive rock bands coming before them. Anderson may have dropped off listening to progressive music in his spare time, but the roots that were planted by those four bands are still a part of the cultural conversation years later. Punk may have told us that prog music was supposed to suck, but what’s wrong with being able to arrange stuff really well?
