What was the first prog rock album ever made?
There’s progressive, and there’s ‘prog’. The former evokes heady journeys of sophisticated, unreined creativity, rejecting pop formulas in pursuit of boundless sonic hinterlands.
The latter, however, has become a pejorative byword for bloated, gratuitous self-indulgence lost in a bubble of self-satisfied excess in need of punk‘s burst.
Well-trodden ‘punk killed prog’ narratives aside, the truth is that ‘prog’ has a broad grey area between the pioneering and the silly. Many artists tagged as prog deeply influential to the punk generation and reached its mid-1970s peak from the prior decade’s pop.
Prog’s genesis was forged at the dawn of the album. While there were always LPs, the focus of bands during rock and roll up to the British invasion was the 45, pumping out single after single with a breathtaking pace. Pioneered by The Beach Boys and The Beatles in the mid-1960s, the album became a coherent artistic statement in its own right, grounded in a conceptual theme and lyrical uniformity and overseeing a shift toward pop music being listened to rather than just for dancing.
In 1998’s Listening to the Future: The Time of Progressive Rock, philosopher and prog fan Bill Martin touched on the expanding peripheries of music at this creatively furtive time: “Many groups and musicians played important roles in this development process, but none more than The Beach Boys and The Beatles … (they) brought expansions in harmony, instrumentation (and therefore timbre), duration, rhythm, and the use of recording technology. Of these elements, the first and last were the most important in clearing a pathway toward the development of progressive rock.”
With Pet Sounds and The Mothers of Invention’s Freak Out! highlighted as important precursors, it’s The Beatles’ defining Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club is often touted as the first true concept album and, thus, arguably the roots of prog rock. While the fictitious Sgt Pepper Band is upheld in earnest for the first two songs and its brief later reprise, the moment ‘Billy Shears’ has finished ‘With a Little Help From My Friends’, the concept is abandoned in favour of a regular collection of songs that while continuing the album artform’s emerging artistic ambition, weren’t guided by any particular narrative or overriding arc.
Sgt Pepper’s did, however, afford a divide between pop and rock. Perhaps insisted upon by music journalists, but a chasm between radio-friendly pop and ‘serious’ rock vanguard began to materialise, the road to prog paved by rock’s embrace of the studio as an instrument in its own right and the album medium ever-more defined as every artist’s ultimate expression.
What separated the earliest progressive artists from the caricature that later developed around the genre was a genuine sense of curiosity. Bands were no longer content with the limitations of three-minute singles and standard verse-chorus structures, instead borrowing ideas from jazz, classical and avant-garde music to expand what rock could encompass.
The ambition was not necessarily to appear intellectual, but to test how far popular music could stretch artistically at a time when the studio itself was rapidly evolving into a creative playground.
That experimental spirit is why prog’s influence reaches far beyond the genre’s stereotypical image. Elements of progressive rock can be heard in everything from David Bowie’s theatrical art rock to Radiohead’s structural complexity and post-punk’s willingness to deconstruct convention. Even many punk musicians who publicly rejected prog retained admiration for artists pushing boundaries in unconventional ways, revealing that the divide between the two movements was never quite as absolute as cultural mythology later suggested.
The first album to truly claim conceptual narrative is The Moody Blues’ 1968 Days of Future Passed, a lofty piece of quaint, baroque psychedelia in cahoots with The London Festival Orchestra detailing the chronology of the archetypal ‘everyman’ and narration from Mike Pinder. The first use of ‘prog rock’ was in the liner notes of Caravan’s 1968 self-titled debut, one of the many groups out of the Canterbury scene imbuing folk and rock with classical elements.
From Brian Wilson’s pop ambitions across symphony orchestras to Kent’s improvisation, many albums can be posited as prog rock’s ‘first’, but prog rock will always be defined by the wieldy output of Yes and Emerson, Lake, and Palmer, still suffering from a stereotype of theatrical bombast and costly record packages they’ve yet to shake off.
