What was the first prog-rock song to go to number one?
There’s a lot of contention around the definition of prog-rock, mainly because, despite its decades in the game, few people know what it actually means.
However, this all becomes a hell of a lot simpler when you listen to the wise words of prog-rock’s finest legends, like Peter Gabriel and Ian Anderson, who have both indicated that it has more to do with style and artistic development than anything else. As Gabriel once put it, “There were a lot of extraordinary musicians trying to break down the barriers to reject the rules of music. When it worked, we could move people and get some magic happening.”
Thus, many claim that prog-rock actually began long before the term itself was popularised, emerging in the mid-to-late 1960s with bands like The Beatles, Pink Floyd, and The Doors, who each introduced the initial strand of proto prog by placing a greater emphasis on innovative musical structures for a more sophisticated type of rock ‘n’ roll.
Records like Revolver and The Piper at the Gates of Dawn weren’t just your everyday rock records, and therefore were genuine masterpieces that challenged the boundaries of the mainstream, ushering in new concepts to demonstrate how music could be entire worlds, not just something you listened to and then forgot about as soon as it stopped playing.
From there, prog-rock became a breeding ground for testing the waters and taking musical artistic expression to novel places, with Pink Floyd continuing to lead the charge with the monumental The Dark Side of the Moon in 1973, alongside others, like Genesis, Rush, Yes, and King Crimson, who each took major risks to blend sociopolitical commentary and meticulous technicality with mainstream accessibility.
And because the genre emerged gradually before exploding into a perfect storm of musical excellence, tracing its roots is nearly impossible, unless you break down both iterations into two categories: one with the Fab Four and other pioneers, and another including those who carried the torch during prog-rock’s mainstream reign.
So, what was the first prog song to go to number one?
By that logic, The Beatles technically scored some of the first-ever proto-prog rock number ones, with songs like ‘Strawberry Fields Forever’ and ‘Eleanor Rigby / Yellow Submarine’ pushing what was expected in the pop-rock arena, as well as capturing the haze and psychedelia of the counterculture movement of the time.
However, during the genre’s most prominent years (the early-to-mid 1970s), Pink Floyd, Jethro Tull, Moody Blues and others secured multiple album number ones and even more reached the top ten, though none of those earned number one hits in the early days. Then, years later, Yes scored a number one hit with ‘Owner of a Lonely Heart’, and Pink Floyd finally got there with ‘Another Brick in the Wall (Part 2)’ in 1979.
This difficulty of finding such quantifiable prog-rock success proves that it was never solely about appealing to the masses or achieving widespread commercial success, but was about earning a more prominent and lasting impact, with many of those under the prog-rock umbrella changing the musical landscape far more than any other single big-hitters across music history.
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