This blog comes about 20 years too late for me. But then again, back in 1989, when I was first discovering progressive rock, the Internet was still unknown to most people, and the very invention of the World Wide Web was itself two years away. Sure, there were active discussions of progressive rock on USENET, back when it had marginally legitimate uses (in that it was only a supreme waste of time, not the seedy underbelly of the Internet it has become since). But even that would not come to my attention until midway through my freshman year of college four years later.

Too late. The progressive rock era was arguably the time of rock music’s peak of experimentation — beginning roughly in 1967, with the release of Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, or, if you were really in the know (and alive, which I wasn’t), a year earlier, on June 27, 1966, with the debut album from Frank Zappa’s Mothers of Invention: Freak Out! and ending (more or less) with the death knell sounded by the release of Never Mind the Bollocks, Here’s the Sex Pistols on October 28, 1977. My personal era of obsession with exploring the outer realms of this musical universe itself lasted only a bit more than a decade.

Although I had encountered tantalizing teasers of the prog world, growing up as a child of the ’80s — “Owner of a Lonely Heart” and “That’s All” were my two favorite songs of 1983 — it wasn’t until a friend played the recently-released live Rush album A Show of Hands for me in late 1988, and shortly thereafter supplied me with a cassette dub* of his CD of Classic Yes — that I became truly aware of (and eventually infatuated with) the genre. It helped that the music of the late ’80s and much of the ’90s was the most worthless drek released thus far in my lifetime. But I scarcely paid attention: I was too busy exploring the nether reaches of Canterbury and Kraut Rock and Zeuhl by then to notice what was happening in the here and now of there and then.

I also remember the moment when I finally broke free of the spell of the music that was mostly being produced around the same time that I was. (For a time, in fact, I imagined that I just maybe had heard Tales from Topographic Oceans upon its release, while myself still in the womb.) The new awakening began slowly, first with my stunning encounter with Kid A in 2000, and finally coming fully a few months later, in 2001, when I first heard the new album Standards by Chicago-based musical collective Tortoise.

Since Radiohead and Tortoise reminded me that new music worth hearing is still being made in the world today (or alerted me to the fact that it was once again after a far-too-long hiatus), I’ve mostly listened to “current” music, albeit still with a progger’s ear. (Case in point: my favorite band of the decade by a large margin is Porcupine Tree.)

But I’ve never totally given up on prog. Strangely, though, I did come full circle: having long since exhausted the interest Rush could hold for me, I moved on by my college years and beyond. And then, in 2001, I began playing bass in an instrumental rock trio in Atlanta whose signature piece was a 13-song, 11-minute Rush medley.

And now, this website.

So, what’s all this, then? Besides being a quote from an old Monty Python’s Flying Circus sketch that I’ve never gotten out of my head, it’s a blog for the 15-year-old boy I might be if I were 20 years younger. Someone just discovering this crazy, absurdly complicated, restlessly inventive offshoot of rock music that flourished for a few brief years in the early 1970s and has, just barely, managed to survive to this day, despite all efforts by the rock press (most notably Rolling Stone magazine, though I’m sure if they had been around at the time Pitchfork would have done their part) to shove it down the memory hole over the intervening decades.

Because, you see, the Internet is a teeming haven of prog rock. It is here that prog has refused to die, and managed to flourish again. There are some great prog rock websites, and I will provide links to them along the way on this strange journey. But the primary focus here is on a single tool, a marvel of this era: YouTube. There is so much prog rock on YouTube. I am ceaselessly amazed by the breadth of incomprehensibly obscure nuggets of live prog video from the ’70s that have surfaced on YouTube in recent years.

It’s all there, of course. All you have to do is search for it. Back in my day (cue that annoying Dana Carvey character — and yes, I know that doesn’t narrow it down much), we didn’t have endless hours of every imaginable band’s live performances at our fingertips. We had to spend countless hours flipping through used vinyl at record stores. (You see, a record store is… uh… well, back before CDs… OK, a CD is… oh man, where do I begin?) We had to read between the lines in prog-hating books like the Rolling Stone Record Guide. We had to special order CDs from the local Musicland, flipping through a giant catalog of crap in 4-point type.

Yes, it’s all there. But you still have to know what to look for. You need a guide. A curator of the exhibit. And that’s where I come in. My goal with this blog is to help you navigate the landscape of prog rock videos on YouTube, offering a clip a day for… well… for as long as I can keep it up. The focus is going to be on the videos. This essay is surely the longest uninterrupted block of rambling blather you’ll encounter here. (If that’s what you’re after, check out my main blog.) But along the way I’ll probably throw in a few anecdotes about my own experiences hunting down prog rock in the wilds of two decades ago.

And just remember, I managed to do it all at what was probably the absolute nadir of prog rock. You kids these days don’t know how easy you’ve got it.

* Cassettes were once things you put music on. And the process of doing so was called “dubbing.” I used to be a badass, walking down to the local Walgreen’s with my cassette Walkman to pick up the latest copy of Mad magazine. Anyway… the point is, people have been sharing music one way or another for as long as recordings have existed, and they will continue to do so. And the RIAA can suck it, because if it weren’t for that cassette copy of a Yes CD back in 1989, I wouldn’t have spent ten years and countless thousands of dollars on hundreds of prog rock CDs. And I’m still spending money on music to this day, although most of the time now the product is delivered via Ethernet and Wi-Fi with no physical medium whatsoever. Think of the savings in overhead! That’s almost pure profit for the copyright holders (who are rarely the musicians themselves, for what it’s worth). You see, people will buy music they like, given the opportunity. But no one in the history of sound waves has ever liked music that they’ve never gotten a chance to hear in the first place.