Do You Recognize Yourself Here?

Phase 1: Discovery. You hear Yes's "Fragile" in college. "Roundabout" hooks you from the first pluck of Steve Howe's guitar. By the time "Heart of the Sunrise" ends, you are left spent and exhausted from the most magical musical experience of your life to this point. You then learn that Yes is called a "Progressive Rock" band, and that groups such as King Crimson, Jethro Tull, Emerson Lake & Palmer, and Genesis are also considered part of this genre. (You even learn to your absolute shock that Peter Gabriel was once a member of Genesis!) This is the most wonderful time of all, when the world seems full of an almost limitless number of classic masterpieces crying for your attention. The only constraint on your enthusiasm is your wallet, and you do whatever you can to purchase as much as possible as quickly as possible.

Phase 2: Fandom. Your taste in various performers leads you to fixate on one or two (or more) who you believe hold the key to indisputable artistic greatness. You can enumerate the subtle nuances during 20 versions of "Easy Money" that you have amassed during your purchase of the entire King Crimson Collectors' Club series. You have Yesshows, Yessongs, 9012Live, Keys to Ascension 1, Keys to Ascension 2, House of Yes, the Masterworks tour bonus discs, and over 100 other "foreign pressings" of Yes live concerts. You begin looking for demos, mp3s of unreleased material, a rare cassette of a drunken Chris Squire's rendition of "100 Bottles of Beer on the Wall" recorded on the Yes tour bus in 1977...every YesScrap you can get your hands on. You collect every solo album by members of Yes, Genesis etc. You MUST have EVERYTHING relating to your favorite groups. You check the ebay search page for "Yes" 20 times a day. You smile knowingly when friends and family members ask the perfectly logical question: Why do you need 55 different recordings of "Roundabout"? Foolish people!

Phase 3: Expansion. A guy working in a record store notices you keep buying Genesis CDs, and says "hey, try Marillion, they sound a lot like Genesis". They get their hooks in you, and you buy every Marillion album on used CD. Then you realize that these are all the "old" single CD editions, and you proceed to purchase all the remastered and expanded 2 CD versions with the bonus tracks. You get all the Fish solo CDs. You buy all the official bootlegs released by Marillion and Fish, except you cannot find the elusive Yin & Yang, Vol. 26. Over the next several months, the same record store guy tells you that IQ, Arena, Pendragon, Citizen Cain, Galahad, and The Watch sound like Genesis...You are so happy to have discovered so many bands that sound like Genesis!!

Phase 4: Nostalgia. This is a transitional phase: now comes that terrifying moment when you feel that you've heard it all. You've collected all the works of the "Big 5", even the ones everyone else thinks suck, like "We Can't Dance", "Open Your Eyes", and "Love Beach"...on SACD, CD, cassette, vinyl, and 8-track. The record store guy has run out of recommendations. You have reached the dreaded "There is No More Progressive Rock Left to Hear" point. What's missing in your life is the thrill of discovery: that first Rush of enthusiasm for each masterpiece as it sounded when you first really cranked it.

Phase 5: Crusade. Happily salvation is at hand, in the form of dozens of Internet sites for Progressive Rock. You learn that there are fine independent labels specializing in all sorts of prog sub-genres just waiting to be explored. There are two principal dangers with this phase. First is the danger to your health as you eat Ramen Noodles for every meal, because you are ordering so many CDs from The Laser's Edge, Wayside Music, Greg Walker, and Big Balloon. Your fingers have also ended up smashed to bloody pulps because you have installed CD racks on every exposed wall in your house, in order to hold your exponentially growing collection. The second danger is the tendency to make exaggerated claims for music that really isn't all that special or interesting just because it's obscure. People will look at you strangely as you vigorously try to defend the assertion that Gracious was England's best symphonic rock band or that Rick Wakeman was a wanker compared to the keyboardist for Quaterna Requiem. This phase can go on for years, with literally thousands of discs passing through a typical collector's hands in an endless crusade for that Holy Grail of Progressive Rock: the Gnosis "15" that no one else has ever heard of. If you have come to the point where your undisputable "Big 5" means Pentwater, Aka Moon, Groovector, The Red Masque, and Magma ("the Argentinian one, duh!"), then you've gone too far, and it's really time to move on to Phase 6. Certain persons may feel the need to start a multi-band international festival to promote all this new music they have been discovering. If this is the case for you, please check yourself into the nearest psychiatric hospital as soon as possible.

Phase 6: Renewal. One day, while shaving for the first time in 8 years, you spot the "Y" section in your collection, which is housed over the bathroom sink instead of a mirror. You pull out "Fragile", which you haven't heard in years. Playing this classic, just for old time's sake, you're stunned to realize that it truly is better than most of the obscurities that constitute your main musical diet. So you move on to old Genesis, King Crimson, Jethro Tull, Gentle Giant, PFM, Banco, Emerson Lake & Palmer, Camel, Van der Graaf Generator. It's as if you're hearing them all for the first time--and how alive, how refreshing they all sound! You fall in love with the great classics all over again, and you realize that the judgment of history isn't always wrong. (Well, the ELP has not aged all that well, but you can still look back with fondness at it.) There is a reason why there are 750 individual threads at Progressive Ears devoted to these bands!

Phase 7: Maturity. If you're lucky, you may get this far. You realize that it's not necessary to own 50 progressive rock CDs from the Basque region of Spain, 46 of which you never play, when you can be just as happy with 20 of them, 16 of which you never play. The complete set of Marillion official bootlegs, that rare Yugoslavian pressing of "The Snow Goose", 20 or 30 festival compilation CDs, six different remastered editions of "Red", your cherished 50 CD Klaus Schulze "Historic Edition" box set, and literally dozens of albums about which you remember nothing beyond the fact that they all sounded like Genesis--all of these go straight to eBay where they will be returned to circulation to nourish the next generation of progressive rock CD collectors. And as for you, well, you still purchase new releases, but very selectively, and you take the time to savor every one with deep late night listens on the $50,000 stereo purchased via your eBay proceeds.

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