[lamour]

A certain Aural Moon member has prodded me into adding to this apparently dead thread. I tend to be long-winded. I hope this doesn't ramble. ;-)

I was born in 1967 to parents who seemed to be very uninterested in music at all. I remember getting a transistor radio at some point when I was little and listening to AM radio. First song that really stands out in my memory is "Barracuda" by Heart. I pretty much listened to whatever was on the radio until around 7th grade when I started to get into Styx and Kiss and AC/DC. In HS, I was still listening to AC/DC and Judas Priest and Iron Maiden, but I'd started to listen to a "Classic Rock" radio station, and was starting to get into some of what I heard there. Yes, Kansas, Rush, Tull, Led Zeppelin. In college, a friend got turned on to Zappa and Renaissance and introduced me to them. Somewhere in here I picked up Crimson too.

Oh, and that other guy. ;-) I got into Todd Rundgren BIG TIME while I was in college. I heard "Hello It's Me" on the radio one day, and decided that I really liked it. I'd heard it before, but for some reason, it really struck me that day. I bought a LOT of Todd Rundgren. I have pretty much all of it now, and am impatiently awaiting his next release. ;-)

Up to this point, I'd still never heard the term "Progressive Rock". In 1988 or so, I started hanging out on Usenet in the music newsgroups. I picked up Kate Bush and really got into her for a while (her music! sheesh, you people). One day I was talking to someone in rec.music.misc about the music I liked, and he suggested a bunch of other stuff I'd probably be into. As a favor to me, for the cost of the tapes and shipping, he sent me about a dozen cassettes with various stuff on them including GG, Gong, VdGG, PH, Camel, and some other stuff I wasn't into as much. I decided someone needed to do something to make it easier to find more of this great music, so...

I started a mailing list called Gibraltar. My original thought was that the discussions would include Classic Rock music, but the people who subscribed were in it only for the prog, so that's where it went. I ran that for 4 years. I pretty much listened to only prog for those 4 years. I bought a LOT of CDs around then. Picked up some stuff by old bands people seemed to like like PFM, Le Orme, Banco, Can, Ange. Picked up a lot of new bands who seemed to be popular at the time like Anglagard, Anekdoten, Il Berlione, Minimum Vital, Kazumi Watanabe, Happy Family, Deus Ex Machina, Djam Karet, Ozric Tentacles, Univers Zero, Echolyn. After 4 years, just prior to me handing over the mailing list to him, Mike Taylor conducted surveys of the members of the Gibraltar mailing list to get the initial comments that formed the Gibraltar Encyclopedia of Progressive Rock. That is really the only remaining trace of any of that venture at this point.

I got married. I ran out of space to store CDs. I burned out on prog. I pretty much stopped buying CDs at this point. As such, that era is when almost all of my prog was collected. Until I started hanging out on the Moon, I was out of the prog loop entirely.

It's an odd time warp for me on the Moon. It seems like most people on the Moon know the "old" bands they grew up with and the "new" bands who are active now, but are somewhat unfamiliar with the bands who were big at the start of the prog revival when I was getting into it (this was the period when the prog fests started up, and Laser's Edge, Musea, and Cuneiform were starting to crank out CDs). Fueled somewhat by the reissues of old prog on CD, a new generation was being introduced to prog, and I was there for it...and then walked away. So, I don't know many of the old or new bands that everyone else seems to listen to, and it seems few know the bands I listen to.

So, when I say that I've never listened to Focus or Caravan or Soft Machine or whoever, it's not that I've never heard OF them, I've just never had a chance to hear them. I haven't listed EVERY prog band I listen to in this message, but I've listed the ones that I like...which are most of them that I've heard.

(and yes, I am truly not a Genesis or ELP fan. sorry)