A prog library
- garethsprogblog
- 21 hours ago
- 15 min read
I probably read as many books relating to music than I do novels. The last two novels I read were The Wizard of the Kremlin by Giuliano da Empoli and The Rose Field by Philip Pullman; the former a satire on post-Yeltsin Russia and something I’d regard as a companion piece to Julian Barnes’ The Noise of Time about Dmitri Shostakovich, a book that might interest avant prog fans, the latter is the final part of the Book of Dust trilogy, itself a continuation of the His Dark Materials trilogy and a must-read for anyone who likes fantasy fiction.
While I read through novels without pausing – I got through the 640 pages of The Rose Field over three evenings and The Wizard of the Kremlin over two days – I usually take my time over books about music, especially if they are comprehensive lists such as Jerry Lucky’s The Progressive Rock Files and Progressive Rock Handbook or academic studies like Edward Macan’s Rocking the Classics, Bill Martin’s Listening to the Future or the Kevin Holm-Hudson edited Progressive Rock Reconsidered.
On the other hand, I tend to treat biographies and autobiographies as though they were novels, and if they’re well written I’ll have finished them within a couple of days. One of the ‘list’ books that can be read in around an hour is another of Lucky’s books, 20th Century Rock and Roll: Progressive Rock (2000) which is a book of the 50 most influential progressive rock albums of all time, up to the date it was published.
I’d encourage anyone interested in listening to prog to also read about it too, including those new to the genre. There are a large number of posts on r/progrockmusic asking for what to listen to: 'I'm new into prog...', 'I want to get into prog...' or ‘my Spotify recommendations are all the same’, where before clicking 'post', the novice should firstly understand that 'prog' is a musical form defying an accurate description, not in the least homogeneous and secondly, that the pool of around 80,000 predominantly anglophone respondents tend to reply with the names of their favourite bands, some of the suggestions falling outside the genre and many will be for music the original poster has already heard but not bothered to mention.
I’m certain that a message to the sub asking what to listen to is the opposite to a quick solution, a sure-fire way of generating noise and wasting time because it's highly unlikely the responses will be a perfect fit with anyone’s particular tastes, so the time would be better spent doing one’s own research. A subscription to Prog magazine with its coverage of pretty much the full spectrum of the genre, coupled with whatever someone has already listened to should provide sufficient direction for anyone to expand their prog experience, help sort out likes from dislikes and increase their knowledge of the genre. There are also plenty of books on prog rock and even more online sites and blogs.
If someone really feels they must ask the sub, please help the community help you by telling us what music you already like and what you don't like. For instance, if you don't like jazz you'll be unlikely to like prog-jazz, jazz rock maybe not even Canterbury sub-genres; if you really dislike metal, that does away with at least half of modern prog. It’s also important that you understand the golden rule: you don’t have to like all prog. The genre is a broad church, spreading from metal to folk and it's fine to like some of the music while not liking other elements.
While there’s no single way to explore prog, I do think we should all plough our own furrow, with a bit of nudging and guidance, but basically following our own path. In the 70s, I relied on a close-knit group of friends for suggestions - research has shown tribe-forming and the finessing of musical taste occur during teenage brain development – and we’d lend out and borrow albums from each other or sit around in each other’s houses listening to what someone had just bought. I also adopted some strategies of my own: looking at the album cover art and reading details of the instrumentation normally gave a decent indication whether or not an album was worth buying, but you only have to see Gentle Giant's Acquiring the Taste to realise great prog didn't always come with fantastic artwork and that it wasn't the instruments available to a group that made the music interesting, it was how they were employed in the song writing. I checked out the musical histories of musicians in bands that I liked, finding out who else had they worked with and any previous groups they’d been in. The number of progressive rock bands was limited in the early 70s so this wasn’t too onerous, even without the internet, because the weekly music papers, Melody Maker, NME and Sounds carried all the pertinent information.
The number of books about prog took off a few years after the start of the third wave when Amazon seemed like a good idea and prog could be discussed in polite company once again. The recommendations sent to me when I browsed Amazon for prog releases I couldn’t find in shops included Jerry Lucky’s The Progressive Rock Handbook and it proved very useful when I visited record stores. I took it around Europe with me until the pages were in danger of falling out and it would later be replaced by Lucky’s more comprehensive Progressive Rock Handbook.
I found out about Macan’s book and the first of my Bill Martin books, Music Of Yes: Structure and Vision in Progressive Rock shortly after my brother bought Paul Stump’s The Music’s All That Matters in a Virgin Megastore and I was looking for my own copy. Unable to locate Stump’s book which had gone out of print - I had to wait until the 2010 edition to add it to my collection – I came across Macan’s Rocking the Classics and bought that instead.
My prog library, boosted by a near-complete set of Prog magazines and a significant Prog Italia magazine collection, continues to grow.
The ‘lists’
Though largely an A - Z catalogue of bands, with brief descriptions of the music and a strict discography, both Jerry Lucky’s Progressive Rock Files and Progressive rock Handbook include an introductory discussion about progressive rock, though that’s not why I bought them. As early examples of books that promoted the genre, I used them to identify potential additions to my collection and they didn’t just sit on my bookshelves, their slightly dog-eared appearance is down to being carried around as reference manuals in record shops. In the early 2000s I holidayed extensively around Europe and listing the country of origin was particularly helpful.
Lucky’s 20th Century Rock & Roll: Progressive Rock is a different matter. Published half-way through 2000, it’s a short list (152 pages) of what the author considers to be the top 50 most influential prog bands set out in alphabetical order, and while it includes the usual suspects Emerson Lake & Palmer, Genesis, Jethro Tull, King Crimson, Rush and Yes, it also throws in the odd curve ball like Mexico’s Cast, Germany’s Grobschnitt, and the Hungarian band Omega. It expands on the histories and descriptions laid out in The Progressive Rock Files and The Progressive Rock Handbook for each band and furnishes us with facts, rather than a personal opinion on why each band deserves their place on the list. It’s irrelevant that his choice won’t coincide exactly with anyone else’s because it’s in the nature of progressive rock fans to advocate for their own favourites during impassioned debates; everyone is going to have their own personal preference. I’m not sure of the criticism suggesting that the information had been culled from the internet, because at the time of its publication there was limited fan-produced material on the internet. I happen to like a book format, and my criticism relates to an apparent absence of proof-reading, exposed by poor grammar and more worryingly, by what appears to be a neglect of fact-checking, most notably but not restricted to repeated reference to Pink Floyd’s Dave Gilmore.
Whatever the shortcomings of 20th Century Rock & Roll: Progressive Rock, I’ll remain ever thankful for Lucky cross-referencing Celeste and Banco del Mutuo Soccorso in the Finisterre entry of The Progressive Rock Files which opened up a whole world of Fabio Zuffanti projects and other progressivo italiano for me to seek out and enjoy.
I have two copies of Charles Snider's Strawberry Bricks Guide to Progressive Rock, the 2007 edition that lists notable releases by year up to the end of 1979 and the 2017 revised and extended edition that ends in 1982 and includes a series of ‘portraits’, articles written around some of the progressive rock musicians’ answers to written questions submitted by Snider. The first of these volumes was an early addition to my library and I found that Snider’s descriptions were mostly quite accurate, so I could rely on what he’d written when I was considering buying albums, the second has a more comprehensive introduction.
Prog 50. Progressive Rock Around the World in 50 Years is a 2017 book by Maurizio Galia which differs from Lucky’s guides by listing bands by country and including a small photo of each one.
The first time I visited Pisa was in 2013, where La Galleria del Disco, one of the two record stores I discovered, had a stand devoted to Italian prog CDs. It also displayed a book called Progressive Italiano, an A-Z guide to 70s progressivo bands and their albums, written by Alessandro Gaboli and Giovanni Ottone. This genuine pocket book replaced Jerry Lucky’s guides on all subsequent visits to the Italy, and even though I don’t agree with too many of the album ratings, I believe it’s indispensable for any travelling fan of progressivo italiano.
I have a few more books on Italian prog, three of which concentrate on music produced during the 70s: El Libro del Prog Italiano by John N. Martin, Michele Neri and Sandro Neri is a hardback in the same style as Gaboli and Ottone – both are published by Giunti; Mox Cristadoro’s Progressive Italiano is a list of his 100 best Italian prog albums, similar to, but more comprehensive than the Gaboli and Ottone edition.
In his book Rock Progressivo Italiano, Massimo Salari concentrates on Italian bands in the years between 1980 and 2013, coinciding with the second and third waves of prog, the first comprehensive list of Italian music I’d seen about more modern Italian prog. While these four books are written in Italian, Andrea Parentin’s Rock Progressivo Italiano, subtitled An Introduction to Italian Progressive Rock, is not only a list of the author’s favourite 100 albums, covering the entire prog time line, it has an excellent introduction to the genesis of the genre and has a separate list of groups by region. This was my second Italian prog book purchase – it’s written in English and Parentin, while describing his individual choices, translates excerpts of the Italian lyrics to provide a greater insight into the music. I’d recommend it to any anglophone interested in progressivo italiano.
Augusto Croce’s ItalianProg: The comprehensive guide to the Italian progressive music of the 70's, the print version of his ItalianProg website created in 2002, is another reference restricted to music from the 70s. The book was first published in 2008 thanks to a collaboration with the AMS record label, itself connected to the specialist Italian prog vinyl and CD distributor BTF (renamed from Vinyl Magic), and was written in English to maximise its reach. Japanese and Italian editions followed and the Updated English edition was released this year.
The Return of Italian Pop by Paolo Barotto is a Vinyl Magic publication, predating the name change to BTF. Written in English and minimally illustrated with album covers, it describes itself as ‘a complete guide to Italian progressive music’, and though it includes groups releasing original material during the 1990s in a chapter with the title ‘New Progressive’, it gets no further than the middle of the decade; my copy was printed in 1996.
General reading
Jerry Ewing's Wonderous Stories, Will Romano's Mountains Come Out of the Sky and Prophets and Sages by Mark Powell are all good general overviews, though Powell’s book is restricted to progressive rock’s formative years, running from 1967 up to 1975. There are a few differences between the three. Ewing’s work is lavishly illustrated in colour but is a bit short on words, and as a hard cover publication it makes an ideal coffee table book; Romano also has colour illustrations, mostly of album covers, and includes the thoughts of the musicians he’s interviewed to add weight to his own words; Powell’s book is fully illustrated but apart from 16 colour plates composed primarily of LP sleeves, the photographs are printed in black and white. Along with a description of featured albums, he includes reviews and interviews taken from UK music papers providing good, in-depth coverage. It’s worth owning all three – I tend to dip in and out of all of them.
Another general book by Romano is Prog Rock FAQ, set out in no particular order but covering a wide range of subjects. Compiled from his interviews with musicians and articles for both specialist magazines and daily newspapers, this isn’t so much frequently asked questions as looking for subject matter that most prog fans wouldn’t even think about, a sort of detailed and informed book of prog trivia. I find it quite fascinating.
David Weigel, a Washington Post journalist, provides a good number of references in his book The Show That Never Ends, a run through the history of prog, but despite what appears to be diligent research, my expectations after reading a few pages weren’t that high. The book is America-centric, written for a home audience by an American, where even the dust jacket illustration is dreadful and over-the-top, and the errors begin to creep in: “When [Steve Hillage] left, Egg slimmed down to Dave Stewart on keyboards, Clive Brooks on bass, and Mont Campbell on drums…”
Stephen Lambe’s Citizen Of Hope And Glory is the story of progressive rock written from a personal point of view and it’s so much better than Weigel’s effort. Lambe has been one of the promotors of the Summer’s End Festival since 2006 and is a former Secretary of the Classic Rock Society, so he’s a voice of authority when it comes to prog, and with very few exceptions presents subject matter in an impartial manner.
Former professional bass guitarist and later associate professor at the University of Otago in Dunedin, Robert G. H. Burns also produced a ‘listener’s companion’ history of prog under the title of Experiencing Progressive Rock. This is a well thought out and executed document, meticulously researched as you’d expect from an academic. I disagree with some of his writing but overall it’s a good read.
Academic studies
I volunteered for and took part in research for Paul Goodge’s PhD thesis An Acquired Taste? The Enduring Legacy of Prog, recruited via a letter in Prog magazine, believing that the idea that in the the voice of fans needed to be heard to enrich our understanding of how and why prog rock was valorised. Goodge was the first person to apply rigorous academic methods to the subject of prog fan views and was awarded his Doctorate in 2022, but there’s been a concerted effort to reappraise the genre since the resurgence (or detoxification) of progressive rock in the mid 90s when authors were once more able to write about prog without being pilloried. Edward Macan’s Rocking the Classics: English Progressive Rock and the Counterculture (1997), Paul Stump’s The Music’s All That Matters (1997) and Bill Martin’s Music of Yes: Structure and Vision in Progressive Rock (1996) and Listening to the Future: The Time of Progressive Rock, 1968-78 (1997) were all attempts to address the shortage of critical material about the genre, not simple biographies that had been available before (e.g. Yes Perpetual Change by David Watkinson, 2001; Close to the Edge, the story of Yes by Chris Welch, 1999), looking at the genre from musicological, sociological and philosophical perspectives, putting it in context of how, when, where and why.
More recently, Paul Hegarty and Martin Halliwell published Beyond and Before. Progressive Rock since the 1960s (2011). I disagree with some of their ideas, but with backgrounds in Philosophy and Visual Culture (Hegarty) and American Studies (Halliwell), the writing should be taken seriously.
A series of essays edited by Kevin Holm-Hudson published as Progressive Rock Reconsidered (2001) continued the academic approach and set a new standard of analytical writing, but how many prog fans are aware that there have been a series of international conferences on progressive rock? The first was held in 2014 at the University of Burgundy, Dijon, and I received the proceedings from this meeting in book format, Prog Rock in Europe. Overview of a persistent musical style edited by Philippe Gonin, as a Christmas present a few years ago.
Andrew Keeling’s series of Musical Guides to King Crimson albums fall between academic study and in-depth band history where Keeling, an academic and composer, provides each guide with social and musical context, meaning and analysis. There’s even an endorsement from Robert Fripp, quoted on the 10/50 Edition of the Musical Guide to In the Court of the Crimson King: “The guide is stunning, an exemplary piece of work. It sets a standard in the field” and a new edition, a Musical Guide to Red, is on its way.
Biographies and autobiographies
Though not a major fan of biography as a literary genre, I make an exception for some prog musicians such as Bill Bruford. His The Autobiography (2009) was a book that I could hardly put down, setting itself apart by avoiding a straightforward chronological narrative and using a series of ‘frequently asked questions’ to begin each chapter.
I also like to read the stories behind my favourite bands. While my shelves contain some very readable accounts, Steve Hackett’s 2020 autobiography A Genesis In My Bed for instance, much of my library is comprised of run-of-the-mill journalism about Yes, former Yes members, Pink Floyd and Syd Barrett. My Jethro Tull book Minstrels in the Gallery. A History of Jethro Tull by David Rees (1998) isn’t very exciting, my signed copy of the John Wetton biography My Own Time by Kim Dancha (1997) doesn’t answer any of the questions I had about the subject, and Greg Lake’s Lucky Man (2017) is genuinely poor, though not as embarrassingly bad as Keith Emerson’s Pictures of an Exhibitionist (2003), which I loaned out with instructions not to return. Paul Stump attempted a book on Gentle Giant, Acquiring the Taste (2005) which I enjoyed, although I appear to hold a minority opinion: three Amazon reviewers derided it for being too verbose, factually incorrect and over-reliant on pre-existing sources.
On the other hand, there are some well-researched and well-written biographies. Sid Smith did an incredible job with In the Court of King Crimson (2001), followed up in 2019 by the expanded and updated In the Court of King Crimson. An Observation over 50 years, and Jim Christopulos and Phil Smart produced the excellent Van der Graaf Generator - The Book (2005). Coinciding with Van der Graaf Generator’s reunion, I somehow heard about its planned publication and pre-ordered my copy; it’s long since out of print and used copies can sell for between £180-£200.
My most recent purchase is the first English translation of Aymeric Leroy’s comprehensive guide to the Canterbury scene, Legends in Their Own Lunchtime (2026), where the details, all referenced, makes it another stand-out book. I also recommend the Robert Wyatt biography Different Every Time by Marcus O’Dair (2014) and Barry Miles’ Frank Zappa (2004).
Miscellaneous books
If you’re interested in prog, you might be interested in the instruments that have helped to define the genre. The Mellotron isn’t exclusive to prog but there’s little doubt that it found its natural home in progressive bands. Nick Awde’s Mellotron, subtitled The Machine and the Musicians that Revolutionised Rock (2008) is an extensive compilation of recollections of musicians closely associated with playing ‘the Beast’, in addition to an introduction on how the instrument worked, but for those interested in the full range of instruments and effects, there’s Gerard Brassols’ fully illustrated The Musical Instruments of Progressive Rock (2019).
Around the time that Nick Mason was presenting the radio series A History of Music and Technology in 2019, I found a copy of freelance writer and composer Robert Berry’s The Music of the Future (2016). Rather than imagining the future of music, the book concerns 200 years of composers, performers and inventors attempting to mark their place in history by attempting to imagine the music of their future, but mostly ending in failure. It’s not about prog, but it makes fascinating reading.
There’s one book in my collection that only proved useful for introducing me to the writing of Nick Coleman; Yes is the Answer and other prog rock tales (2013) is a compendium of lengthy anecdotes from industry insiders (a few musicians and a plethora of journalists/latterly novelists) about discovering prog. Edited by Marc Weingarten & Tyson Cornell, it looks the part: The dustcover on my hardback edition features a Nathan Popp design of a Roger Dean-like tree in watercolours; there’s a supportive quotation from Adrian Belew on the cover; the paper has a nice quality and the Goudy Old Style typeface fits a prog text really well; it has a good weight and sits comfortably in the hand; and to cap it off, there’s an apt quotation on the overblown nature of the genre before the first essay:
Disclaimer: Some of the essays in this book are prolix and self-indulgent.
These are essays about Prog Rock. This is as it should be.
It soon becomes clear that the views of the majority of the contributors have been forged under the influence of mostly soft but occasionally hard drugs and that their introduction to the genre was either at the tail-end of the golden period or later. They're predominantly American and apart from a couple of names (Jim DeRogatis, British-born Wesley Stace for example), they’re largely anonymous in the UK and I personally am not interested in their personal histories. On the other hand, Coleman writes about art-rockers Be Bop Deluxe, a band he got into to replace prog. The piece is holds together really well and for a Brit of a certain age, quite relatable, inspiring me to read his autobiographical memoir. I’d strongly recommend The Train in the Night: A story of music and loss, shortlisted for the 2012 Wellcome Trust book prize.
Even if the Weingarten and Cornell edition isn’t to my taste, the expanding number of books concerning prog is an indication of the health of the genre, and that can only be a good thing. Prog is music for the adventurous and books, like prog music, have the ability to take anyone curious enough to different worlds; books about prog show us the mechanics of that journey.