> Have you ever been here, Jon? :-) Actually, bits of the country still
> keep that 'olde-worlde' charm, but identikit pedestrianised precincts in
> every two-bit town tend to smooth off the interesting rough edges.
No, curse the luck, I spent three years in France and another year in
Germany in the early Sixties as an Air Force brat, and my parents toured all
over contintental Europe with me in tow, hitting all the museums and
historical sites we could find. It was wonderful, but we never made it
across the Channel. I honestly attribute my own musical tastes largely to
that experience.
> Although it's a small minority of current prog bands that use Mellotrons,
> even sampled ones. And to get all picky on you, prog was dying a bloody
> death years before digital synths - the early '80s bands predate the
> DX7...
> Seems to me to be more of a cultural shift, where the generation that grew
> up with the Moodies, Crimson, Genesis et al. all got married and had kids,
> and started listening to the Alan Parsons Project and ELO, and their
> younger
> siblings turned to other music, perceived as current. Or am I just talking
> crap? :-)
That is certainly a big part of it, but I think the pressures of bands like
KISS that were starting to make TONS of money playing really crude rock but
with elaborate visual presentations kind of worked on kids' lizard brains
and separated skill from the equation. The death of the Mellotron was the
coup de grace.
> Haven't Muse already done that? In seriousness, there are some decent
> current prog bands, but most of them sound like nothing's chaged in 30
> years. I'm not actually arguing that this is a bad thing, only it has
> little
> to do with moving forwards, and a lot to do with recreating something that
> was once innovative. Wouldn't stop me doing exactly that, mind...
And I certainly don't advocate just reliving ancient prog, but the meld of
rock power, classical majesty and technical virtuosity and musical passion
is still fertile ground with a lot left to say as a genre. Look at how much
mileage a very limited form like the blues still gets.