The Show That Never Ends: The Rise and Fall of Prog Rock

by David Weigel

“The Beatles,” said guitarist and producer Robert Fripp, “achieve probably better than anyone the ability to make you tap your foot first time round, dig the words sixth time round, and get into the guitar slowly panning the twentieth time.”

In his 1997 history Rocking the Classics, the music theorist Edward Macan argues that the progressives built their sound by “uniting masculine and feminine musical characteristics.”

They were English, at the exact moment when invocation of the word no longer instilled confidence.

second record. The cover portrayed Emerson, O’List, and Jackson as interlocked skeletons with brightly colored organs. To get that photo, the three were injected with mildly radioactive solutions, then X-rayed. When Emerson was photographed, he learned that sometime earlier he had broken two ribs.