IT WAS CHRISTMAS 1976. My family had just moved from one Midwestern town to another, and we’d been there long enough that I’d started a new school (as a high school sophomore), made some new friends, and gotten a job.
It was a fresh start for the family in many ways. My father, a Fundamentalist pastor, was setting aside that role to go into business with an old friend. This was a key moment in my teenage life; there had been no rock music in our home while I was growing up,1 as was the case in many religious homes; but at this point my parents had their hands full tending a store, and I had more freedom to listen to whatever I liked. In 1976, as you might guess, that was a pretty big deal: most of the greatest music in rock history had come out in the few years preceding.
I knew what I liked, because I’d spent the past five years listening to the school bus radio, where WLS Chicago – the greatest rock station in the Midwest – had given me a very complete education: Elton John. Three Dog Night. Queen. Aerosmith. Eric Clapton. Paul McCartney & Wings. The Eagles. I knew what I liked.
But at that point, I’d never heard of ‘progressive rock’, which was still a relatively new thing, younger than my little brother. I had heard Yes’s “Roundabout” (the single edit, anyway) on the radio, but had no other exposure to them; I had heard Pink Floyd in someone’s basement, but couldn’t buy Dark Side of the Moon for myself.
Yes and Floyd and all the rest were just up the road for me, of course. My buddy Joe, already deeply into Tull, would play Heavy Horses for me a year or so later, as my buddy Wamp would share out Alan Parsons’ I, Robot. But in late 1976, nothing like that had yet drifted over my transom.
Until “Carry On Wayward Son”.
I heard it on the radio while riding in a friend’s van. And from those opening a capella vocals through the final fading Hammond chords, I was stunned into speechlessness.
This was my first real exposure to progressive rock: music created by virtuoso players, wildly dynamic, with multiple solos – four guitar, one organ – counterpoint out the wazoo, that lone high-register piano, the intelligent and emotionally complex, almost mystical lyrics. Wild, unexpected modulations. Melodies that presented ideas, and then developed variations and extensions of those ideas.
This was a music unlike anything I’d ever heard.
I’d been raised on the piano and organ, prepared for a life of church music, but my mother had mercifully plopped down more classical than liturgical when I sat down to practice. I loved all of it – Chopin's etudes, Mozart’s concerti, Beethoven’s sonatas – and the structure and complexity had stretched my young brain. Now, to hear that kind of structure and complexity in rock music...
I got the album, and realized that “Wayward Son” is, of course, only a modest example of the band’s progressive chops: there was much more going on here, I learned right away. “What’s on My Mind”. “Miracles Out of Nowhere”. The heartbreaking “Cheyenne Anthem”. And that magnificent masterpiece, “The Wall”.
I would soon hear “Song for America”. “Hopelessly Human”. “Closet Chronicles”. My buddy Tom played the first album for me not long after, and I got to hear the spectacular “Journey from Miriabronn”. “Aperçu”. “Death of Mother Nature”. “Incomudro - Hymn to the Atman”. And eventually “No One Together”.
And on the radio, “Point of Know Return”, with – a violin! As signature as Tull’s flute – a classical instrument out there in front of the guitars. And then “Dust in the Wind”, a decade-defining classic, an utterly spiritual song, with its acoustic fingerpicking and that haunting violin, and vocals that were almost ghostly – sounding nothing like that band had ever done, portending the astonishing stylistic range of the prog bands I would soon discover.
Bands like Yes and Tull. And Floyd. And, later, Genesis and King Crimson. Emerson, Lake and Palmer. And eventually Dream Theater. Gentle Giant.
I would pick up Close to the Edge and Aqualung and Dark Side and Brain Salad Surgery. And 2112. Thick as a Brick. In the Court of the Crimson King.
But before all of them, touching this Midwestern boy’s earliest longings to hear the music of the spheres, there was Leftoverture... and a band that changed my thinking about music.
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