ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the backgrounds and creative intentions of the British musicians and bands that comprised the 1970s British progressive rock movement. The musicians’ backgrounds were strictly white-collar, and their parents were often downright distinguished. Never working-class, it was rather the vital expression of a bohemian, middle-class intelligentsia. If the progressives approached the Wagnerian concept of the Gesamtkunstwerk at all, it was only intuitively and obliquely. The album-oriented rock radio format that many FM stations adopted in the early to mid 70s replaced the freeform ‘underground’ FM stations with a solid diet of progressive, metal, hard rock, and singer-songwriters, ensuring that the stadiums were filled when the bands came to town. Progressive rock was more or less loathed as much then as it is, but that, of course, says as much about the critics as it does about the genre itself.
