Bear in mind it's a whole different generation. In the mid 70s, everybody who I knew, including all the highschool cool kids, loved mainstream radio music that was (and is) considered prog, like Jethro Tull's Aqualung and Thick as a Brick, and Pink Floyd's Dark Side of the Moon (which I cannot stand, but that's a subject for another post). Free form "progressive rock" radio allowed DJs to have personal discretion in what they played and the time to feature entire album sides. It was a different era; the record companies were rolling in dough, experimentalism was encouraged. If you're interested in my historical take on this, there's an elaborate discussion I'm having with prowler in the "The Reason We're Cardiacs Fans!" thread you could take a look at ...
SaltyJon> I was a pretty big fan of Primus at the time (still enjoy them),
Oh I'm definitely still a Primus fan. Claypool's sense of humor covers a multitude of sins, including his rather innocent grasp of what should be every bass player's grab bag of music theory. The "fusion" bass feature in the song "Frizzle Fry" and the solo in "Tommy The Cat" are just embarrassing. But still, they have done some great songs, "Mr. Knowitall" and "Mrs. Baileen" among them.
SaltyJon> and on one of Les Claypool's Frog Brigade's live discs, there was a cover of this weird song "Thela Hun Ginjeet"...it intrigued me, wasn't much like anything I'd ever heard before. So I did a little bit of searching, found this "unknown" group King Crimson and the album Discipline, and promptly fell in love for a while.
That's so interesting to me, seeing it from the other side. You know, of course, that the live bit they tape-cassette segue out of at the beginning of "To Defy the Laws of Tradition" is a Rush tune, right? Claypool's a huge Rush fan and he also covered Peter Gabriel's "Intruder." Of course you've prolly discovered that long-time King Crimson fans have a different perspective, and that while we like and appreciate the 80s band, it's the earlier stuff, for my money the John Wetton era, that really made King Crimson immortal. Lark's Tongues in Aspic is an enduring masterpiece -- and there aren't many of those in the TRO-Total / Atlantic stable of mid-70s hugely successful prog bands.
SaltyJon> At first I stuck with the big names, Genesis, ELP, Yes, etc. but then I realized I wasn't a big fan of Genesis or ELP.
Heh, speaking of which. Genesis and ELP are two bands who choked on their own success. ELP probably inspired more punk bands just by what a sheer monstrosity they had become by '74, the year their horrible triple live album came out. The sound quality and musicianship wasn't any better than a pirate live LP I had bought a year earlier so that was it for me, Guida's Fugue or not. Not to dismiss Keith Emerson, maddening though he can be, too lightly. He was and continues to be an enormous influence; his quartal writing on Tarkus continues to stick in my head. But he's a shameless thief so in love with the idea of pop success that he thought he could take pieces specifically known for their subtle timing structures like Brubeck's "Blue Rondo a la Turk" and Leos Janacek's "Symphonetta" and turn them into chugging symmetrical-time rockouts like, you know, nobody would notice or something. His best classical adaptation remains Bartok's "Allegro Barbaro" into "The Barbarian." And okay, with the perspective of decades of hindsight, I just revisited ELP's jamout on "Fanfare For the Common Man" and it wasn't quite as terrible as I remembered.
Genesis is another story. Phil Collins had such a different frontman demeanor than Peter Gabriel that I suppose they had no choice but to change their entire direction if they were to remain together. I, needless to say, have zero use for them from And Then There Were Three onward. But I always thought that PG Genesis would be one of the prog bands from the Golden Age that would stand the most revisiting. Lately, though, listening to their classic stuff I've been mostly impressed (sadly) by how diatonic and sing-songy so much of it is. I'll always have a place for "The Battle of Epping Forest" (ever try to play that tune in a crowed bar with a good jukebox? People get completely bolloxed up by the drum track) and that wonderful midsection of "Firth of Fifth" (and some truly standout cuts on Nursery Cryme and The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway), but yeah, overall they've definitely waned on me, too, in my case over decades.
SaltyJon> I still like Yes and King Crimson,
Yes, even back in the day, I only had partial use for. Close To The Edge is another enduring masterpiece and Fragile isn't far behind, but everything else I can sort of take or leave. The band you didn't mention is Gentle Giant -- and if you haven't checked them out, you really ought to. Start with The Power and the Glory and work your way back and forward from there.
SaltyJon> but most of my favorites are the lesser known/lesser adored groups. I'm a big Canterbury fan as well (Caravan, National Health, HatN, etc),
I wouldn't equate "lesser known" with "lesser adored" necessarily. All these groups had (and have) hardcore cult followings no matter how popular (or not) they wound up. I happened to catch a recent concert of Caravan's on YouTube, doing Mike Ratledge's "Backwards" (originally part of Soft Machine's "Slightly All The Time") with an orchestra (like on the studio record), and I was very pleasantly surprised. It's like they're doing the Fairport Convention thing, old guys reuniting to play congenial concerts in front of small, adoring crowds, of what has become classic material.
Bear in mind there would not be RIO as we know it without Canterbury, since so much of the impetus behind the startup of RIO came from arsehole attitudes and behaviors Virgin Records started exhibiting towards their progressive stable from the mid-70s onward. The story of Hatfield's massive debt after recording their first at Manor Studios was evidently only the beginning. I won't start on a big Dave Stewart rant; there's some of that in the "Canterbury Tales" thread already.
SaltyJon> but it's the RIO/avant/Zeuhl/Krautrock which really has my love as far as prog goes. Some groups completely turn me off, of course, but my rate of success with those groups is pretty high.
I'm not one of these people who believes that music is this ineffible expression that gets leached of its essence the more you talk about it (and as a prog fan, I'm sure you must've run into this because prog fans tend to love talking about the nuts and bolts of music and most people are content with "I like it cuz it's good / it's good cuz I like it" formulations. I have a bootstrapped, primarily self-taught knowledge of music theory and analysis and can pretty much describe in concrete terminology why it is I like or don't like something. So I'm a little betwildered why you'd even include Krautrock with RIO/Zeuhl (which belong together for I think obvious reasons). Faust was a unique, deeply influential cabaret / experimental art rock band that defied categorization and Birth Control was a kickin' classical and jazz-influenced progrock outfit for one or two albums in the mid-70s, but otherwise they were a poor man's Deep Purple. Kraftwerk is cyborg music, a precursor to techno maybe but definitely not progressive as rigorously defined. The synth-dominated Krautrock led by Tangerine Dream, Edgar Froese and others is more a species of ambient music and the jamming Krautrockers exemplified by Guru Guru, Highdelberg and Can didn't have much going for them in the way of musical/structural development. All in my everso-humble opinion, of course. But still ...
So I guess my question would be (retreating out of arrogant assertion), what is it about RIO and Zeuhl (I consider "avant-prog" an unnecessary term more clearly rendered by things like "experimental progrock," "art rock" or even just describing the music) that makes you like it? Is it the unusual amount of dissonance? The tar-black moods of certain pieces by Univers Zero and Art Zoyd? The assymmetrical rhythm patterns? The sheer exoticism of music sung in languages other than English? The amount of musical information conveyed, what Zappa called "statistical density"?
I'm not asking these things because I'm morbidly curious about the minutiae of your personal musical taste, but to get you started thinking about these things, the better to know your own mind.
SaltyJon> I enjoy all of the jazz/classical you mentioned there as well. I just listened to some Dolphy last night,
Eric Dolphy had to take a stand in the early 60s jazz war between the emergence of free jazz, spearheaded by Ornette Coleman (the approach he called harmolodics) and the modern classical-influenced, technique-oriented progressive jazz which he exemplified (and which Miles Davis still thought was too out-there to rank with the best of the jazz mainstream -- i.e. him). So he said something in an interview which has always struck me. He thinks of every note he plays -- no matter how oblique or dissonant -- as relating to the chord progression of a given tune. This, for me, amounts to a musical credo and influenced me so deeply that I carefully hand-painted "Allan Holdsworth is the Eric Dolphy of Fuzz Guitar" on the back of my car when I was your age, because I think Holdsworth's approach to soloing is about the same. It amounts to a reverence for the harmonic structure of a given tune that, while allowing for large amounts of dissonance up to and including bitonality, acts as a natural break against the potential chaos of soloing "out." Holdsworth's studio records I'm almost complete on owning. I worship his self-taught approach to harmony.
SaltyJon> and I've been a big fan of Rite of Spring since the first time I saw Fantasia. Didn't know what it was until much later, of course.
Hehe, the Stokowski arrangement, which is universally recognized by RoS lovers as having butchered the piece. But that's okay! -- ELP butchered the living hell out of Mussorgsky and still wound up turning the masses on to Pictures at an Exhibition. But it would take perhaps nuclear firepower to destroy what is probably the single most influential piece of 20th-century classical music. Here's a very slight little number I concocted under its influence, the Martian Fight Song.
If you'd really like to focus on the structure of the piece and not be overwhelmed by the sheer texture of even the best, most clearly-rendered orchestral version, you might wish to check out one of the reductions for pianos out there. There's the original composer's reduction for two pianos to rehearse the ballet; my favorite recording (and I think my favorite recording of the RoS, period) is from the mid-60s on Angel, by Michael Tilson Thomas and Ralph Grierson. There's also the Amsterdam Piano Quartet's proprietary arrangement (no one else authorized to record it by the legal stipulation of Stravinsky himself) for four pianos, one piano taking the percussion parts.
SaltyJon> As with you, I'm a bit broke as far as new music goes - I've been taking some heavy courseloads in school, so I don't work while there. Music purchases are based off the odd birthday cash or Christmas presents/money right now.
*sigh* ... No comment.
Well ... except save for this -- and please don't consider me out-of-line because I'm being entirely sincere. This is the prime of your life. Next time you blink, you'll be thirty-five. (I didn't believe this either until it happened to me.) I know how easy it is to get sucked into these fora, and I couldn't help notice your comment to that effect about your time spent on ProgArchives. Stay focused on your coursework. If that means spending much less time on these places, then do that. Okay, pseudo-parental lecture finished. Please take that in the spirit in which it is meant.
SaltyJon> As for your song there, I enjoyed it.
I gotcha. It's good cuz you liked it, and you liked it cuz it's good
SaltyJon> It's definitely more than I would have been able to manage, as I've never done much in the way of writing music.
Dude, it took me two years to write that piece. And it wasn't an assignment to please a teacher for a letter grade. Maybe it's good, maybe it's bad (maybe it's a little of both), but I'll tell you at the very least it is as or more complex than anything you're listening to now, including Henry Cow and Univers Zero. And that's not blowin' my own horn, that's stating an objective fact. C'mon, bro, you're a fellow proghead. Am I on the right track, wrong track, do the sounds suck, does the meter scheme work, do the melodies get stuck in your head ... sorta feedback-y observations.
SaltyJon> I play music (not very well at that), bass and the occasional trombone,
Once again, you 'n' me both. I played bass in highschool with a close friend keyboard player and sousaphone in marching band. And I wasn't anywhere near as proficient as I wanted to be.
SaltyJon> but I've barely had any experience writing and little more in a group.
It's my belief that you can't really be taught composition. Composition's gotta teach you. You can sit there in a class, go through the motions and punch out exercise pieces in any style they want, because they'll lay it all out for you. It's like doing algebra. But if you have the composition bug, if you really want to learn how to write music as a burning desire, your school could burn down tomorrow and you'll still find your way to the library, Grove's Music Dictionary and every musician you can talk to. "Experience" will seem irrelevant because you'll live with thoughts of it constantly.
SaltyJon> I did take a course last year on digital music, and we had to make some music, but my final project ended up sounding something like a mix of Neu! and Kraftwerk - not exactly what I wanted to do, but it was easy enough that I could finish it on time.
Demonstrating my thesis that Krautrock sucks
But seriously, you know exactly what I mean ... there are certain styles that are paint-by-numbers. Create a percussion loop, choose among a fairly small number of four-chord progressions (and if you're amused by music theory humor, check out what started the "The Reason We're Cardiacs Fans!" thread) and noodle over it for awhile on one scale until you find a melody. If you're really ambitious you could try four different chords for a chorus, maybe even in a related key, and then a little bridge or what The Beatles called a middle 8 to link the two sections together. Next thing you know, you have a little pop tune you can impress the girls in class with, and it only took you an evening to write and sequence the whole thing.I mean, what teacher in a digital music class wouldn't give that an A?
Trying to be original, or trying to genuinely express something, are of course a different set of issues.
Bob
I'm glad you're okay with the sounds; you must have a decent card in your computer. The desktop we use here has a brand-new processor and tons of RAM, but I can't tell you how shitty the sound card is; and my stuff sounds positively wretched on it. The sound card in this laptop is much higher fidelity.
). I'm more a fan of their studio work, though I bought one of their DVDs a while back and it's got some amazing stuff on it. The first half hour or so is improvs by various members of the group, and they're joined on the DVD by Hoppy Kamiyama on keyboards and vocals. I'm not sure how familiar you are with his work, but he's a pretty great keyboardist (at least to my ears) and his vocal style is something like a mix between Vander's and Yoshida's. Plus, during one of the improv pieces he plays a rubber duck. As far as Ruins goes, I'd say I like the studio stuff and the live stuff about equally. I always get a bit of a chuckle when I let people know that their material is almost completely composed. Most people who I introduce the band to don't believe me for a while. 
That's the kind of reaction I like to fob off on people. I guess I can't really separate my ultimate view of the album from the fact that I bought it as 14-year-old ELP freak. Which goes to straight to your earlier point. I loved that flute solo as only an inexperienced enthusiast can. And lost my love of it (along with most of ELP) as the proggier stuff they drove me to opened up my ears ...
just Fripperized fuzzchords and Wetton's blues-rock runs ... then it settles down to the main theme over Wetton and Bruford slamming another of their kickass subdivided riffs, 2+2+1+2+1 / 2+1+2+1 / 2+2+2+1+2+1 / 2+1+2+1 / which equals, lemme see ... 14/8 + 16/8 = 30/8 superimposed under three bars of 3+3+2+2/8 (3 x 10/8 = 30/8) which is the theme. Hehe, nice. Never counted that out before 
But I'll certainly keep a lookout for opportunities to revisit. And after this Holdsworth, it's Branca-hunting time ...