[10:35 AM] JP (he/him): I mean they’re not wrong, though I honestly would start with Can, personally, if the listener was in my listening-cave, I would put on Halleluwah, and probably only spend the first 2 or 3 minutes talking over it about how great it is – and while Can is definitely prog, I wouldn’t actually call Halleluwah prog, but you can hear how Can took music from there to prog
[10:37 AM] JP (he/him): but I’m kinda prog-averse, so I would probably take the music-historian approach to prog-initiation, rather than an approach that might end with getting someone into prog
[11:08 AM] JP (he/him): STORY TIME
[11:09 AM] JP (he/him): when I was 17 I was living in a tree fort behind an empty house down the street from a friend of mine. My ticket out of that sub-optimal lifestyle came in the form of a job as a graveyard shift dishwasher at Denny’s. I spent my 18th birthday in that sweaty, oil-stank kitchen. One of my coworkers – the line cook iirc – was super into Dream Theater. Idk if you know them, but they’re prog metal, but, like, if you took prog metal and put it in a pot and cooked off all the contaminants, so all you were left with was insanely proficient instrumentation arranged into equally complex concept albums. They were pursuing the perfection of taking fiction and expressing it in musical form – but their fiction was profoundly uninteresting to me – and technical proficiency in music wasn’t a trait I appreciated at back then.
[11:09 AM] JP (he/him): This guy – he was only a few years older than me, but, at that age, even 5 years seems like a century. He was tall, with short blond hair and 80’s gramma glasses – but not in a hipster retro way, this was the 1990s, before subcultures were submerged in irony and self awareness. He looked like if Napoleon Dynamite had a kid with Anthony Michael Hall. He was one of those people you meet who look as plain as plain can be, but contain an inner life as bizarre and self-interwoven as any surrealist artist from 1930s paris. He was an important lesson for me about listening to people, and about how cool weirdos are.
[11:11 AM] JP (he/him): I hated Dream Theater, and I hated those moments in his free-form lectures where he would force his foam-padded $3 earphones on my head to listen to a passage, fast-forwarding and rewinding his cassettes to find the right moment. More than that, I hated that feeling of trying to hide my distaste so as not to offend him – not because I was concerned for his feelings – unfortunately, that was not a strength of mine at the time – but rather because if I demonstrated disinterest in the thing he was passionate about, I was afraid he would confuse it for disinterest in his passion.
[11:11 AM] JP (he/him): I still think about that guy – obviously – I wonder if he’s still just deep into Dream Theater (who are, afaik, still putting out albums) or whether he’s changed. No one else listened to him, at least while I was working with him – no one gave him the silence to fill. Did the cold, uncaring-about-Dream-Theater world snuff out his flame? Did he ever meet someone and fall in love? Right now, 25 years later, is he talking to his tall, blond child, staring up at him with that rapt look he hoped for, about the growth of DT’s themes in their recent albums? Does he still work at Denny’s? Does he still refuse to speak the phrase “Moons Over My Hammy”?