[atlantaprog] ProgDay report

Greetings Gentlebeings:

ProgDay X in Chapel Hill was a wonderful experience. We had excellent weather--no hurricane trouble. About 300 people, including a lot of families with children, in an outdoor-cookout family atmosphere on a big beautiful lawn.

Jeff Blanks has attended all 10 Prog Days--this was my fourth or fifth, I can't remember for sure.

We need Atlanta acts that are good enough to be considered for this festival. Timothy Pure appeared in the very first Prog Day, and people still remember and talk about them. David Ragsdale's band played a couple years later, and they were all from Georgia and Tennessee as well.

This is the longest-running world music prog festival in existence, guys. Nearfest and Baja Prog, which are larger, would not exist were it not for Prog Day's lead.

Nashville act Salem Hill was a last-minute substitute act. These guys are wonderful and their latest album "Be" is very strong. Their performance was hampered by the fact that one of their four members is on tour with another band and they had to get a friend from Seattle(!) to sub for the missing member on one week's notice. Everybody in the band is a multi-instrumentalist and singer and they had to rotate duties around to cover all the parts in all the songs.

Mats/Morgan from Sweden was delightful. They are a bunch of shockingly young guys whose original music is heavily influenced by Frank Zappa. Highly recommended for all you drummers out there. And all you Stevie Wonder fans.

Cabezas de Cera (Heads of Wax) is a young outrageous and cheerfully manaical trio from Mexico City composed of electronic drummer, Stick/guitarist, and saxophones/wind controller/vocalist, and some sequences, samples and loops. They range from improvisational industrial noise to melodic acid jazz, yet they say their next project will be all acoustic. I wish we could get these guys to play up here in Atlanta. They are very innovative and have a wonderful stage presence. They are also amazing at publicity materials and album packaging--you have to see their stuff to see what I mean.

Focus, from Holland, is Thijs van Leer and three younger guys. They were a psychedelic trip-and-a-half, with great sense of humor, and they play mostly new material.

Amarok is a large Spanish ensemble with both flutist and saxophonist, and the drummer from Galadriel, if you remember them. They are highly recommended for anybody into acoustic-based prog. They feature saz and oud and on this outing they are emphasizing a strong Moroccan influence. Hard to describe but a lot of fun.

Mahavishnu Project, from New York, is no fun at all. They are a Mahavishnu tribute band, John McLaughlin-approved, and they are very dense, noodly, serious, and overbearing, just like the original. They were the most intellectually stimulating band, if intellect is your major criterion.

Trettioåriga Kriget (Thirty-Years War) is the most influential Swedish hard rock band from the 70s. That may not sound like much, but think about it. They hit Number 3 on Swedish radio in 1979 in the middle of the reign of ABBA. Furthermore there are a ton of excellent prog and metal bands in Sweden today, and they all cite Kriget as a primary influence. Kriget is an example of a Prog Day specialty. This band was formed in 1970 and has never performed in the United States. For several of their members, all of whom were born in 1953, this was their first-ever visit to the United States. It is also heartwarming to see a bunch of guys who went to the same high school still performing together 34 years later. The Prog Day committee invited them to come over. While they are still a functioning band they are not nearly as active as they once were, and took a hiatus all during the 80s. I'm sure they were quite shocked when a tiny American festival told them they wanted to fly them over and make them headliners. Anyway, they were the closest band to mainstream 70s rock, not very proggy, but they rocked harder than any other band and their presence rounded out the bill nicely. Jeff and I helped transport some of the members and we got a nice lecture on why Swedish socialism is better than our form of government.

Farquhar is a really tight power trio from the States, which I hastily labelled "Green Day-prog". Maybe they failed to make an impression on me solely because they were the weekend festival opener and, by their own admission, they had never played in daylight before. But their music is good and sounds very contemporary, and they don't resemble anybody else in terms of prog influences--I think that's a good thing.

Prog Day has never been a commercial success, but they bring together acts from all over the world that you would never hear in your life, otherwise. There are local NC bands from time to time, but none this year. We can aspire to make our own scene and RogueFest as vibrant and renowned as theirs, but it will take some doing!

Wish y'all were there!

Wheat Williams

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