Audiobook11 hours
The Show That Never Ends: The Rise and Fall of Prog Rock
Written by David Weigel
Narrated by Rudy Sanda
Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
3/5
()
About this audiobook
The Show That Never Ends is the behind-the-scenes story of the extraordinary rise and fall of progressive (“prog”) rock, epitomized by such classic, chart-topping bands as Yes, Genesis, Pink Floyd, Jethro Tull, and Emerson Lake Palmer, and their successors Rush, Styx, and Asia.
With inside access to all the key figures, Washington Post national reporter David Weigel tells the story with the gusto and insight Prog Rock's fans (and its haters) will relish. Along the way, he explains exactly what was “progressive” about Prog Rock, how it arose from psychedelia and heavy metal, why it dominated the pop charts but then became so despised that it was satirized in This Is Spinal Tap, and what fuels its resurgent popularity today.
With inside access to all the key figures, Washington Post national reporter David Weigel tells the story with the gusto and insight Prog Rock's fans (and its haters) will relish. Along the way, he explains exactly what was “progressive” about Prog Rock, how it arose from psychedelia and heavy metal, why it dominated the pop charts but then became so despised that it was satirized in This Is Spinal Tap, and what fuels its resurgent popularity today.
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Reviews for The Show That Never Ends
Rating: 3.2 out of 5 stars
3/5
30 ratings3 reviews
- Rating: 1 out of 5 stars1/5I just could NOT get through this! The narrator took a boring and insanely verbose book and made it even MORE boring. Dear LORD!! I just couldn't do it. I listened for an hour and still there absolutely zero info on Prog Rock and why, how, etc it became popular and so on.
The book itself is like a prog rock song, but without all of the cool feels. Hated this book, which sucks because I love prog rock. - Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5That it touched on both Van Der Graaf and on Steven Wilson. Unfortunately a lot seems to have been left out, too, due to the focus being mainly on England and the US. Weigel also skips right over Be Bop Deluxe and Bill Nelson, and barely mentions XTC in passing.
The reader on the audiobook is pretty non-optimal. Boring, nasal, and prone to I’ll-advisedly attempting accents. Also consistently mispronounces “Moog”…. - Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5While I liked the author's series of articles in "Slate" better than this book, if only for their immediacy, this is not a bad introduction to a unique moment in music history that's at its best in examining the early roots of the movement. The problem, as someone who is old enough to have experienced this history in real time, is that there is so much that you could cover that sticking to the soap-opera lives of the main players is probably the best you're going to do and it's still going to seem to be inadequate. Still, this was an honest effort and a perfectly good jumping off point for an extended exploration of the scene.