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Rating: 
Summary: Very good analysis of a major period in music history
Review: After Martin finally gets off his political/philosophical soap box (hard to get through even if you agree with most of it), he presents a very good analysis of the music itself. Highly recommended to anybody who has a serious interest in progressive rock.
Rating: 
Summary: Well worth reading, but...
Review: Bill Martin comes across in this book as a brilliant thinker with a strong knowledge of progressive rock and many other styles of rock music. Unfortunately, he is a horrible writer. His writing style is best described - as much as I hate to use the term - as "noodling". Overuse of parenthetic comments, frequent lapses into the first-person, and frequent diversions into philosophical tangents, among other things, are highly distracting and make this book difficult and sometimes downright frustrating to read.Still, there is a lot of meat here if one is willing to slog through the turgid writing. For the avid fan of progressive rock, this probably belongs in the must-read category. For the more casual reader or rock fan, this book will probably be a bit much to digest. The discussions of the background of 1950s and 1960s rock, which Martin argues inevitably led to prog, are especially good, as are the year-by-year discography and the discussions of post-prog styles. Complicating matters somewhat is the author's Marxism; not any kind of orthodox Marxism but the sort of unorthodox academic type which is fond of referencing people like Herbert Marcuse and Jean-Paul Sartre. Martin spends plenty of time analyzing progressive rock from a utopian left viewpoint, which eventually gets tedious. On the other hand, this also lends a certain value to this book, since progressive rock has often been dismissed as a conservative, even reactionary style with its drawing from Classical and Anglican church music and from European and especially British Isles folk music and mythology. To Martin, progressive rock grew out of the utopian possibilities envisioned by the 1960s New Left, even if other musical styles which are also associated with the political left, such as punk, were in part a reaction against prog. In this regard, this book may serve as a good antidote to the Dave Marsh/Robert Christgau school of rock criticism, for whom progressive rock is neither progressive nor rock. As might be expected with any book like this, the author has his favorite prog bands and spends a lot of time discussing them, to the exclusion of others. This will obviously not be to everybody's liking. Yes, Jethro Tull, and King Crimson get an extended treatment, while Focus, Triumvirat, and Nektar rate little more than an occasional mention, Rush discussed only as an afterthought, and Pink Floyd is dismissed entirely. I'll just leave this with 3 stars and recommend it if you like progressive rock. It provides a unique and challenging perspective on prog, and is a good compliment to the other books on prog which have appeared in recent years; it would have been a better book, however, with some editing.
Rating:
Summary: Fascinating but flawed study of progressive rock.
Review: I found this book enjoyable and infuriating at the same time. Martin's take on prog rock is well informed and thorough. But I kept wanting to argue with him all the time I was reading it. My main problem with the book is that Martin has specifically modified his definition of progressive rock to exclude Frank Zappa. His definition also excludes Pink Floyd, while admitting the Mahavishnu Orchestra. This strikes me as ducking the issue; if Martin were to consider the work of Zappa along side Yes, King Crimson, etc., he would probably have to modify his thesis, and would probably has produced a stronger book. Nevertheless, I am quite glad I bought this. But my copy will be severely marked up!!!
Rating: 
Summary: Did This Guy Take Writing Lessons From Heidegger?
Review: I really wanted to like this book. I like a lot of Progressive Rock. I like a lot of philosophy. Unfortunately, Professor Martin writes with a meandering obscurity that resembles Yes lyrics at their most impenetrable, or like reading Hegel after not having slept for sixteen hours. Simply put, Martin is an appallingly bad writer. It's too bad that as writing models, Martin bypassed Schopenhauer, Hume & Nietzsche. He seems to prefer Hegel, Fichte and Heidegger. I agree with several of Martin's opinions, though. I love King Crimson, Jethro Tull and Gentle Giant, and all of these bands are given thoughtful analysis by Prof. Martin. Martin has little time for Rush; considering that Rush is the most overrated prog band ever, I heartily concur. Frank Zappa isn't included among the giants of progressive music (Martin takes something like eight pages to explain why Zappa isn't covered, but he never gets much beyond the "I don't like his lyrics" stage ). Zappa's music is, truly, more "progressive" than most of the bands covered here. Personally, I think I detect a political bias on Martin's part: one gets the feeling that had Zappa wrote Utopian lyrics that involved gnomes and fairies, or had embraced the Left as had his contemporaries, he would take up a major part of this book. Some more curious omissions are Captain Beefheart & Pink Floyd. As far as Martin's philosophy is concerned, he is apparently of the Hegelian-Marxist school of thought. Perhaps that is why his theory of a progressive-rock "Zeitgeist" never really gets going. The main flaw, in my opinion, is that this "logic of history" approach is biased from the get-go. For his theory to work, Martin had to leave out inconvenient accessories. That explains the absence of Zappa.
Rating:
Summary: Comic Book Guy from the Simpsons would be proud
Review: Martin claims to be moving "toward a theory" of what progressive is about throughout his text, but he never gets there. His attempts to link various philosophical positions to the music are interesting, but end up being extremely long digressions away from the main topic. Martin clearly does not believe that less is more when it comes to the unnecessarily excessive length of these digressions. He could make his philosophical points more succinctly in a few pages; instead he takes 150, by which time many readers will feel they are reading a philosophy book, not a music book. Martin also spends too much time discussing specific prog rock albums, he arranges his approach in a chronological unfolding, which is good, but he then proceeds to get a full one-third of the years wrong for the albums he mentions. This totally undermines his chronological ordering, and is supremely sloppy work. Instead of relying on his memory of these album release dates, all he had to do was check the actual CD or LP for the year. For example, Martin constantly refers to Yes' "Fragile" as being one of the highlights of 1971, when it was not even released until January 1972. This from a writer who has a book out about Yes! Readers will also be confused at the choices Martin makes. Martin takes many, many pages to describe prog rock as being experimental, multi-stylistic, often conceptual, and imbued with enormous counterculture/philosophical/political significance. Yet Martin does not feel that the genre's superstar group, Pink Floyd, meets this definition, but yet a pop/rock band like Caravan does. Aren't albums like Floyd's "Ummagumma" and "Animals" precisely representative of the definitions he has set out? And while there will always be disagreements over more obscure groups, surely there has always been a consensus that Pink Floyd has always been one of the leading prog rock bands (if not *the* band). Instead, Martin would rather devote pages of analysis to the prog elements in the music of the Beach Boys and the Dave Matthews Band. And to underscore his own political correctness, Martin chides his fave band Caravan for being "sexist," in that they write songs about wanting to have sex with women. The book has a large amount of academic footnotes (more philosophy), but no photos.
Rating:
Summary: An interesting study
Review: Martin's second book on progressive rock suffers from comparison with his first (Yes) and his competition - Macan and Stump. As usual, he takes a long time getting to his point(s), using extremely academic arguments. The elimination of Floyd and Zappa from his progressive universe can only be justified using his complicated, academic definitions. So, this is the book for the progressive rock completist. Interesting, but not essential.
Rating:
Summary: Comic Book Guy from the Simpsons would be proud
Review: This book is simply a train wreck in its approach to discussing evrything under the sun. The author has a keen understanding of rock's evolution, but his writing is a shambles. Alternating between indescribable academic Marxist philosophy one minute, to anecdotal mentions of gathering 'round the piano with fellow nerds to knock out a few chords of "Siberean Khatru" - it can be a real slog. The one argument Martin has that he fully develops is that "Yes is the greatest band ever because I say so". It gets pretty amateurish. There also an annoying habit of quoting Bill Bruford and Robert Fripp and informing the reader that their views on progressive rock are simply "misinformed". A much wiser choice is Paul Stump's excellent "The Music's all that Matters" which is full of lucid writing placed into a coherent whole. Stump's book will appeal to any music fan - highly recommended.
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