
As I am sure is true for all of us, albums I love and cherish and listen to, repeatedly, carry with them fond personal memories. For better or worse, almost every single Neal Morse album and Spock’s Beard album comes with a story, and usually more than one. As I’ve mentioned on progarchy before, I’ll never forget the release of the first Spock’s Beard album, THE LIGHT. Being a prog fan since as far back as I can remember, I had no idea about the arrival of neo-Prog in England, and I had to content myself in the early 1990s with jam bands such as Phish and jam pop bands such as the Dave Matthews Band to satisfy my not so easily satisfied prog desires. I had purchased so many CDs and had had so many discussions with the manager of Tracks in Bloomington, Indiana, that she remained on the lookout for me. Anything that even remotely smacked of prog, she let me know. She rather gleefully handed me a copy of THE LIGHT when it first came out. To say I was thrilled would be an understatement. I was just plain elated, inserting that cd in the tray, putting on my Sennheizers, and falling into prog bliss, attempting to follow all the nuances of the album and to figure out all of the lyrics. I mean really, who is the catfish man?
And, why did this guy with such a great voice have to cuss so much?