Genesis, "The Musical Box"

Peter Gabriel isn't dressed up like a flower or anything.  No, wait--he's possibly supposed to be dressed up like Joan Baez.  Or he stole her hairstyle.  Man, that's just weird.  Peter Gabriel looks like Joan Baez and Phil Collins looks like this guy I knew in college.

Nursery Cryme is a lot more fun than you might think from the twee title.  I always think of it as the first Genesis record, but it's really the third--the first two are from a lineup you've never heard of unless you're a Genesis obsessive and the first of those was a record that sold 650 copies on its original issue and has occupied a weird legal place since then.  I think one of the little record stores I frequented in high school used to have some kind of off-brand reissue or maybe even bootleg on vinyl that I never bought, though in retrospect I should have; now, what would the point be?  I'm sure I could get it on CD, but I hardly listen to all that much prog anymore.

I didn't delve too deeply into prog back then, either.  I think--I have to admit this, though I don't think I ever quite realized it until I started writing this paragraph--I think I've never quite liked actual prog as much as I liked the idea of prog, and I didn't even quite like the idea of prog nearly so much after I kicked some of my own musical pretensions and realized how awesome punk and new wave were, which was something that dawned on me fairly late.  I think my earliest formative tastes had me on a steady and excessive diet of what I guess would be called classic rock these days, with a steady evolution towards college or alternative that started in high school, which is really very late to notice college rock when you realize this would have been the late '80s and all sorts of cool stuff had been going on for nearly a decade already; I'm proud to brag that I found out about R.E.M. before Document but embarrassed by and reluctant to admit that it was well after Murmur.  (I blame my parents, who either should have allowed me to be born earlier or should have provided me with a cool older sibling with awesome taste in music; no, they were way too young when I was born as it is, I guess that wouldn't have worked.  Dammit.)  But yeah, prog seemed like something I should have liked and I may have even claimed I was a big prog guy at some point when I was young and thought Pink Floyd was proggier than they ever were (they get labeled "prog" a lot, but it doesn't really fit them very well); in retrospect, not so much.