10 Bands That Started Hard Rock

The idea of rock music getting more progressive was just starting to become a thing in the late '60s. Since Pink Floyd and Yes were first starting to come to fruition with their more complex takes on psychedelia, it wasn't out of the question for songs to depart from the traditional verse-chorus format into something a lot more adventurous. While Floyd may get called the progenitors of prog rock, King Crimson made that kind of complexity a lot more nasty.

Across their debut In the Court of the Crimson King, King Crimson created some of the most chaotic takes on prog rock ever conceived, bringing in saxophones and doomy percussion on 21st Century Schizoid Man. Aside from their debut, leader Robert Fripp always had a bigger picture for what the music was supposed to be, going for even more adventurous territory on songs like Larks Tongues in Aspic just a few years later.

This proved to be fertile ground later down the line, with everyone from Dream Theater to the sounds of stoner rock taking some cues from King Crimson. No matter how strange that sounds, you can definitely the germs of something like Kyuss in the brutal riffs of In the Court of the Crimson King. King Crimson might not be in the same league as someone like the Rolling Stones, but their influence is much more understated than it is in your face these days.