A lot of people keep mentioning Gentle Giant. I actually saw them open for Renaissance, if you can believe that. This was at Ford Auditorium in Detroit in the late 70s. It changed my life. Gentle Giant absolutely rocked. I had never heard anything like it before. Renaissance was great too. You can't listen to Annie Haslam's voice at 120 dB and not have an epiphany or two but Gentle Giant changed the very way I looed at rock music and music in general.

But were they techno-rock? They often got lumped with Genesis and ELP but in many ways had more in common with Steeleye Span. There really was no other band like them and I bought every album--first to last. Today, I have most of them on CD including several live bootlegs.

Techno-rock belonged to the British. The Germans to a lesser extent. I enjoyed Triumvirate even though they were an ELP retread--at times sounding more like ELP than ELP. But the British owned that genre.

North America made some forays into techno-rock but I found it hopelessly inadequate. Kansas, of course, was the main one. Never could stand Kansas. I thought they were bloody fucking horrible. "Dust in the Wind" was about as profound as what comes out of a soggy fortune cookie--not to insult soggy fortune cookies. And how I hated the violin sound they had.

Another American techno-rock band was Starcastle who sounded something ELP after being neutered by a combine. Like Kansas, I never bought one of their albums. You truly could not have given me one and I had over a thousand slabs of vinyl in those days. That leaves Rush. While I did like some of Rush's stuff (and admittedly had one Rush album), I still was not a big fan and never saw them live. I saw both ELP and Genesis. Same with King Crimson.    Never saw Triumvirate. I saw Kraftwerk--that was cool. I actually saw Karl Rodelius of Cluster once. Saw Ultravoxx. Saw Gary Numan. Saw Bowie but he was playing organ for Iggy.