Lately I've been getting in touch with my classic rock inner child. I believe it was Homer Simpson who stated that the best year for rock music was 1974, and somewhere I found a reference to a book or article defining a classic rock era from 1965-1985. For myself, I have found myself repeatedly returning to the 1967-1973 period -- an insane font of creativity which includes late Beatles, best Jefferson Airplane, Santana, best Grateful Dead, the Who, etc etc etc, and then for good measure throw in the creation of British Isles folk-rock -- Fairport Convention, Steeleye Span, Albion Band, Richard Thompson and so on. This could be simple nostalgia for my youth; I started collecting rock music in 1971 and started college in 1975. When I was in college there was sort of a horizon line of ten years back, and only real music geeks tended to listen to rock & pop older than 1965, and only eclectic fanatics paid attention to the pop music of 20 years ago, the stuff pre-Buddy Holly, not yet influenced by Elvis. But sometimes in the late 1980s, I was sitting in a pizzeria near Michigan State University, and as Pink Floyd's "Money" played on the speakers overhead, I had a blindling revelation: the basic soundtrack of university life had not significantly changed since I was an undergraduate almost 15 years earlier. And in 2001 another decade has passed, and the soundtrack STILL has not significantly shifted. Current college students are listening to music from 25 and 35 years ago; this was the equivalent of me listening to Glenn Miller when I was an undergraduate. REM and U2, which are still thought of as "modern" and "contemporary" bands at least by the media, and by old geezers like me, are 20 years old...24 responses total.
Let's start the debate: Two things work for Classic Rock,
1) The artistic gap from the 'Tin Pan Alley'ism of previous pop
music. Artists performing their material. Some gaining very
dramatic control over the content and sound of their finished product.
2) The fidelity gap. In 1985, the twenty year old music of 1965
sounded much like what is made into records. In 1965 the 20 year
old music of 1945 was easy to identify by the lower fidelity of it.
(audio veiwpoint only).
3) Classic rock artists had places to get gigs and worked a long
while building audience, so time was on their side in building
their musical chops.
it's sounds good when your platered on shitty pot and pbr, too.
Here's an article which nudged me to start this item. http://www.latimes.com/business/cotown/20010418/t000032721.html "The Oldies Are Still Goodies." The article's hook is that "Journey's Greatest Hits" sold 11,185 copies in the retail reports listed last week, a bigger sales figure than recent albums from Dr. Dre, Ricky Martin or Macy Gray. The sales power of back catalog classic rock items is glossed over by the music industry; ever since the biz tired of the embarrassment of Pink Floyd's eternal position on the charts, albums over two years old are now banished from the official Billboard Top 200 to a segregated catalog chart. But back catalog still accounts for a third of the albums sold in the US. The article cites a Sony Legacy marketing survey which claims that almost half of the customers for Janis Joplin CDs are under 25. The industry worries about the Napster threat to their catalog wealth. Even legitimate downloads, song by song, could threaten that wealth, because currently back catalog sells in album-sized chunks for between $10-$19 per album, depending on the artist. The industry also worries that many current top-selling artists -- both the bubblegum pop and the hip hop fields -- are not showing any staying power for their older albums, in comparison to the durable classic rock stars.
personally i am into contempory , rock ,pop. but i think mp3'.
I was born (like the good rock :-) in 1974. Radiohead is a younger band than U2 and R.E.M. and it rule! Anyway my favourite groups are Pink Floyd and R.E.M. Reveal will be my next cd :-))) luca_
Hmm I think part of this may be due to what I would call an information age effect. Now that everything is digital and more widely available on the net etc, I think it flattens out differences and that an average students, 5 cd changer might contain a techno cd, a classical cd, a cd of mp3s from different genres, and a classic rock cd say. I think most students have pretty elcetic tastes now that we live in a global society. Thus classic rock is probably part of a spectrum of music that students listen to. I get the impression that most peoples listening habits were more focused on one genre back in the day (with a hearty exception for all you eclectic grexer geezers ofcourse :-)). Part of this is probably also due to the conservatism of record companies in these conservative times. They know the backcatalog and Britney Spears sells and they aren't too willing to try and promote more experimental music like they were in the late 60s and early 70s (with an exception for bands like Radiohead).
I suspect your last paragraph hits the nail on the head. Right now the music sucks because we only get to see the proven moneymakers. Why would a company risk major investment on some new act with an untested style when Janis Joplin still sells and doesn't even demand her royalties?
Disappearing horizons of the sort Ken describes are common with any new art form, and I think rock qualifies as a new art form apart from other popular music. Consider movies: today people watch 40-year-old films all the time. 40 years ago they didn't, much: their 40-year-old films were silent. So the fact that the Beatles (and even Elvis, I suppose) are still current listening, while pre-rock popular music belongs to a different era, is a very interesting sociological fact. Other things move, however. "Classic rock" certainly does. In the early 80s, the radio stations I listened to defined classic rock as pre- Beatles. Yes, they really did. Turn to the station during the "classic rock" hour, and you got Buddy Holly. Slowly the ending date moved up, and I think it's still moving.
Well, "retro 80's dance" does seem to be popular in the club scene, so you're probably right. I don't think Ken mentioned here, but I'm sure he's said it before. One big problem right now is that the people choosing which acts to sign and promote have shifted from being mostly music people to business people.
My recollections differ from David's; I don't remember pre-Beatles music ever being marketed as "Classic Rock." What I remember from the late 1970s and early 1980s is a radio format often called "Solid Gold" which covered the pre-Beatles era. (As a radio format, the creation of "Classic Rock" is pretty well attributed to radio programming guru/prince of darkness :) Lee Abrams.)
resp:3 (any particular reason the author chooses to compare the sales to three discs which have been in stores for nearly a year apiece? talk about your misleading leads...)
"Journey's Greatest Hits" is from 1988. The argument is that, compared to classic rock, current big-name releases are not showing "legs;" a 12-year-old album is steadily outselling one-year-old releases from current stars.
Apparently that wheel in the sky keeps on burning and there's nothing we can do about it.. What a chilling thought.. It really doesn't surprise me that a one-year-old release from a (semi-) current star doesn't sell as well as a back-catalog title. Where would new listeners encounter the songs from the former album? Certainly not on a commercial radio station or a music video channel -- those are very tightly formatted and there isn't currently a widespread radio format that reaches back much into the near past. Journey's "greatest" hits might be getting airplay on a classic rock station, but you simply won't find alternative, country, or adult-contemporary stations playing last year's songs unless they're paid to play them the way they're paid to play the latest highly-promoted singles.
As you've phrased it, I see a chicken-and-egg problem here. Which comes first, the radio airplay or the public interest?
I have no doubt whatsoever that the radio airplay comes first, and that without it only the most exceptional music has any chance at public interest.
The stations Ken was listening to in Ann Arbor in the early 80s may have called pre-Beatles rock "solid gold", but the stations I was listening to in Seattle and San Francisco used that, if at all, as a more general term for hits. Their term for specifically pre-Beatles, or up to early Beatles, rock was "classic rock". Scott laments that it's business people, not music people, who decide what acts to sign. When was the golden age when business people kept out of it? Lament that the bottom line is the only concern dates back to Tin Pan Alley, if not earlier. And before we wax too nostalic for the 60s, remember that they brought us the Monkees, perhaps the first totally manufactured band.
I've written about this before: in the Good Old Days, music business executives with taste and judgement had considerable authority to sponsor artists only on their artistic merit. Ahmet Ertegun at Atlantic; Clive Davis at Columbia and Arista; Lenny Waronker and Mo Ostin from the golden era at Warner Brothers; Chris Blackwell at Island. These are just the names that leap to mind, there are probably lots more, who are respected by knowledgable fans and critics for the work they brought out.
Heh.. Ken beat me to the punch.. Ahmet Ertegun and Chris Blackwell are perfect examples..
If that's so - that is, if there really was a golden age then that's completely vanished now - then it was because, for a brief period, experimental stuff sold. But I think it far more likely that there was just as much beefing then as there is now.
One factor everyone is leaving out is the rise of independent labels. There is a lot of good music out there, it just isn't on the majors anymore. It's hard to imagine that if todays mindset had been true in the 60s that Ornette Coleman John Coltrane or Bob Dylan would have major label contracts. They would all be recording on Ryko or some other even more obscure label IMO.
There's an interesting chicken-and-egg question in there. Did a drop in major-label variety cause the rise of the indie labels, or vice versa? To some extent, though, it doesn't matter. The two occurred hand-in-hand, and each encouraged the other.
<trying to imagine chickens and eggs encouraging each other's reproduction> It's OK, I know what you mean.
(Well, the chickens sit on the eggs, and the eggs ... uh ... inspire the chickens. Sure.)
classic rock. led zep, genesis, boston, styx, stones, jeff beck...
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