No Dice–A '70s Music Blog

Trends is Banality

One reason it’s hard to tell whether classic rock as we had known it since ’65 or so had really gone to hell in a bucket after ’75 was the evolution of FM radio. From my own experience, several trends guaranteed that classic rock would seem pretty out of touch, stale, boring, etc., when compared to the punk and new wave of the era.

1. Dinosaur Rock—FM kept playing new stuff by bands that had been hanging around since the ’60s … which made them ancient by rock standards. The Who, Led Zeppelin, the Rolling Stones. While these bands could still surprise you (The Who By Numbers), there was a sense of diminishing returns as the decade rolled on.

2. Nostalgic Rock—Lots of folks got real excited about Bruce Springsteen, Bob Seger, and Tom Petty around mid-decade (1970s), as though these guys—deep voiced, real men—were the saviors of a dying form. Most of the music and even the lyrics, however, seemed firmly grounded in yesterday.

3. Rock Redux—One thing that helped the AOR format keep growing was a slew of new bands that reduced rock to its most banal elements. Foreigner, Van Halen, Boston. In their hands, rock was either turned into cheesy pop dross or reduced to the grand themes of partying and getting laid.

4. Mainstream Rock—It was hard to tell whether bands like the Eagles, the Steve Miller Band, and Fleetwood Mac embodied or created mainstream pop-rock in the mid-to-late-‘70s. Everything sounded pretty good … but also pretty predictable.

5. Southern Rock—Southern Rock had elements of Rock Redux and Nostalgic Rock … and in the hands of a band like Lynyrd Skynyrd, something worse. The tuneful, gritty music was laced with a cultural conservatism that was disguised as Southern pride. It gave the music an unpleasant (and aggressive) edge that worked against many of the things that rock originally seemed to aspire to.

That doesn’t cover everything … I’ve left out the double album phenomenon (Kiss, Peter Frampton, etc.) and the occasional addition of pseudo-new wave bands (the Knack, the Cars) to playlists. The point is, the classic rock/AOR format seemed to be chocking off the growth of a form (and the personal growth of its listeners) by promoting fairly safe, predictable stuff.

What Gets Pushed to the Side?

Yesterday while listening to Pandora Radio, I had a musical revelation. I don’t listen to much music online—I find most of it a pain. All my MP3 files have been ripped from albums or borrowed from my sister (I only bought my first MP3 player last Christmas). … So I don’t go to the internet for music unless it’s to order CDs from Amazon. But I did run across this Pandora site yesterday, and it—along with the Presidential race—managed to distract me for most of the day.

To start out, Pandora simply wanted to know what song or artist I wanted to hear. I plugged in—just because I happened to be curious about the group—the Residents. From there, the Pandora program started randomly selecting other tracks from other bands that were just as strange/ experimental as the Residents. The program also allowed me to add more bands to the playlist. There was Faust, Amon Duul II, the Bonzo Dog Band, Mahogany Rush, David Bowie (from his Eno collaborations), and Pink Floyd. There was also a lot of intriguing stuff that I’ll leave out because it had nothing to do with the ’70s.

What was (and is) strange to me is that even within the confines of the classic rock I grew up and, for much of my life, have continued to listen to, it surprises me—even without considering punk and new wave after ’76—how much stuff never made it onto classic rock playlists. And even when it did (as with Pink Floyd), the material that was played was limited to a handful of the same tracks. It shouldn’t seem surprising then, that many classic rock fans, weaned on the most conservative playlists, would have—in 1978—perferred Dire Straits to Pere Ubu.