FM, 8-Tracks, & LPs
Mainstream rock n roll …
I’d describe my tastes in the mid-to-late-70s as classic or mainstream rock, incorporating mostly what I listened to on AOR … but also including an assortment of 8-tracks that I picked up. At the time, I really didn’t think much about how odd the mixture was or—within my given category of classic rock—how mainstream it was. It was simply what I and my friends listened to and identified with.
A couple things strike me as odd looking back. First, the bizarre mixture of bands. Why would anyone in his or her right mind stick Boston, Styx, and Foreigner in the same format with Led Zeppelin, the Who, and the Rolling Stones? Or Peter Frampton, Kansas, and Queen with the Kinks, Bob Dylan, and the Beatles? I’m not sure that a lot of the newer stuff at the time—say, like, Boston—should have even qualified as rock, but it was all thrown together in the AOR blender and we called it our own.
The second thing that strikes me odd has to do with the limited number of tracks AOR stations would play from any given band. Why did you usually hear the same four or five Lynyrd Skynyrd tracks—“That Smell,” “What’s Your Name,” “Gimme Three Steps,” “Sweet Home Alabama,” and “Free Bird”? Or the same two or three Kinks tracks—“You Really Got Me,” “Sunny Afternoon,” and “Lola”? Part of the problem with “Stairway to Heaven,” then, wasn’t that it was a good or bad song; it was that the AOR stations I was familiar with didn’t play a wider variety of Zeppelin songs. As a result, they played “Stairway to Heaven” too damn much.
Of course the simple solution would’ve been to buy more albums … and I had a list of 5 star albums memorized from the first edition of The Rolling Stone Record Guide. But I was a dumb teen with little cash to spare … so I relied on FM radio which was free.
A Beautiful Corpse: Rock Meditations, 1975-1979
How do you define what rock music is at any given historical moment?
I have a little downtime over the holiday break … so I’d like to lay out or frame—over a half-dozen or so entries—an idea. It basically revolves around a particular period of time—‘75-‘79—and a particular music—rock—and asks: what did rock music have to offer music fans at this juncture of time?
The juncture seems to be the crossroads where whatever had been initiated in rock during the mid-‘60s was either coming to an end or changing. I’ll get more into the traditional narratives of this mid-to-late-‘70s juncture/change later … I’ve also picked this juncture because I came of age as a music listener during this time. The original question then—what did rock have to offer?—is set against a backdrop of familiar narratives on what happened to rock between ’75 and ’79, and against a personal backdrop of my listening habits during that time.
In a way, ’75-’79 seems like a bad time to write about, because it’s been covered so often. But how many folks have more than a rudimentary knowledge of what rock had to offer between ‘75 and ‘79? How many people have dug beneath the clichés to take a fresh look at the clash between classic rock, new wave, and punk? Other questions might include:
1. How did major labels and FM radio limit what kind of rock music was available between ’75 and ‘79?
2. How did the rock press and FM radio frame the rock cannon between ’75 and ‘79?
3. Were there non-mainstream forms of rock available for those industrious enough to find them in the mid-to-late-‘70s?
4. What were the spaces—musical, philosophical—between the various forms of rock during the mid-to-late-‘70s?
5. Is it possible to sum up rock music—what it was, wasn’t—during the mid-to-late-‘70s?
