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.
