Rock And Roll, Part 2 [OR "Radio Gaga"]

I was thinking again today about this Almost Famous and "Whatever happened to my Rock & Roll?" [a Black Rebel Motorcycle Club tune, by the way....] conenction and another thought struck me. [Ow!] Specifically I was thinking about Sapphire's speech where she's talking about 'falling in love with some silly little song...' and how I used to hear all this great music. "Invisible airways crackle with life / bright antennae bristle with the energy / Emotional feedback on timeless wavelengths / Bearing a gift beyond price almost free..."

Then I though about Marty's son - the 15 year old drummer dude - [and maybe some of your kids] don't know about radio. They don't know how we used to live to get to a radio after school. "Busted out of class / Had to get away from those fools / We learned more from a three minute record than we ever learned in school..." They don't know of a time when you couldn't log onto a computer and download a song.They don't know about DJs and waiting [AND waiting ... AND waiting] for the DJ to play your request... if they ever really did.

Marty, a real go getter and at one time a music business management major [in a class with Trisha Yearwood at Belmont, right?] used to call and talk to all the DJs and program managers. ["Why do you play this? Why don't you play that?"] What do today's kids know about program managers? Anyone else remember on WKRP when the 'consultant' came in and said his 'service' could program the music [i.e. make up the play-list] better than Andy? Well that's what radio became. It's all programmed from one coast or the other and it's all the same all up and down the dial, unless you hit a college station or a real independant like KXT here in DFW. There's no such thing as a regional hit anymore. You can't have Tommy James' Hanky Panky suddenly break out in Pittsburgh and then begin making national waves. You can't have Celeveland or Detroit breaking a band like Rush or Meat Loaf or the J. Geils Band. It's all down to one guy giving the thumbs up or thumbs down for the whole nation!

I don't know how it was where you grew up. I grew up partially in the north when AM radio was king. AM radio then was a lot of top 40. My parents are fairly young so I was also exposed to some stuff via the miracle of the 8 track, and I still have a fondness for a lot of those bands - Steve Miller, Elton John's Madman Across the Water, Bachman Turner Overdrive, Creedence Clearwater's Pendulum, the Ohio Players' Honey... When I moved to Texas, I found FM and AOR [Album Oriented Rock if you don't recall or never knew]. Yeah, some hits like Cheap Trick, Tom Petty, the Rolling Stones, ELO, Jackson Browne, the Eagles - but also some stuff a little more out there... Billy Thorpe's Children Of the Sun, Zebra's Who's Behind the Door, the Kings' The Beat Goes On / Switching To Glide, the long version of Slow Ride and of course those deep cuts of Zeppelin, Pink Floyd, the Who and lots of ZZ Top in Texas. Plus you could get things that seemed to be regional, like Joe 'King' Carasco's Party Weekend.

In DFW there were three stations that were the rock and roll champions - KEGL [The Eagle or Eagle 97 - originally they were Z97 and a little more AOR, but they went a little more pop in the early 80s and kind of fell off my radar], 98 KZEW - The Zoo and Q102. The Zoo and Q102 had a long running battle for supremacy. Q102 had the wild men of the morning, BNo Robert and 'Long' Jim White [still on the air here, now at 92.5 KZPS, still slinging tyhe same old songs on 'classic rock radio. Good God, how many times can you play .38 Special before you just want to shoot yourself?], while the Zoo threw up the smarmy, wise guy, Steely Dan of the radio LaBella and Rody. John Dillon on mid morning on the Zoo - I'd listen while grading papers as a TA my senior year. Sally Diamond on 102? Tempie Lindsey on the Zoo afternoon drive, Redbeard [who got great guests - he got Joe Walsh to cover for him one week while he was on vacation] on Q102. Evening on the Zoo was Chas Mixon...I'm blanking on the Q person - not bad for 25 to 30 years ago. You can see what an impact radio had on me!

But that was what I had - of course I had some records and a tape deck in my car, but radio was still good enough where you could cruise and listen to the radio. Now I get in the car, spin around 12 FM stations twice in three minutes and push a CD in. Partially this is because I have become my parents: I've heard that so many times if I hear it once more I'm gonna throw up. I never thought I'd get sick of some songs, but now I have songs I will willingly give up days at the end of muy life not to hear again. Dream On by Aerosmith? Three days. Kashmir by Led Zeppelin? Maybe two. Wonderful Tonight, Tears In Heaven by Eric Clapton and Layla [Derek And the Dominos] - take a week. Candle In the Wind by Elton John - two days. When the Zoo was flipped in the winter of 88, the war was over. The Zoo had been trying some other stuff - incorporating newer music both from the college end like R.E.M., Kate Bush and XTC and some of the 'Metal' like Dokken, Poison, Tesla, etc. I guess it didn't work. Or maybe Belo was tired of them. After that it seemed like there was nuthin' good on the radio, no matter what station you were tuning to. And that's when I became a tape junkie.

But what saddens me with the loss of radio, is the loss of the magic moments that sometimes happen. The first time something new comes blasting out of those speakers - the first time you hear the Black Crowes' Jealous Again or U2's Sunday Bloody Sunday or the Foo Fighters' Monkey Wrench or Pearl Jam's Evenflow and you go "What was THAT?!?" Or maybe you hear a song you've heard before, but this time it clicks and you go "Oh. OH! Now I get it." Or the DJ pulls some moldy oldie that you haven't heard in ages - or maybe you never heard and it sends you scurrying to the record store [or I guess iTunes now]: Dylan's Shelter From the Storm, Springsteen's The River, the Who doing Summertime Blues, Aerosmith's Rats In the Cellar, Neil Young's Powderfinger, Joe Walsh's County Fair.. or almost anything by the Kinks or Johnny Winter or Frank Zappa or PiL or X or Roxy Music... Where will kids find out about such things? It's what Michael Leone did for me and I try to pass it on. I guess people who make connection with the music will always find someone to say "You should check this out." At least I hope so.

I Miss My Rock & Roll

"These people want you to write sanctimonious stories about the genius of rock stars and they will strangle everything you love about it. They're trying to buy respectability for a form that is gloriously and righteously dumb. And the day it ceases to be dumb is the day it ceases to be real. Then it just becomes an industry of 'cool.'"
- Lester Bangs to William Miller, Almost Famous

Whether the real Lester Bangs uttered these words or words to this effect to a very young Cameron Crowe somewhere about 1973 will never be known except to the two persons involved in the conversation. Or is this Crowe's view from a standpoint almost two decades later as he wrote Almost Famous? Or some combination of both? Having the 20/20 hindsight and a review of the history of music from roughly the start of the rock and roll era, the words strike me harder this time I view the film [on Turner Classic Movies!]

Having read some Lester, the words are in line with Lester's thinking. And he was right - 'They" won. When the suits got the numbers from albums like Frampton Comes Alive, Rumours, Hotel California and [shudder] Saturday Night Fever, the war they had been fighting to have that blockbuster album that everyone "had" to have was won. And it did become and industry of 'cool,' heavy emphasis on 'industry.' There's a reason the record companies were taken over by big multinational conglomerates like Sony and Phillips in the 1980s. There was money to be made. And eventually, this is what killed the 'record company' or the 'music industry.' Being tied to an old business model, it wasn't able to adjust to the new technology once the CD was no longer the prime medium of delivery of the product [music]. Except to hard core idiots like me who still like holding the plastic and reading liner notes. But even I am slowly succumbing to the lure of the download, having hit up the Rhino and Merge websites for a few digital music purchases this year. [If Sony /Legacy would set this up instead of trying to make me go through Amazon, it would be a great day for music!]

I look back at the 1980s now... yes there was a lot of dumb resurfacing - some on purpose [The Replacements], some accidentally dumb [Poison] - and a lot of pushing 'cool.' At Sound Warehouse, we had a monthly music sampler the corporate pushed on us to make sure it played every two hours or whatever. Basically, someone had an album they were pushing and paid some dollars to get 'guaranteed airplay.' [Now you can't do that on radio - that's 'payola' and highly frowned upon, but to push it in the store? *sigh* This was the 80s and I guess greed was still good.]

I have been working on a maddening and enlightening set of projects - for myself really - making car CDs of two of the three major eras of my music listening. One is called 8 Track Flashback, covering an era from the late 60s to about 1980. The other is called Walkman Favorites, covering from about 1978 to about 1995, when cassette was my primary source of music playback - mostly in my vehicle. And I wonder as I wander though, looking for the tunes: Why that album? Why Then? Why was the world ready for [insert album] at this time and not before? And why not [insert more obscure band and/or album]? Why Frampton Comes Alive? Why was Springsteen / Born In the USA so huge in 1984-85, but when the follow up came out [Tunnel Of Love] it sank? Why did Billy Joel connect with so many people? Yeah, Billy made some good albums between 1977 and... say 1984, [and he made 52nd Street, which had its hit singles, but otherwise - bleh.] but why? Why do most casual music fans only know about one or two Thin Lizzy songs, but a whole wealth of the Zeppelin catalog? Why did Metallica explode into what they are while Megadeth or Anthrax are 'also rans?' Why R.E.M and not the Long Ryders or Lone Justice? Why are Pete Townshend and Andy Partridge so smart and Paul Westerberg the 'brain damaged cousin'?

Which is not to say I haven't enjoyed hearing some older stuff I haven't visited in a while. But side 2 of Billy Idol's Whiplash Smile? Uh... no. And I was so excited when that came out, too. Why do I still like side 2 of Billy Joel's Glass Houses so much? Or the Cars Panorama? How come me and Marty [and now Marty's 14 year old son] seem to be the only people who love the Black Crowes Amorica?

To Be Continued [or not]....

"I used to get a little speed, you know - a little cough syrup. And I'd just sit and write for hours. 20 pages of nothing but dribble on Coltrane or the Faces. Just to fuckin' write."
-Lester to William again, Almost Famous

In honor of the publication of Rolling Stone's Top 100 Beatles Songs, I have put together my own little list for your approval [or not], in as close to an order as I can muster. Now RS included cover tunes in the catalog, I have opted not to. I have also not opted to go to 100. I'll stick to 33. This leaves a lot of really good stuff off, but I think this is a good 'Desert Island Beatles' list. And so: 1. A Day In the Life 2. Strawberry Fields Forever 3. Hey Jude 4. Tomorrow Never Knows 5. Dear Prudence 6. Help! 7. Day Tripper 8. Lucy In the Sky With Diamonds 9. Here Comes the Sun 10. Penny Lane 11. Paperback Writer 12. She Loves You 13. I Am the Walrus 14. For No One 15. Helter Skelter 16. Ticket To Ride 17. You've Got To Hide Your Love Away 18. If I Needed Someone 19. Oh! Darling 20. Let It Be 21. Dr. Robert 22. Lady Madonna 23. Nowhere Man 24. I Feel Fine 25. When I Get Home 26. What Goes On 27. In My Life 28. Mother Nature's Son 29. You Can't Do That 30. This Boy [Ringo's Theme] 31. You Won't See Me 32. I'm A Loser 33. Julia