Classic Rock?

  I was surfing the guide the other night as one is wont to do and I came across a listing on AXS for a ‘documentary’ called What Is Classic Rock? The current showing was about 20 minutes from ending and I wasn’t up for spending two hours on it at the time, so thank goodness for the DVR. Since my usual Friday night view [Blue Bloods] was preempted, I had time to take a gander at it. Of course, this gives me an excuse to pontificate at length about rock music and some related subjects. So here it goes.

   The short answer to “What is Classic Rock?” is “Well, I know it when I hear it.” This is subject to individual tastes and is absolutely true. But life is rarely as black and white as that.

   The monochrome answer is “It’s what I have been programmed to deem Classic Rock by my local station boasting the format ‘Classic Rock’.” And this is where the waters get really, really muddy. [Not to be confused with Muddy Waters who is definitely classic but not rock.]

   There are a few artists who most everyone would list as the backbone of Classic Rock – the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, the Who, David Bowie, Led Zeppelin, Pink Floyd, Aerosmith, the Steve Miller Band and ZZ Top. But there are rules about even those artists in the tightly controlled format known as Classic Rock Radio [CRR]. For example, there is a dividing line for the Beatles. One rarely hears anything before the groundbreaking late 1965 album Rubber Soul on CRR. I Want To Hold Your Hand? She Loves You? A Hard Day’s Night? No, these are usually kept to Golden Oldies Radio. Why? In my personal opine, it has a lot to do with one of those lines that divides the Golden Oldies era from the Classic Rock Era – the switch from the single to the album as the primary means of music consumption.

   You can thank the Beatles for this as well. Although the Beatles would have many more hit singles, the aforementioned Rubber Soul was a line in the sand where they said “every track on the album should be as good as any track put out as a single.” Not to say that prior albums weren’t great. The original British release of A Hard Day’s Night [the one you now get on CD and vinyl] was an outstanding record and [again the original British release of] Help! was getting there even though I think there a couple of clunkers on there. Part of that line comes from the practice in Britain of putting singles out completely separate from albums. Which is why there are a handful of songs from the Beatles and Stones catalogs you can only get on compilation albums. For the Beatles, that includes songs like Day Tripper, We Can Work It Wout, Paperback Writer, Rain, Lady Madonna, Hey Jude, Get Back and Don’t Let Me Down. The Stones catalog has never been synched up the way the Beatles catalog was when the decision was made to put them out on CD as the original British releases from 1963 to 1966. With 1967’s Sgt. Pepper, the Beatles records were issued the same in the U.K and the U.S. [Except 1967’s Magical Mystery Tour which was the issued as the American album with the B side collecting the single tracks Strawberry Fields Forever, Penny Lane, Hello Goodbye, All You Need Is Love and Baby You’re A Rich Man.] The Stones albums would be synched worldwide with 67’s Their Satanic Majesties Request.  But a few of their non-LP tracks include It’s All Over Now, 19^th Nervous Breakdown, Jumpin’ Jack Flash and Honky Tonk Women. In Britain [I Can’t Get No] Satisfaction, Get Off Of My Cloud, The Last Time, Ruby Tuesday and Paint It Black are all non-LP singles!

   The other shift that for me marks the arrival of the Classic Rock Era [CRE] is the beginnings of the rise of FM radio. AM radio in the 60s was dominated by the Top 40 format. Play the hits! But with the uncontrolled format rising on FM radio, underground artists would begin to get exposure. Sure, there are bands that cross over to both – the Beatles, the Stones and Creedence Clearwater Revival. While their record company release a cut down version of Whole Lotta Love but Led Zeppelin didn’t release singles so you would not hear them on top 40 / AM radio. The Jimi Hendrix Experience. Cream. The Grateful Dead. Janis Joplin.

   Because it is subjective, I personally place the Classic Rock Era in the general consensus range of 1967 to 1977. This coincides with the cleaning of the slate by the Punk and arrival of New Wave. [New Wave being a brilliant marketing term by Sire Records Seymour Stein in response to those radio station who said “we don’t play punk records.”]

   For me the watermark record is the arrival of the Cars’ first record. The Cars are another band that is a staple of CRR but personally I don’t consider them a ‘Classic Rock band.’ They touch on the Classic Rock Era though and fall under a heading I call The Golden Age of FM, which in my experience was approximately 1977 to about 1990. A lot of artists from TGAoFM wind up on CRR. Guns N’ Roses, Def Leppard, Bon Jovi and Motley Crue.

   Although its origin is an Album Oriented Rock station in Cleveland in 1980, CRR is generally recognized as coming into its own in 1986. CRR is a very tightly controlled and heavily researched radio format. Originally aimed at the 25-34 year old white male, the demographic has shifted over the years and is now aimed at the 44-54 year old white male. This explains the updating of playlists now include totally non CRE acts such as Nirvana and other mainstays of the Grunge Era [1991 – 1996]. This is comparable to the changes in Golden Oldies Radio which slowly shifting from a 60s Top 40 to more of the 70s to currently being heavily 1980s. You can tell the difference because GOR played Madonna. And a lot of Michael Jackson.

   This is the confusion that is the whole basis of the starting question: “What is Classic Rock?”

   Per Wikipedia: Classic-rock radio programmers largely play "tried and proven" hit songs from the past based on their "high listener recognition and identification", says media academic Roy Shuker, who also identifies white male rock acts from the Beatles' Sgt. Pepper-era through the end of the 1970s as the focus of their playlists.^[30] As Catherine Strong observes, classic rock songs are generally performed by white male acts from either the United States or the United Kingdom, "have a four-four time, very rarely exceed the time limit of four minutes, were composed by the musicians themselves, are sung in English, played by a 'classical' rock formation (drums, bass, guitar, keyboard instruments) and were released on a major label after 1964."^[

   Shifting demographics aside, my personal problem with the CRR format is that tight formatting. Because of that need for “high listener identification,” there’s a focus on 250 – 300 songs. In terms of your usual record buying public, averaging 10 songs per album, that’s about 30 CDs or albums worth of songs. To put that into more perspective, I am on my 44^th car mix CD of the 8 track era [appx 1967 – 1980] alone!

   With such tight focus the average radio listener is going to miss a lot of great music. For example, the 15 studio albums Rod Stewart participated from 1967 to 1979 are represented by the Faces’ Stay With Me and maybe 5 or 6 other songs. Jefferson Airplane [7 albums] would be deemed to have only ever done two three-minute songs: White Rabbit and Somebody To Love. Mountain [4 albums] is reduced to one two-and-a-half-minute song: Mississippi Queen. Don’t even get me going on never heard artists like Rory Gallagher, Johnny Winter and Jeff Beck / the Jeff Beck Group.

   My answer then is this:  The Classic Rock Era is an era of music made from 1967 to 1976 made by mostly American, Canadian and British artists encompassing the gerne of Rock / Rock and Roll and subjective sub-genres such as Progressive Rock, Singer-Songwriter, Country Rock, etc.

   The Classic Rock Radio format is one that plays some Classic Rock but is not limited to the range of the Classic Rock Era. Therefore, Classic Rock Radio plays some Classic Rock music but not everything on Classic Rock Radio is from the Classic Rock Era.

   Clear as mud, right?

 Random Record Revisited: 

The Roaring Silence – Manfred Mann’s Earth Band [1976]

When Manfred Mann’s Earth Band’s version of Blinded By the Light popped up on the radio it was like nothing else out there. It was one of those songs that forced you to sit on the station that just played it or go hopping around the dial looking for it on another station. The single version at 3:49 cuts out three minutes of jamming in the middle [a cardinal sin of say the Knack’s My Sharona single] yet still feels like it captures the complete spirit of the song.

Blinded kicks off MMEB’s The Roaring Silence in high cotton. Unfortunately, the second track Singing The Dolphin Through is an overlong, slow mid-tempo thing that rises and swells like parts of Styx’s Come Sail Away melded with the Monkees’ The Porpoise Song. After about five and a half minutes it falls into the prog death spiral of guitar solo over fanfare keyboards then a descending synthesizer figure that leads to calm, lolling waves over which someone has now decided to add some honking saxophone solo. [To say I am not a fan of this song would be a pretty fair statement.] And then surprisingly, the next cut Waiter, There’s A Yawn In My Ear kicks into some interesting keyboard runs and riffs that turn into an interesting instrumental jam. It's nothing to challenge a band like Yes but it avoids being just stock, dull “rock by numbers.” Applause at the end indicates that this may be something cut off a live tape.

The second side is actually pretty darn good. The Road To Babylon is some good light prog with a choir and some time shifts. Good wah-wah lead work by Chris Hamlet Thompson. Hate the abrupt cut off that ends the song. My copy is the second issue of the album which has a touched up recording of another Bruce song, Spirits In the Night with vocals by new singer Thompson. [A longer version of Spirits had been on the band’s previous album Nightingales And Bombers. It featured a stretched out middle section with some tasty work by Mick Rogers which probably heavily inspired what was to come with Blinded.] This  heavily edited version is nowhere near as interesting. This Side Of Paradise cops the vocal melody from Brandy You’re A Fine Girl but puts it over a bubbling light progressive tune. Starbird has a bit of uptempo jamming ala  Led Boots on Jeff Beck’s Wired that breaks into a little chordal dirge at the end akin to something maybe the Alan Parsons Project would be doing on I, Robot. Questions is not a cover of the Moody Blues but flows similarly like a Moody Blues song with Brian May adding a fanfare like solo.

As a second-tier progressive band album, I find Manfred Mann’s Earth Band satisfying enough to warrant digging up a couple more albums to see if there’s another good record out there.

ADDENDA: Apparently the remastered CD version puts the touched up Spirits In the Night after Questions and adds the single version of BBtL as the final cut. Maybe this original running order which appears on the first pressing [denoted by its sepia brown colored jacket, not the blue green one] might be a little more satisfying than the one with Spirits plopped down [possibly breaking the cosmic flow]between Babylon and Paradise. And one review says Singing the Dolphin Through is a cover of Mike Heron who was also in the Incredible String Band. This does not change my opinion of the Earth Band’s cut here, I add it merely to be informative.

 Random Record Revisited:

Get the Knack – The Knack [1979]

Sure you know the hits, ever tracked the whole album? Should you? I mean if you like Cheap Trick type power pop, you’re going to like the opener Let Me Out. And Lucinda and Frustrated on the B side.

The main difference between the Knack and the Tricksters is the Knack’s base in L.A. jangle pop. Maybe the Raspberries would be a better group to compare the Knack to. But they rarely ever hit as hard as the Raspberries or Cheap Trick. It’s like the band is on a really tight leash and don’t get a chance to really rock. Then you get to Good Girls Don’t. It’s a joyous ode to “school [kid] stuff, sticky sweet romance.” Nudge, wink. Shit man, we’ve all been fifteen, sixteen living out those Fast Times At Ridgemont High things. And someone finally said “girls want it too.” Is it embarrassing if one thinks about it? Maybe. But it’s better than Gene Simmons singing about Christine Sixteen - that’s just pure lechery.

The of course My Sharona kicks off the second side. Berton Averre’s guitar solo makes this song. Lucinda on side 2 is another Trick style song, a ballad this time. A cover of Buddy Holly’s Heartbeat sounds like a tribute to Dave Edmunds’ Rockpile. The previously mentioned Frustrated ends the album with another bit of rocking pop.

I mean I guess if the radio is playing disco, disco and disco and this comes out it’s going to be a breath of fresh air. Ultimately, I don’t think it holds up very well.

 

Random Record Revisited: 

Hounds Of Love - Kate Bush [1985]

I was in Austin’s Waterloo Records & Video looking for [and finding!] something wholly unrelated when I began grooving to Kate on the speakers. Familiar really only with The Whole Story collection, I recognized Hounds Of Love and Cloudbusting [even though I could not recall the name of Cloubusting until looking up the album later]. But nothing in the CD section seemed to be what was playing. I wandered up to the counter and asked and the nice lady held up a vinyl copy of Hounds Of Love.   

I get why some people might not be able to get into this. Kate’s high soprano swooping and diving all over the range might not be for everyone. Kate’s musical left turns like the unexpected jump 1:20 into Waking the Witch might also put some people off. Those shifts from the minimalist Under The Ice into the claustrophobic Tears For Fears like part of Waking the Witch to the Celtic Jig Of Life to the dramatic Hello Earth with it’s section of ethereal voices at the end all as one piece [side 2’s The Ninth Wave suite] aren’t for everybody. Even the ‘pop’ [as in ‘popular music’] side has its share of quirks – the cheery chirpy ‘arfs’/ background vocals in the title track.

Hounds Of Love is an ambitious album for anyone. Considering [now, 35 years after the fact] that this was done by a 26, 27-year-old is stunning. If one needs to add ‘woman,’ then fine [but I don’t think talent knows any gender]. I think it takes someone with an open mind and who enjoys a sense of adventure in their music to get deeply into this album. Not that it can’t be enjoyed by anyone of course!  Anyone putting this album on opens a door to as rich and rewarding an experience as they want to get into.

 

Disclaimer: Reviews of the 2018 remastered version of HoL indicate that this version uses a different mix of the song The Big Sky than the original release – much to the dismay and disappointment of many fans. [I don’t think whether this was by accident or on purpose has ever been addressed.] Some reviews basically claim that this ‘ruined’ the album, makes the album an abomination or red headed stepchild to be hidden away in the basement when company comes over. However, not being familiar with the original, this does not affect my judgement of the album at all.