Two stories about why I stopped listening to classic rock stations

[womzilla]

One is recent, the other much older.

Back in North Carolina in the 1980s and early 1990s, my best friend was a fellow named Mike Cullen. He worked the Wednesday afternoon shift at Second Foundation, the comics and sf store at which I worked on Thursday through Tuesday. We generally had free choice of what to play on the radio; I had already shifted over to college radio by that point, but Cullen still preferred the local classic rock station (WRDU, now an all-talk station) and would play it for his whole shift, noon to 6 PM.

One week, he noticed that he had heard Gerry Rafferty's "Baker Street" every week for at least the previous four, and decided to keep count. Starting with that day as week 1, WRDU played "Baker Street" some time Wednesday between noon and 6 PM for 17 straight weeks. On week 18, they didn't play "Baker Street" until 6:05. Thus did the streak end with a whimper.

More recently, yesterday I was driving around running some errands. My first- and second-preferred stations, "The Peak" and "The Rock Xperience" were in commercial breaks, so I switched over to the classic rock station, Q104. I enjoyed a couple of pleasant songs that now elude me, and then they played Jethro Tull's "Locomotive Breath", which I like but which got me thinking about the fact that classic rock stations play maybe five Tull songs ("Aqualung", "Locomotive Breath", "Bungle in the Jungle", and a few other tracks off of the Greatest Hits album), and how the thing I hate about classic rock stations is that it isn't even that they overplay a small number of bands, it's that they only play three or four songs from those bands. I'm not a big Tull fan, but there are a lot of good pieces on those early albums that aren't "greatest hits".

So I switched over to The Peak, which was midway through Procul Harem's "Simple Sister", which I probably hadn't heard in fifteen years. When the song was over, the dj came on and said, "Procul Harem: so much more than just 'Whiter Shade of Pale'". He then mentioned that Procul Harem would be performing at Jones Beach this summer, in a double bill with . . . Jethro Tull.

Bill Watterson once wrote, "You're listening to Boomer 102 classic rock -- where we promise not to expose you to anything you haven't heard a million times before!" But sometimes it's like the universe just shouts at you.

(ETA: I just looked at the contents of M.U., Tull's first Greatest Hits album, from 1976. There are ten songs on it; all of the Tull I've heard on a classic rock station in the last two decades comes from side one. In classicrockworld, Tull don't even have an entire Greatest Hits album!)

Comments

[sarah-ovenall.livejournal.com]

the weird thing is, lots of people really want to hear the same songs over and over. For instance, I used to feel like it would be a big problem to play songs that I considered "overexposed" on my show. I would make a point of looking for unusual songs & try not to play a band's biggest hit. Then I did that "song for every year" show, in which every single song was a hit. People loved that show. I got more calls than in any other show I've ever done. People called and said "I remember every one of these songs!" So maybe I was overdoing it in trying to introduce people to songs they didn't know.

Since then, I'm much more willing to play the song for which an artist is best known. People want to hear it. They don't think, "gah, that's so overplayed." They think "oh I love this song! yay!" Even if you can hear it on mainstream radio or in a movie or in advertising. (though I won't play a song that's in a memorable ad campaign right at the moment, that still feels overexposed).

[womzilla.livejournal.com]

I don't think it's bad for a radio show to build around *some* familiarity. The entire idea of a classic rock station stands on that. But classic rock stations are abyssally bad at tempering familiarity with variety. A staple of the classic rock approach is the Memorial Day weekend marathon of the "Top 500" (or 1000 or whatever) songs, all but explicitly declaring "these are the only songs we will play for the next year."

[washa-way.livejournal.com]

I remember once when I was working a temp job that WRDU played "Beast of Burden" something like four days in a row.

Come on, folks--this is the ROLLING STONES. They released more albums in the 1960s than most bands do in an entire career, and you couldn't think of a single one other than "Some Girls"?

[womzilla.livejournal.com]

Back in the 1990s, I said that in the classic rock world, Lou Reed came out of nowhere, recorded "Walk on the Wild Side", and then he had a couple of good songs on his most recent album. In the twenty years since, that last clause has changed to "and then he disappeared forever."

Lynard Skynard used to have a bunch of songs. Now they just have "Free Bird" and "Sweet Home Alabama" and maybe, once in a blue moon, "Tuesday's Gone". I mean, seriously, if you're not the Beatles, the Stones, or Led Zep, in classicrockworld you have at most two songs that get any play and two more "deep cuts".

[washa-way.livejournal.com]

Ha! I guess Lou jumped, fully-formed, from the forehead of Bowie in 1975 or so?

Of course, you don't hear a lot of Bowie on classic rock stations, either; "Space Oddity" or "Ziggy Stardust" is pretty much it.

[womzilla.livejournal.com]

"Suffragette City" and the early-80s pop ("Modern Love", "Let's Dance") still get played, I think. But there are huge swathes of Bowie that *never* get onto classic rock (most of the Berlin albums, except "Heroes"; all of Aladdin Sane).

[sarah-ovenall.livejournal.com]

seems like I've heard "Fashion," "Rebel Rebel" and "Young Americans" on the radio, though maybe I'm thinking of the radio in my head.

[womzilla.livejournal.com]

Oh, yeah, "Young Americans" still gets play--not just on classic rock; I think it's officially an "oldie" now. "Fashion" might be the only song from the Berlin period that surfaces.

[sarah-ovenall.livejournal.com]

so what's the difference between "classic rock radio" and "oldies radio"? A few years ago I had a part time job where they kept the radio on a station playing pop from the 60s and 70s. I can't remember most of the music because it was pretty uniformly horrible and I mostly blocked it out. But I remember hearing Christopher Cross (always "Sailing") the Doobie Brothers (always "What a Fool Believes") and the song "Build Me Up Buttercup" constantly. That was a good song, the only one I didn't mind hearing all the time. Is that what you mean by "oldies"? That station would never have played David Bowie.

[womzilla.livejournal.com]

Dan Breen, the owner of Second Foundation, was (is?) an oldies listener, so most of my oldies listening is from nearly 20 years ago. "Oldies" stations play pop songs, starting generally with the mid-1960s and extending, last time I checked, into the early 1980s. It was quite a shock to channel-flip to the oldies station a few years back and hear "Sweet Dreams (Are Made of This)". Sometimes an oldies playlist will include rock; the more melodic and less guitar-driven Beatles songs certainly could show up in an oldies mix. But psychedelic music never would, and (back then, anyway) neither would anyone who had ever heard a Velvet Underground song.

"Build Me Up Buttercup" is an oldies staple and a song I still enjoy. Oldies used to include a lot of Motown, and some of the Brill Building pop was very good.

The other songs you list might be oldies fare, by now. But it sounds to me like you were subjected to a "Lite" or "Adult Mix" station, which is like oldies but even more bland. Solo Neil Diamond is the weak backbone of Lite oldies.

Obviously, the boundaries among these various radio genera are not rock-solid. I just googled Lite stations in central NC and discovered that one of them had just played "Down Under" by Men at Work, which has far more percussion than I ever would have thought would be acceptable on a Lite station.

[sarah-ovenall.livejournal.com]

"Lite" sounds familiar, I think the station ID included the word "Lite". They also played Christmas music 24/7 for an entire month. You'd think that would make their playlist even narrower but I didn't notice more repetition than during the rest of the year.

I actually still have the job but the office manager who had control over the radio left soon after the station changed format -- probably to "oldies" because they started including newer & more rock-ish songs. She kept listening but I could tell she didn't enjoy it as much. Her replacement kept the radio off, for which I was grateful, and her replacement listens to Diane Rehm.

[laurahcory1.livejournal.com]

I completely lost my taste for Led Zep for well over a decade, because local stations wore out their copies of "Stairway to Heaven." It's only been in the past couple of years that I've slowly started listening to them again.

[montoya.livejournal.com]

What's interesting to me about classic rock stations is that 25 years ago when I was a kid, they were there, playing songs from the '60s and '70s. But there aren't today any "modern classic rock" stations that play solely music from the '80s and '90s.

There are TONS of stations that play stuff from the 80s through modernity (to the point that you have to really hit that scan button to actually find a pure Top 40 station these days), but there's no classic rock ghetto for the people who are as old now as classic rock listeners were in 1985.

I feel like this must mean something, but I don't know what.

[minnehaha.livejournal.com]

I gave up on classic rock so long ago I had completely forgotten what overblown tedious dreck is "Baker Street" (a song I have heard many dozens of times, but never knew the name of).

Listening to classic rock radio is like going back to high school. None for me, thanks. Locally, the classic rock station employs a really despicable human being as its morning drive time personality, and that made it all the more easy to set all the radio buttons in our car to something else.

K.

[kip-w.livejournal.com]

Jethro Tull played at the amphitheatre in Virginia Beach (or maybe Norfolk — Southside, anyway) around 2000 and gave one hell of a show. They could have filled it up with greatest hits, but played as much, or more, new stuff as/than old stuff. No living in the past for them! I was glad, of course, that they did the Bourree.

We started heading out a minute too soon, alas. As I was walking away, they did an encore. "What a Wonderful World," the MOR standard made popular again by GOOD MORNING, VIETNAM. They did it right down the middle, with a sincere, cornball delivery that melted my heart and feet. Since then, I've searched repeatedly for a recording of them doing it, always in vain.

[kip-w.livejournal.com]

As a current college student, I find the listening choices on the crappy CD player in the printmaking studio very interesting. I've found one or two newish things I liked well enough to rip a copy of the CD to my iTunes, and I've been bold enough to put on something of my own from time to time. "Un Monde Parfait" by Les Innocents never got a response. "Flood" by They Might Be Giants is clearly familiar to the class of today ("Now I'm going to be hearing Particle Man all day."). "Sunset Ride" by Zephyr got an inquiry or two.

They know Dylan, the Beatles, and Zeppelin, and even put them on for enjoyment. They've discussed other groups I know well, and many that I remain ignorant of, though not by choice. I miss details in the music since I started sitting on the opposite end of the room from the player.

I should listen to Fleet Foxes again. Takes me back to the studio.

[womzilla.livejournal.com]

One of the things that I compliment myself on is that I'm still finding new (or new-to-me) artists to not merely enjoy but go crazy for: New Pornographers, Bishop Allen (both from the past decade); Neutral Milk Hotel, Belle and Sebastian (from the 1990s); The Only Ones (from the 1970s!)....

I think that They Might Be Giants have been doing first-rate work over the last few years. Maybe nothing will ever again hit the world with the shocking originality of their first 3 albums, but Join Us, Nanobots, and large parts of The Else are just amazingly good. (And I'm serious that "The Mesopotamians" might now be my favorite TMBG song.)