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

[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.