Carved in Stone
How radio watered down the legacy of classic rock
By Mick Farren
Could classic rock be God's way of telling us that rock 'n' roll has been repeating itself for far too long, and that a bunch of riffs invented by Chuck Berry a half-century ago cannot, in fact, be eternally recycled? Or is it just that the music we all knew and grew on has a bizarre, contradictory, but exceptionally unbending conservative spine that belies the idea the rock 'n' roll was, is, and always will be rebel music? As John Lennon pointed out, maybe we do delude ourselves as being "so clever and classless and free." (You probably know the rest.)
This is not, in any way, to denigrate the work of the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, Jimi Hendrix, the Who, Neil Young, the Beach Boys, the Grateful Dead, Queen, the Eagles, Bruce Springsteen, and the rest of the hallowed host of 20th-century great ones who make up the playlists of middle-American classic rock radio. All of the above, in their heyday, made quantum creative leaps, and many were undisputed global icons. (Led Zeppelin should, of course, be included in this list, but I could never personally stand them, unable to view them as anything but the great overblown sperm whale of pomp rock.)
Back in the day, when I watched Pete Townshend lead the Who into violent mayhem in the London clubs - a skinny psychotic, full of art-school rebellion and Dexedrine, and with knuckles bleeding from the still-to-be-perfected windmill - neither he nor I had an inkling that his music would one day be used to validate Hummer commercials. When Keith Richards, all mascara and China White, opened his guitar case to work on Exile on Main St., was he conscious of approaching a monster peak in his creativity, and that it would never be so good again? Both men knew that rock 'n' roll is an infinitely fluid art form that needs constant movement and mutation to remain alive and vital. Richards and Townshend would have been appalled by the idea that their ultimate fate was to become preserved in cultural aspic - Play the old songs, goddamn it! - and to be defined by an audience for whom change is anathema, who uses rock music to provide a stadium invocation of its youth - or someone else's - and who wants to hear "Satisfaction" and "Substitute," and not the crap off the new CD.
And who's to blame for all this locked-down closed-mindedness? The true culprit is rock 'n' roll radio. When most of what we now consider classic rock was being created, the DJ ruled. Underexploited FM radio had been annexed by album-playing rock 'n' rollers, as an alternative to low-fi AM Top 40. Characters like Meg Griffin, Bob Rudnick, Barbara Birdfeather, Bob Fass, and the perpetual Rodney Bingenheimer played exactly what they wanted to play. Every market had an idiosyncratic FM personality, a version of Dr. Johnny Fever, the parody of the archetypal freeform jock from TV sitcom WKRP in Cincinnati, who - especially in dark of the stoned night - could play John Coltrane, Captain Beefheart, and the Stooges without a stylistic qualm. The legend was that the 12 minutes of Bob Dylan's "Sad-Eyed Lady of the Lowlands" gave a DJ enough time to take a shit.
Listeners were randomly exposed to all manner of weirdness, and all this musical cross-pollination had a direct and profound effect on the bubbling creativity of the times. But anarchy was not only the order of the day, it also made inadvertent money. In the pioneer times, local FM was supported by commercials from neighborhood head shops and waterbed entrepreneurs, but very soon success brought national advertising - beer, cosmetics, clothing, and automobiles - and both advertisers and station operators realized FM had become commercially viable, making content far too valuable to leave to a bunch of narcotized disc jockeys.
Polls were taken, studies conducted, and samples sampled. The jocks were deprived of their creativity, which was handed instead to station managers, salespeople, and assorted suits. Dr. Johnny Fever found himself with a playlist, a rotation of what were deemed the favorite bands of the maximum listeners. Innovation, idiosyncracy, and, above all, anything new and unusual were out. If DJs balked, they were shown the door - the corporate way or the highway. Playlists were further refined so they only included the most popular tunes by the most popular bands. Pete Townshend has complained that classic rock radio reduced his career to three songs. Sure "Won't Get Fooled Again" is on the playlist, but "Mary Ann With the Shaky Hands"? Forget about it. The same with the Stones. The classic rock stations were far more likely to play "Start Me Up" than "Moonlight Mile." The Jefferson Airplane and the Doors were reduced to one-hit wonders with the playlisting of only "White Rabbit" and "Riders on the Storm." Playlisting always went for the easy and accessible - no complications, no surprises. In this, Dylan presented a real problem: clearly a towering figure in the annals of rock, but rarely played on the classic rock stations because he was just too ... well ... Bob Dylan.
And it all worked. The classic rock format attracted an audience that seemingly wanted nothing more than the same familiar tunes played over and over. The joke that, at any given hour of the day, a radio station somewhere in America was playing "Stairway to Heaven" became infinitely plausible. The position of classic rock as the immutable and all-consuming radio format was consolidated by the discovery that it was a perfect marriage to blue-collar/commuter "morning zoo" drive shows fronted by the likes of Don Imus and the formative Howard Stern. No one touched that dial when Stern was followed by AC/DC. The only possible conclusion was that a vast section of the country wanted their music carved in stone. They had gone so far with rock 'n' roll, but that was as far as they wanted to go. Classic rock radio protected listeners from nasty new excesses like glam, or punk, or anything coming out of the inner city. It reassured the listener that everything - John Mellencamp and Bob Seger included - was stable and unchanging. Indeed, classic rock, despite all its macho posturing, essentially functioned as comfort radio for the culturally conservative.
Time passed, however, and even the hardest rock is subject to a certain erosion. After only a couple of decades, the Clash is now included in some classic rock playlists, although only "Should I Stay or Should I Go?," and Time Warner cable music now features what amounts to a classic punk channel. Maybe the most significant change, though, is on satellite radio, where DJs once again rule. Although perhaps not making the media inroads its investors had hoped, both XM and Sirius allow their featured DJs to run their own shows, and attract audiences by being unexpected and eclectic rather than adhering to a playlist. Bob Dylan plays such a weird assortment of material on his XM show that bootleg copies are making the rounds, not only because it's Bob, but also because of his bizarre selections.
Maybe I'm being a tad unfair to classic rock. I have no quarrel with the music. The Who and the Stones will remain superlative. That can't be taken away, but it might be treated more objectively without artificial consumer designations.
Published: 10/05/2006
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