Back in Paleo-circuit times (pre-internet: Neo-circuit
would be dial-up internet) electronic media by necessity were mass media. There
was a fairly small number of broadcast radio and TV stations and…well…that was
all. To be sure, there were niche music
radio stations even in the early days: country, classical, jazz, etc. In nearly
every market, however, there was a dominant top 40 radio station to which most
home, car, and portable radios were tuned at least part of the day. In the NYC
area, this for at least two decades was 77 WABC AM. While I appreciate and make
use of the massively greater array of media choices available today, there was
one peculiar advantage to the more limited options of the Paleo-circuit. The
top 40 stations were literally that. There was no division by genre; if the top
singles one week were by Frank Sinatra, The Rolling Stones, and Tammy Wynette, those
were the singles that aired. Recording artists who appeared on television were
the same ones who turned up on the top 40 stations. Here is a play list from
1974:
1. The Way
We Were - Barbra Streisand
2. Seasons
In the Sun, Terry Jacks
3. Love's
Theme, Love Unlimited Orchestra
4. Come and
Get Your Love, Redbone
5. Dancing
Machine, The Jackson 5
6. The
Loco-Motion, Grand Funk Railroad
7. T.S.O.P.
(The Sound of Philadelphia), MFSB
8. The
Streak, Ray Stevens
9. Bennie
and the Jets, Elton John
10. One Hell
of a Woman, Mac Davis
11. Until
You Come Back to Me (That's What I'm Gonna Do), Aretha Franklin
12. Jungle
Boogie, Kool and The Gang
13. Midnight
At the Oasis, Maria Muldaur
14. You Make
Me Feel Brand New, The Stylistics
15. Show and
Tell, Al Wilson
16. Spiders
and Snakes, Jim Stafford
17. Rock On,
David Essex
18. Sunshine
On My Shoulders, John Denver
19. Sideshow,
Blue Magic
20. Hooked
On a Feeling, Blue Swede
21. Billy,
Don't Be a Hero, Bo Donaldson and The Heywoods
22. Band On
the Run, Paul McCartney and Wings
23. The Most
Beautiful Girl, Charlie Rich
24. Time In
a Bottle, Jim Croce
25. Annie's
Song, John Denver
26. Let Me
Be There, Olivia Newton-John
27. Sundown,
Gordon Lightfoot
28. (You're)
Having My Baby, Paul Anka
29. Rock Me
Gently, Andy Kim
30. Boogie
Down, Eddie Kendricks
31. You're
Sixteen You're Beautiful (And You're Mine), Ringo Starr
32. If You
Love Me (Let Me Know), Olivia Newton-John
33. Dark
Lady, Cher
34. Best
Thing That Ever Happened to Me, Gladys Knight and The Pips
35. Feel
Like Makin' Love, Roberta Flack
36. Just
Don't Want to Be Lonely, The Main Ingredient
37. Nothing
from Nothing, Billy Preston
38. Rock
Your Baby, George McCrae
39. Top of
the World, The Carpenters
40. The
Joker, The Steve Miller Band
Not much consistency there. Accordingly, audiences
had more cross-genre exposure than today. We heard a lot of stuff we wouldn’t
have chosen to hear if we had programmed the music. Nowadays, of course, we do
effectively program our own music, selectively storing and playing our
preferred tunes and videos in a multitude of formats. A curious consequence of
all these choices is that we tend to be less eclectic. We focus on our
preferred brands of music and visual entertainment, while even the old-tech radio
and TV stations have grown ever more niche-oriented in order to grab some piece
of the fractured audience. (This is also true of opinion and politics, but that
is a subject for another blog.)
Some artists are hard to pigeonhole, of course. They
fall between the niches. This is certainly true of the blues/rock/country/folk
fusion of Lucinda Williams, who is one of the best songwriters working today as she has been for more than 30 years. Her indeterminate style hasn’t stopped her from winning awards and
selling recordings, but it does make her less well-known to a broad audience
than she would have been years ago. Niche stations are never quite sure that
she fits. In ’99 she won a Grammy in a Contemporary Folk category even
though that description of her album was more than a little dubious. Paul Rice in a Slant review of Lucinda’s new
double-album Down Where the Spirit Meets
the Bone comments, “In other words, should Williams be nominated next
year, expect the Grammys to once again have no idea what to do with her.”
I’ll be surprised if the Grammys do not face
that head-scratcher because Down Where
the Spirit Meets the Bone is a fine album. At 61, Lucinda has worldly
cynicism but without the bitterness of youth. Songwriters in this stage of life
(e.g. Joan Jett in last year’s Unvarnished
album) often get retrospective and contemplative as mortality grows harder to
ignore. The perspective often enriches their work, and it does here. It’s an impressive collection of songs, all delivered in her distinctive gravelly voice. There are
dark songs such as Something Wicked This
Way Comes, tough songs such as Cold
Day in Hell, sad songs such as This
Old Heartache, and songs that smell of the bayou (Lucinda is from Lake
Charles, LA) such as Stand Right by Each
Other. Some are mellow and some rock. A few, such as Walk On, are very close to modern country but not quite there. She doesn't want to go quite there. In a Rolling Stone interview, she was dismissive of modern country and quoted bassist John Ciambotti: "Country music today is like Seventies rock without the cocaine."
If you’re thinking this isn’t really your kind of
music, you’re probably right. It isn’t mine either. I’m not sure it is anybody’s.
Nevertheless, I’m glad I bought the album anyway. Both CDs from the pack are currently in my stereo’s CD tray
– with the Offspring, Eric Burdon, and Theory of a Deadman, which are odd
company. They’re likely to stay there for a while.
West Memphis (from Down Where the Spirit Meets the Bone)
That is an eclectic mix of songs from '74, which brings back a lot of memories. Odd that Billy, Don't Be A Hero and Seasons of the Sun, among a few others would be above Paul McCartney. I always wondered who put these list together and perhaps some payola behind them?
ReplyDeleteWith today's music scene probably doesn't help much for variety in that most radio has fallen into monopolized conglomerates like Clear Channel or I Heart Radio or whatever. A large number of people listen to radio over their cell phones, if you have that capability using Pandora and Last.fm, etc., I have used them and they can be a pretty good tool, however, with them, you plug in a performer you enjoy and they find other performers similar to them. So you're not experiencing anything new. To be honest though, back in the 70's when a song would come on like say, Terry Jacks, or whoever, that I had no interest in, I'd usually push a button and switch the channel anyway.
Seems I've always perused magazines and such to search out new music, back in the old days, that was hit and miss, however, these days it's switched to using Amazon, to hear something before buying. That's a great data base for that sort of thing and other media. Heck, you can preread excerpts of books, search opinions, and all sorts of things.
I agree about modern country, it's pretty close to pop and rock these days. Miranda Lambert is pretty big down here as she grew up around these parts. I don't care for country much, but to each their own. I certainly listen to some outlandish stuff that I don't feel anyone could care about either. That's one of the nice thing about the arts though, there's plenty for any taste. By the way I have a Lucinda Williams CD, Car Wheels on a Gravel Road. That singer/songwriter genre is one which I enjoy from time to time. I've always enjoyed Bob Dylan, Van Morrison, J.J.Cale, early Jackson Browne, Jame Taylor, etc. Check out Jack Hardy's Coin in the Realm, or his Collected Works '65-95 is excellent. You can hear some on Amazon. He's from NYC, but traveled all over performing when he was alive. I was fortunate to see him play in Dallas, and he gave a great concert. He used to hold songwriting workshops in his home in NYC when he was around. Also check out Robert Earl Keen, Jr.'s No Kinda Dancer--it's a great one filled with all sort of songs--his best probably.
All good songsters to be sure. Thanks for the Keen recommendation.
DeleteThe internet definitely makes research and sampling of music easier. I peek at the Rolling Stone lists for Best Albums too. As for homogenization of music in each genre, that's apparently not just our imagination. See the study referenced in a Livescience article: http://www.livescience.com/21911-pop-music-trends.html . Apparently this is largely consumer driven. Now that people can call up whatever they like on youtube, most of them call up (and later buy) stuff that sounds just like what they picked the last time. I guess the good news is that the same tech makes also it easy to find something different -- for those who want to do so.