CLASSIC ROCK TRACKS POLL parking lot tailgate pre-party -- nominations, discussions, parameters, etc.

Cheap Sunglasses a strong contender for my #1 spot

I lose my patience with ZZ Top all the time.

no prob! (xp)

are ppl voting for santana?

oye como va gonna be high on my ballot

def. going to be voting for Santana, probably that track

songs that are primarily a groove+solos are one of the best kinds of classic rock. Same reason Cheap Sunglasses is a high contender for me.

Santana-related, from the Ween thread

how many songs are we putting in our ballots? i know we haven't got to that yet but I was wondering

347.

- After this thread has run its course and I officially open voting, I'm thinking of a 2 week voting window, with ballots consisting of a minimum of 20 songs and a maximum of 100 songs.

100???

Except for the decade polls, this will be the first time I feel confident I can full a 100-track ballot pretty easily.

420

I think the results from this poll are gonna be super hella interesting and contentious.

if people think 100 is insane i can dial it down to 50 but i kinda want the option there for those of you (us) that wanna go whole hog. i just look at all these songs and the hundreds of them i've enjoyed, and i'd like to be able to really vote for everything i feel strongly about, be able to vote for as many Who songs as i want and still have room for the one hit wonders, etc.

whatever wins, we should start a movement, maybe through one of those whitehouse.gov petitions, to have that song replace "freebird" as the song that people are required to shout out at concerts.

this is prob gonna be one of the hardest polls to predict ever. i don't even want to venture a guess at a #1 or a like top ten.

Did Rainbow's 'Stargazer' ever get much US "classic rock" airplay? 'Cuz if it did, it deserves to be in there.

^ never. even though it is better than 99% of songs on there.

I'm excited to do a 100-song poll, don't dial it down to 50 please!

Guessing "Baba O'Riley" for top 5.

Everybody's going to have a different criteria for voting. For me, this poll is the place where songs like More Than A Feeling get their due.

If the band/singer already had their own dedicated poll, I'm not going to vote for them. That means no Stones, Who, Dylan, Zeppelin, Springsteen etc. So while I normally like Gimme Shelter more than Radar Love, I don't here.

I like that approach, will consider

Guessing "Baba O'Riley" for top 5.

it barely made top 5 of the who poll!

YESSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSsssssssss! So stoked for this one, a long time coming. Will flip through the list in a second with suggestions in a second. Really glad it's a long ballot, too.

I vote yes on 'regional hits' - or at least, on "Ah! Leah," which I never heard until I moved north - great song.

I would agree with purging Motley Crue and Ratt - that's something else, new hard rock music at the time that these stations were becoming officially closed-door 'classics' affairs, at least from what I've gathered on other threads. I NEVER heard these on classic rock radio growing up.

I think Asia's top couple of hits should DEFINITELY be here. Not quite as convinced by Europe but YMMV.

Agreed with WilliamC that Horse With No Name absolutely should be here, only format in which I've ever heard it and they play it a LOT. Never heard any of America's other hits on CR though. MAYBE Tin Man, MAYBE Ventura Highway.

Beatles: yeah it's a limited list, but actually almost anything on the last few albums is fair game. I'm sure I've heard "Here Comes The Sun" on these stations. Hell, even "Drive My Car" back in the day. "Birthday" gets played, etc..

basically intheblanks is right - we all know what the ultimate stereotypical Classic Rock would end up sounding like, but this radio format has always been a LITTLE broader than that, and includes lots of things on the basis of decades of inertia and momentum that really don't make sonic sense next to each other. Nonetheless I'd say "Fooled Around and Fell In Love" is pushing us too far into soft AM territory.

"Birthday" gets played, etc..

^ this or Come Together are the classic rockiest of Beatles songs.

Someone upthread mentioned never hearing Pretenders on CR radio. I'm almost positive I've heard "Brass In Pocket" jammed in between the likes of Journey and the Doobies, but no other Pretenders songs ever.

I like the 100-song ballot idea. If you're willing to compile that much data, I'm willing to throw that much data at you.

Testing the waters here - some of these may be 'borderline' and I may be mashing up things I used to hear as "oldies" versus "classic rock." Not sure any are really staples these days. Kinda picking up the woodstockier end of things, I think.

The Band - The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down
Blood Sweat & Tears - Spinning Wheel
Blues Image - Ride Captain Ride
Canned Heat - Going Up The Country
Doobie Brothers - Black Water
Eddie Money - Think I'm In Love (maybe)
Eric Clapton - After Midnight
Faces - Ooh La La (maybe?)
Genesis - Paperlate (once in a blue moon, played to show their deep-cut cred)
Guess Who - These Eyes
Jaggerz - The Rapper
Joe Cocker - Feelin' Alright
Joe Cocker - She Came In Through the Bathroom Window
Little Feat - Dixie Chicken
Robert Plant - In The Mood
Rolling Stones - Tumblin' Dice (might be imaginging this)
Rolling Stones - Wild Horses (not that we need more Stones)
Three Dog Night - Joy To The World
Three Dog Night - Mama Told Me Not To Come (maybe more "oldies"? see also "Celebrate." Does "Shambala" get play?)
War - Cisco Kid (maybe?)
War - Spill The Wine

Does Ace Frehley - Back In The New York Groove have any CR purchase? Just heard it for the first time recently but people seem to know it. Similarly, I know I heard Cheap Trick - Dream Police at SOME point in my youth but god knows on what station.

Overall I think the initial list is already pretty great, and does have the virtue of not including anything that absoLUTEly doesn't get played on these stations. As balls said a while back, "bemoaning the lack of choices is a key part of the classic rock radio experience" - it would be better for the noms list to be too restrictive than to see votes get soaked up by awesome songs that, like it or not, just aren't part of the 1,000 song Labor Day Extended Weekend Rock Block. I'm surprised for example at This Beat Goes On/Switchin' To Glide, which I would be stoked to vote very high - but it feels very "new wave" and definitely did not hear it growing up. This again might be a Southern regional exclusion though.

Does "Shambala" get play?

Any song prominently featured in the film Joe Dirt should be grandfathered in.

"Back on The Chain Gang" and "Middle of The Road" are pretty big on classic rock radio here.

Re:Pretenders obvs.

Brass In Pocket is absolutely within these parameters, I heard it all the time when it came out

I was 13 in 1979 and had just started getting into music, taping cassettes off of the radio. So many flashbacks already w/these lists & suggestions. It is mind-boggling to me how much stuff from the 1979-82 era is canonized now, so many things that I thought I'd never hear past high school that have essentially been embedded in the American id at this point.

the station I listened to (WWWV in central VA) would play Cars, Talking Heads & Elvis Costello songs alongside Led Zep & ZZ Topp, I gather this was a bit of an outlier for the time.

How does yacht rock and derivatives, or that smooth west coast sound, intersect with this aesthetic? Because I'm another Briton w/no experience of classic FM radio, but one song that really makes sense to me is:

Christopher Cross - Ride Like The Wind

If there was one Christopher Cross song that might be heard on typical CR radio, that would be the one.

look at that photo from "mask" that someone posted above, and ask yourself if a majority of the dudes in that photo could play the song on a jukebox without the rest of the dudes beating them up, "ride like the wind" fails that test. if bob seger had released it, the results might be different. but the identity of the artist matters here.

Are we drawing a line between pre-Michael McDonald Doobies and Michael McDonald Doobies?

Because I'm voting for Takin' It to the Streets by gum!

takin it to the streets absolutely yes.

but probably not minute by minute or what a fool believes.

basically anything on best of the doobies qualifies, while nothing on best of the doobies 2 qualifies, methinks.

(that, at least, is what this fool believes.)

only know what a fool believes because of classic rock radio

movie bikers be damned

That's a good call.

disco poll was 100 tracks and was awesome

A lot of the acts that have been disputed on some level (Beatles, Cars, Talking Heads, The Clash) have had classic rock staples for two decades. They may be less hard-rocking or hirsute or macho, and their careers fall at the edges of 70s. But if you listen to 24 hours of a classic rock station you'll hear all these acts--multiple times in the case of the Beatles and the Cars.

― intheblanks, Wednesday, June 18, 2014 8:42 AM (6 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Did anyone else here grow up listening to NY classic rock, mainly WNEW and WXRK?

i think those two stations are right on the rock/classic rock divide that have flummoxed a lot of us in trying to remember what did or didn't get played on classic rock radio back in the day. to me, the wnew of scott muni, dave herman and carol miller was a "rock" station, playing beatles/stones/zep but also '60s AM nuggets (motown, girl groups, some actual nuggets) and also plenty of new stuff that lifted from both traditions (petty and mellencamp on one hand, smithereens and elvis costello on the other hand). wxrk, if memory recalls, came later and was much more self-consciously "classic rock," zeroing in on the zeppelin/skynyrd/acdc/vanhalen piece of the format and dispensing with anything that smelled "alternative" or "black" (and adding, of course, howard stern). i think wxrk is much truer to the spirit of this poll.

another station like wnew was boston's wbcn in the '70s and '80s, which played a ton of new wave and weirdo one-hit wonders and local rock along with the beatles and stones and phil spector and sly stone and marvin gaye, and love's "alone again or" was a staple, and i think of it as classic and as rock, but not as classic rock, and i think there's a big difference there.

― fact checking cuz, Wednesday, June 18, 2014 9:03 AM (5 hours ago)

also, great post, fcc

Foghat: Fool For The City

Kim Mitchell - Go For a Soda
Trooper - Boys in the Bright White Sports Car
Headpins - Don't It Make You Feel
Toronto - Your Daddy Don't Know

0 for 4 there imo

I don't know about everyone else, but I WANT to do a 100 song ballot. I mean, just looking at that list, a 100 song ballot is going to be enough of a challenge.