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

"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.

"Go for Soda" apparently was HUGE in Houston, a big staple of all request hours/weekends/marathons.

Todd Rundgren - Bang the Drum All Day

idk, it's not like it was only in the past 10-15 years that Beatles/Cars/whoever crept onto these playlists through the relaxation of standards. My rural Illinois home station was playing that stuff when I started listening in 1993.

nothing on the wiki about the Led Zeppelin ban mentioned upthread but Mr Veg confirmed it. I will dig up some more & see what I can find

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KZAP_(defunct)

i think i was probably 20 by the time i realized "Bang The Drum All Day" wasn't by Talking Heads

local nomination

Y&T - forever

:D

My key CR radio years probably from, say, 89 to 99 or so, everything from hearing it in the background in my dad's workshop or at picnic-type events, to teenage years in a friend's car convinced Led Zeppelin were a major world-shifting revelation. Most of the stuff in this thread is okay by my memories, but most of the ones that have been flagged up as questionable I also question (though I'm down to check 'em out!). It's definitely a way bigger picture than Freedom Rock wooly boogie. On some previous thread I started parsing out some major 'eras' of CR sonically but the thing is they all got played side by side, so you kinda had to dig to realize Steppenwolf and Asia are a decade or more apart. That's kind of the fun of it, it's a canon but it's a weird, contingent, melange of a canon and people's experience varies a bit. The NYC station did a big voter-driven countdown a while ago and ''Joe's Garage'' was in there, never would've expected that.

SD - are we gonna get a 'worst' ballot?

yeah definitely

There will be a worst side poll, yes.

Marillion - Kayleigh?

oooh yes

I made a playlist of as much of the stuff as I had in my own itunes (a lot, lol) and it's the best because I freaking love every single song

lol

(xpost)

I've noticed no Whitesnake tracks have been added yet!

With 1987 being the cutoff, you're stuck with Whitesnake (except for "Slide It In") that never got played on the radio.

Pretenders 100% on classic rock radio -- including My City Was Gone (in NEOH)

agreed

how else would my dad have developed his crush on chrissie hynde

her vegan restaurant did ok iirc

Did Golden Earring get an official nomination? If not I hereby nominate "When the Bullet Hits the Bone" and "Radar Love."

Also, thank you LL and gr80. I will switch to The Loop for the remainder of this poll, even though I generally like The Drive a little better I think.

Golden Earring 4 EVA

psst the first song is 'Twilight Zone' <3

idk, it's not like it was only in the past 10-15 years that Beatles/Cars/whoever crept onto these playlists through the relaxation of standards. My rural Illinois home station was playing that stuff when I started listening in 1993.

Yeah, I was listening to this format a lot in late childhood/pre-adolescence in the late 80s/early 90s. I was definitely familiar with the late Beatles songs and Cars/Police/Talking Heads + the biggest hits by the Clash and Pretenders via this station. I think they actually did a whole feature on Sgt Pepper for its 25th anniversary in 1992. And certainly softer stuff like Fleetwood Mac/Steely Dan/Tom Petty/Eagles/Supertramp/ELO was as much a part of the format as Skynyrd/BTO/Foghat. Has it ever been otherwise? I feel like contenderizer is describing a classic proto-metal stoner rock format that would be awesome but is a bit removed from the reality of classic rock radio.

I know all of those bands were rotation staples on the station I was listening to in 1980

Dylan Poll/CR Synergy Dept.: I'd never listened much to Bootleg V5, so I started it up and The Cars totally swiped that "It Ain't Me Babe" arrangement for "Touch and Go"! I guess Ocasek or Orr or somebody went to one of the Rolling Thunder shows. Or I'm pulling this theory out my behind.

reminds me -

Bob Dylan - Hurricane