CLASSIC ROCK TRACKS POLL: THE RESULTS

(sorry)

as of a few days ago I was still playing Dobie Gray

Glad someone is doing so. But then, in my hearing, very few Classic Rock stations ever gave all that much airtime to any vintage soul/R&B/Motown. Temptations/Marvin/Stevie/Otis/Bill Withers were almost absent from the dial, even in the late 80s.

In my experience, much of the displaced second-tier Classic Rock seems to be stuff like Badfinger, Monkees, BTO, ELO, much of Chicago, most of Doobies, Skynyrd, Thin Lizzy, Small Faces, Yardbirds, Animals, America, Loggins & Messina.

Currently, Classic Rock seems to be a white-male-dominated sausagefest; one can listen for weeks without hearing the Pretenders or Blondie or Pat Benatar, let alone James Brown. But you'll hear plenty of Stevie Ray Vaughan.

are there still teenagers who are obsessed with Jim Morrison/The Doors these days? I'm guessing probably not that many (there were plenty when I was a teenager in the 90s)

I still hear L.A. Woman on the radio pretty regularly, the other songs, not very often.

Kim Mitchell of Max Webster--if you're not Canadian, you may not know them--had a show on Q-107 for a few years and played lots of '60s Motown. It came and went with him.

years ago when I drove through Indianapolis I was surprised/delighted to hear their classic rock station play "Rubberband Man" by the Spinners

based on this poll, dobie drifted off to where the waves grow sweet long ago - i was stunned that song didn't place but a lot of people just didn't think of it as a CR staple the way i did.

re: sausagefest: feel like Heart was and remains the token here. the forward shift in time means joan jett should probably get at least a little bit of airtime but probably not much beyond "i love rock 'n' roll."

the idea of thinning out 60s songs makes sense... but i think that's actually long been accomplished? we talked about this recently with regard to the beatles i think, where you really would not tune into a CR station expecting to hear anything earlier than the white album (except on "breakfast with the beatles" which will go up to magical mystery tour). and i can't remember ever hearing badfinger, yardbirds, or small faces on classic rock radio. do you really hear much 60s stones BESIDES satisfaction and maybe jumpin' jack flash/street fighting man? CCR are safe on this count, at least for a while, as all their late 60s hits kinda feel more like early 70s and i still hear 'em all.

the animals makes sense to cut though along with the doors - stuff that sounded really heavy and profound and dark when it came out and now just sounds transparently like some high school kids trying to sound heavy and profound and dark. i hear "break on through" and "LA woman" still, i think, but "light my fire" and "hello i love you" have faded (thank god). maybe just in my own head or wishful thinking, but i feel like i hear "spill the wine" out in the world wayyyy more than "house of the rising sun" and i can't remember the last time i heard "we gotta get out of this place" or "don't let me be misunderstood. i'd totally buy that cream is going/gone. tbh even in the late 90s they really didn't seem like a Big Deal. maybe that was partly because i found their songs totally boring and draggy. good call also on thinning out led zep deep cuts and stuff. i've been hearing "in the evening" lately more than i'd expect but i could see that kind of thing getting the axe while "black dog" lives on.

there's some stuff that really will die with the people who connected to it as teenagers - that's life. i don't expect future teens to be much interested in third-tier 90s alt-rock hits but i'll be enjoying them when i'm 75 probably. i don't expect present-day teens to be much interested in the narratives of "THE SIXTIES" that granted stuff like the Doors an aura of importance and epochal soundtracking to my 90s-teen peers. maybe the culture machine has been effective and they are. but i meet people in their twenties who express fascination that i was around for "THE NINETIES" and all the great music there was then, not like now, and i'm just staggered.

Doc if I'm not mistaken I think I put it as my #2. I wouldn't want my CR Radio without it.

dobie that is

much of the displaced second-tier Classic Rock seems to be stuff like Badfinger, Monkees, BTO, ELO, much of Chicago, most of Doobies, Skynyrd, Thin Lizzy, Small Faces, Yardbirds, Animals, America, Loggins & Messina

wait, skynyrd? they're still getting lots of play here. doors, too.

the kinks have gone completely missing. then again, they only graced the lower edge of our own poll, so maybe they were already missing.

the fascination with the "60s narrative" migrated wholly to the world of visual art where it will live for another 2 decades I reckon

The doors had dark songs and light songs

I almost included "Light My Fire" in my list of token '60s songs. Always felt one thing that helped the Doors stay on Classic Rock radio is that they had a number of short 2-3 minute songs that could fill out hours in a "We Play The Most Music!" way.

Kinks are weird because their initial big hits in the states were all in '64-'66, then you move to '70 for "Lola", which I feel is still a pretty big radio song, and "You Really Got Me" is another token '60s song. Moving on, they had a number of big radio songs during their Arista period, but those songs are pretty much all forgotten now.

do you really hear much 60s stones BESIDES satisfaction and maybe jumpin' jack flash/street fighting man?

Add to that "Honky Tonk Women", "Sympathy For The Devil", "Get Off My Cloud", "Under My Thumb", "Paint It, Black", and "The Last Time". There are still probably more heavily played '60s Stones songs than there are in the whole careers of some fairly big '70s-'80s bands.

The Velvet Underground's relationship with CR is, uh, interesting--I think it begins and ends with "Sweet Jane." (I might have heard "Rock and Roll," too.)

Whatever happened to Sandy and all his great stories?

(xp) and "gimme shelter"

re the velvet underground: that matches exactly what fm radio played back in the day, so that makes perfect classic rock sense.

i heard "she's so cold" the other day on the classic rock station (only the last 1/3 unfortunately)

i'm sure i hear "she's so cold" more often on CR than any of the ones Grisso just highlighted. "the last time" i've very VERY rarely ever heard and "under my thumb" and "honky tonk women" have both SLIGHTLY faded i think. hard to measure obviously.

i heard Queen Bee the other day & felt like I finally kinda “got” Grand Funk Railroad. I enjoyed it

this video sold me on Grand Funk forever

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jL4rXHt0_GI

i legit only knew them from The Simpsons for most of my life

Tuned into the big local CR station for the first time in a long time during my work commute this evening--they apparently have been doing Pat Benatar blocks all day in honor for birthday (caught "Heartbreaker" & her version of "I Need A Lover"). Last thing I heard was "Unskinny Bop", and "Welcome To The Machine" was the earliest song.

Kinks are weird because their initial big hits in the states were all in '64-'66, then you move to '70 for "Lola", which I feel is still a pretty big radio song, and "You Really Got Me" is another token '60s song. Moving on, they had a number of big radio songs during their Arista period, but those songs are pretty much all forgotten now.

― Never Learn To Mike Love (C. Grisso/McCain), Wednesday, January 10, 2018 6:37 PM (one hour ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

i feel like i hear "come dancing" more than any other kinks song. and van halen's (truly awful) cover of "you really got me" more than that

looking it up now, "come dancing" was their highest charting single in the US (#6), tied with "tired of waiting" but ahead of all the others

the fascination with the "60s narrative" migrated wholly to the world of visual art where it will live for another 2 decades I reckon

― Scam jam, thank you ma’am (Sparkle Motion), Wednesday, January 10, 2018 6:15 PM (one hour ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

also this is so otm

The classic rock station I grew up with still had weekly jazz and blues programmes until the mid-90s and still gave some DJs enough freedom that I heard Frank Zappa and Babe Ruth commonly enough on Sundays and was pretty familiar with Focus's "Hocus Pocus" and "Inna Gadda da Vida" (alongside stuff like Midnight Oil album tracks) by middle school. Those things have all definitely become casualties. (The last five songs they played were "Call Me the Breeze", "Mr. Jones", "Sultans of Swing", Robbie Robertson's "He Don't Live Here No More", and "Jesus Just Left Chicago".) Cream, the Kinks, and the Animals are other good example of things you don't hear as much anymore. Something like Deep Purple's "Hush"?

"Come Dancing" is one of my very favorite songs, but I don't remember hearing it on classic rock radio in the late 80s or 90s. I had to rediscover it in the Napster/Mp3 era.

What I do remember is hearing it on top 40 radio circa 1982-3.

As an aside: That was a great couple of years for eclecticism in pop, by the way. You would hear "Rock the Casbah" and then "Borderline" and then "Beat It" and then "Pass the Dutchie" and then "Rio" and then "Come on Eileen" and then "99 Red Balloons." You'd hear "Everyday I Write the Book" and then "All Night Long" and then "Time After Time" and then "Thriller" or "Shock the Monkey" or "Little Red Corvette."

Everybody thinks the music of their own youth is the best music that ever musicked, I know. But it does seem like punk and new wave and pop and R&B coexisted in Casey's weekly top 40 to a remarkable extent. I feel privileged to have been a tween with a radio during that time.

4 Observations from the Ride Home

--Other Lady Guest @ The Sausagefest: Pat Benatar. Caught another twofer block of "Hit Me With Your Best Shot" and "Promises In The Dark". Seems like she'd do well on a more '80s-centric playing field.

--The only two '60s songs were "Satisfaction" and "Magic Carpet Ride", which reminds me that Steppenwolf are quite lucky because both "MCR" and "Born To Be Wild" will still be in heavy rotation until doomsday.

--Newest track was "You Could Me Mine" by G'n'R, which perfectly ties into the coronation of AxL & Co. as the "Last Great Classic Rock Band" and why the format had to stretch in to the '90s to include them.

--Heard a commercial for a law firm that only represents men in divorce cases--Welcome To The Land Of Who Still Listens To Terrestrial Classic Rock Radio!

It occurred to me re-reading the thread that we rightly or wrongly left out a lot of stuff that was corny to us but that definitely has a place at the classic rock table. Like Kiss, and the Doors, etc. Plus I think maybe some late 60's stuff too, like Dylan etc.
It's kind of funny how modern tastes edit out the stuff that is very much a part of Klassik Rawk

Have the Ramones officially become Classic Rock

it's more that "blitzkrieg bop" has become a sports anthem.

Dylan along with a few others was probably shortchanged by the sense that he'd had his own poll, whereas this is probably the only time you're ever going to be able to put Sugarloaf on a ballot. (Didn't help them either iirc but....)

Probably the most common Dylan song I've heard on CR is freakin' "Rainy Day Woman #12 & 35".

yeah I don't remember hearing Dylan on the radio ever, classic rock or otherwise.

ours plays Tangled up in Blue a lot

Oh, and also "Stuck In the Middle With You".

I though "Hurricane" was awesome in Dazed & Confused but it seemed culturally out of place

wanna say that Planet Waves is the most CR Dylan

Re: Dylan, "Like a Rolling Stone" is sometimes heard on radio.

I feel like "Tangled Up in Blue" is a comparatively recent discovery by radio. Back in the day, we listened to Blood on the Tracks in dorm rooms, but would never have heard its songs on radio until 2005 or 2010. We may have heard the Indigo Girls cover on college radio.

pplains, do you mean the Stealer's Wheel song "Stuck in the Middle With You"? Not Dylan. Not even Lennon (another misattribution one sometimes hears).

One interesting thing (to me) is that Dylan's most famous song may be "Blowin' in the Wind," but his own recording is by far the least-heard version of that tune.

Oh and re: Ramones: "I Wanna Be Sedated" is every teen movie's go-to track for indicating that the antisocial misfit girl has vintage punky musical taste, and that is why she is a cooler and better person than her classmates. She wears black leather and she pogos to the Ramones in her bedroom. The cheerleaders snub her because think she's a weirdo.

Glad someone is doing so. But then, in my hearing, very few Classic Rock stations ever gave all that much airtime to any vintage soul/R&B/Motown. Temptations/Marvin/Stevie/Otis/Bill Withers were almost absent from the dial, even in the late 80s.

― mime kampf (Ye Mad Puffin), Wednesday, 10 January 2018 23:41

There's a UK channel called Smooth Radio which calls itself adult contemporary but really it just plays any pop hits that aren't too fast or heavy. The guys you mention above are represented but it's a woefully small selection of them and everybody else they play.

Maybe kids without internet buy Uncut and Mojo, who probably pander to old farts more than they already did?

As much as the audience for these bands will dwindle, I think most of them will still have a sizeable audience for decades yet, at least among music fans who dig into histories, influences etc.

I never really cared about the Doors but some people on Bakers Dozen convinced me to check them out someday.

pplains, do you mean the Stealer's Wheel song "Stuck in the Middle With You"? Not Dylan.

Pretty sure that song's by Bob Dylan. Surely you're not saying that every single caller on my request line is wrong, are you?

(Also, the name of the band is Stealers Wheel - no apostrophe. :-p)

It definitely feels like there is less variety in the 70s music that is played these days.

yep. one of my attainable New Year's resolutions is to avoid all Classic Rock stations wherever and whenever possible. Already ditched the bar on my way home for a different one. I never, ever want to hear a Foreigner song again. I like a fair amount of this stuff, but there are certain things that are total dealbreakers. Gimme a BOB station anytime, thanks.

no Foreigner? does not compute

I hate them so intensely, the worst ever, I would go back in time to kill them if I could

plus they ripped off Thomas Dolby, so fuck 'em

(pplains, sorry I did not get the joek)

damn sleeve, that's cold as ice

sleeve needs to know where love is