Rock music was perfected by 1972 and everything you needed to make a great album was in place by then. Every element added since then has been a pointless novelty. Let me explain.
One sultry Midwestern night in my 28th year one of my bandmates gave me a mohawk. We then practiced in the filthy basement of a comic bookstore, repaired to our favorite dive bar and I stumbled home around 3am as I did every night of my life back then. Halcyon days!
When I awoke the next morning what I saw in the mirror was not a young, punk rocking teller of hard truths. Not Joe Strummer’s little brother. What I saw was the “Oy!” guy from the Energizer battery commercial. I knew that a chapter in my life was coming to a close.
Punk rock had been a good fit for us philosophically, but we were never interested in following that aesthetic all the way into the recording studio. We pursued instead what I have come to understand as Classic Rock Values.
Like Potter Stewart and his pornography I’m sure CRVs are something you know when you hear them. But let me get specific about what I mean so I can show you who is in the club and who is a liminal case.
Natural drum sounds. The drums should sound like you are right there in the room with them. Not too much reverb. The snare should go “crack” or “snap” or even “thump” but never “tick” or “bloosh” as snares did in recordings of the ’80s.
Warm, extended-frequency bass. I remember one of my music professors telling me how excited everyone was when someone in the department bought a stereo in the late ’60s or early ’70s that was able to resolve the very low C played on the pipe organ at the beginning of Strauss’s Also Sprach Zarathustra. Before then, the note was invisible to consumer playback technology. In pop music the ‘60s bass guitar came across as an overpowered midrange. After around 1968 bass notes could be felt in addition to being heard. The Beatles White Album is a noticeably warmer sounding album than the previous year’s Sgt Pepper. That’s what I’m talking about. Bong rattling bass.
Mostly guitars. It’s a guitar dominated genre.They can be clean but are usually at least a little overdriven (that means turned up loud enough that the speakers distort and buzz some). Often very overdriven. You can have all kinds of effects here and there (leslie, fuzz, flange, phase, wah) but not too much. The basic guitar sound is a naturalistic one. The one you’d hear of you were in the room with the amplifier.
Some keyboards. Some limited synthesizers. I guess Elton John (when he played rock and not pop) and Emerson, Lake & Palmer are exceptions to this. Pianos and organs are fine. Clavinets for sure! Moog and Melotron synthesizers are just fine. No digital synthesizers! No sequencing! (okay, some sequencing)
Vocals. You can sound however you like in rock music. Technically accomplished singing is not preferred to distinctive voices. Freddie Mercury can sing the shit out of anything. Tom Petty rarely strays from his adenoidal half octave. Both are perfect for the job.
Other instruments. As color? Sure! The orchestra is welcome too. But the basic lineup, drums/bass/guitar/vox, is home base.
Some real-world examples:
The first CRV album: 1968’s The Beatles (The White Album)
The Classic Rockiest: Can’t Buy a Thrill.
My own personal lodestars: Muswell Hillbillies, Meddle.
Surprising but true: Never Mind the Bollocks, Here’s the Sex Pistols. John Lydon reportedly hated the way it sounded esp the 100s of guitar overdubs. Sounds great to me!
No CRV: The Clash’s first album. Too gritty and lo-fi. But every subsequent album, yes.
Borderline cases: Creedence Clearwater Revival, The Cars, My Aim is True. Maybe Let It Bleed?
The borderline cases are of course the most interesting. Please note that CRV do not guarantee quality. Journey and Foreigner abound with CRV and that music is shite. But what CRV do guarantee is a certain level of listenablilty. Bands like, say, ZZ Top or Humble Pie who are not blessed with an abundance of songwriting skill are nevertheless very listenable because they partake of CRV.
What became of CRV? Well they were forced off the field for a while during the 80’s due to the influence of punk rock, 60’s rock revivalism and, I have heard, cocaine. But they have come roaring back. Grunge was very much a CRV revival movement. Radiohead’s The Bends and Ok Computer abound with them and that is why they were played to death at least in these precincts. Radiohead’s subsequent albums did not and that is why I stopped listening.
Before you run into the street and grab the shoulders of the first passerby and tell them the Good News of CRV, please take a moment to consider this. It is the fund that’s split between all eventual Democratic nominees in House districts currently held by Republicans.
mvr
I get the point, but I hate the name.
efgoldman
See the navel.
Gaze at the navel
Gaze, gaze, gaze.
Some Guy, Helvering
Can’t see link to original NRO content.
Mayur
Do you write these posts after, like, fourteen gin and tonics?
AFAF.
hellslittlestangel
So Classic Rock Values amount to a bunch of arbitrary rules, but no actual musical esthetics? Well, that sure explains prog rock.
WaterGirl
@efgoldman: Hey, you try writing posts to go with tons of fundraising blegs and we’ll see if all of your threads are awesome. :-)
Ella in New Mexico
@efgoldman: lolololololol
WaterGirl
You are giving me flashbacks to Ann Likes Red. Red, red, red.
? ?? Goku (aka Amerikan Baka) ? ?
A lot of people really like “Don’t Stop Believin'”…
Believe me I know. I’ve worked in a banquet center and it plays almost every wedding reception.
oatler.
Don Brewer’s competent drumming!
12strings2hands
I enjoyed the article because mixing and reading about mixing seem to be one of my main interests. Getting ‘natural’ sounding drums now-a-days seems to involve a dozen microphones each costing a thousand bucks minimum.
I gave a hundred to the actblue link – thought I was doing something great, but the distribution is, like, a buck each to less than half the list of candidates. I need to do more, or else we need a more focused list.
germy
The cello is a wonderful thing on a rock record. The flute (in my opinion) not so much.
efgoldman
@? ?? Goku (aka Amerikan Baka) ? ?:
Wedding reception music is for the old farts like me who pay the band or the DJ.
SmokeyB
Enjoyable read – I feel much the same way and don’t really pay attention to everything new that comes out anymore. I graduated high school in 1972 (“Schools Out” baby) and have never let go of the basic groove of that era. Another aspect of CRV (to me) was the way we listened to music – not with earphones on by ourselves in the bedroom, but at our buddies house on a good stereo that you could blast. A new album would come out and you’d all go listen to it together, one side at a time. You’d scrutinize the album cover and liner notes. And separate seed, stem and bud on album covers that opened up. Good times.
hugely
I hear you i played the f*ck out of the white album in college. I used it as an example of sublime/subliminal in one of my art classes
? ?? Goku (aka Amerikan Baka) ? ?
@efgoldman:
Then explain why 8th graders in a middle school dance I was at want along and danced to it.
It’s one of those songs that generation after generation likes. Probably because it’s played all time at functions like I mentioned.
No Drought No More
It’s funny you mention 1972, because I’ve long cited Exile as my personal dividing line in such matters; in the decades after which the best music of my youth was merely extended, with ever diminishing power, until it pretty much went out with a whimper.
Doug R
So something like this
or this?
Brachiator
This is kinda interesting. How does it shake out if you apply it to truly superior music, e.g., soul and funk?
ETA. How technology influenced music in the 60s and 70s is a cool topic. But it includes much more than rock.
Just One More Canuck
If the phrase hadn’t been taking by Doug & the Slugs for one of their albums, Journey’s entire catalog could have been called Music for the Hard of Thinking. What a comedown for Greg Rolie – Santana to Journey
Minstrel Michael
I’m enough older than you that I always claim that 1967 was the peak year for rock– not specifically those songs or that sound but the originality and fearlessness. (Functionally, the dudes in LA and NYC whose job it was to decide who got to make a record decided, in the wake of Sergeant Pepper and Surrealistic Pillow and Absolutely Free and Disraeli Gears, that they didn’t have a clue what the kids wanted any more and they’d better sign up more freaks.)
And as a bass player myself, I was very much aware of people like Jack Bruce and Jack Casady, whose sound jumped out of the speakers even in 1967 technology– and you can even cite Chris Hillman’s pre-Nirvana thumping in “Eight Miles High.” So yeah, that sort of bass is a crucial component of CRV. IMHO the slippery fretless jazz sound is not CRV, and the low B string has to be approached cautiously (although I confess to owning three five-strings, one of which is my only fretless).
There’s more CRV in punk than you’re letting on, especially CBGB’s punk: Blondie, Ramones, Robert Gordon’s original band Tuff Darts, among others.
Fair Economist
This post reminded me that I was greatly amused to hear heavy metal on the oldies station yesterday.
Luthe
And for your next trick, you will be explaining how Porgy and Bess does not exhibit Classic Opera Values? Or perhaps how Phillip Glass ignores Classic Classical Values?
Genres evolve. Rock’n’roll never dies. And it will never be perfected, either.
raven
Yea, 1972 is when the cops made us sit down at an Airplane show at The Assembly Hall and I gave upon on rock and went stone ass country.
raven
@Minstrel Michael: Fuckin A, I saw Jorma last week!
mad citizen
Yesterday I watched the Ram Jam “Black Betty” video on youtube. The visuals (it’s a straight bakyard performance video) take you back to 1977: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I_2D8Eo15wE
low-tech cyclist
@mvr:
I don’t really get the point, and I don’t care, because even though I love music, I’m not educated in it, don’t have a vocabulary for it, and don’t understand what other people are saying when they talk about it.
BUT classic fucking rock is a blight on the landscape. As the underground FM rock of the 1960s turned into the album rock of the 1970s and early 1980s which turned into the classic rock of the 1980s to the present, it preserved for far too long the illusion that they were playing the good new stuff (along with the good stuff from 1964 on) and just weeding out the teenybopper stuff.
And then after a certain point, they stopped playing any new stuff at all, and played a gradually diminishing set of oldies over and over and over again. Albums that I used to love, I can’t stand hearing anymore because classic rock used up all my listens for those songs. I might be ready to listen to Who’s Next again sometime around 2035. And what should we say about a genre that turned Jimi Hendrix into its token black?
Yeah, fuck Classic Rock. With the rustiest farm implements handy.
efgoldman
@Fair Economist:
Our 37 y.o. daughter is not at all amused to hear music from her high school years as oldies.
raven
Hot Tuna – Easy Now
I got the riding pneumonia today
Well, the weather’s too fine to stay
Now I want to go down to Mexico
Got a feeling we’ll be heading that way
Baud
@efgoldman:
And if you gaze long into an navel, the navel also gazes into you.
Walker
Progressive rock is the only good rock of the 70s. Dave Weigel agrees.
trollhattan
@Just One More Canuck:
Heh. Journey had a weird…journey because they began doing some pretty sophisticated and trippy stuff, a little like Santana’s cousin who went to art school. I happened to see them before the first album was released and was pretty bowled over.
Well now, that kind of music evidently doesn’t make money and so they followed the Bay Area’s other shame: Starship into the arena arena.
Production and sound of “Can’t Buy a Thrill” are far too uneven to be classical anything besides an unexpected and impressive debut. “Countdown to Ecstasy” is a more apt choice. Same thing, if to a lesser extent for “My Aim is True” in that its production doesn’t sparkle and Elvis didn’t have The Attractions in studio. “This Year’s Model” works, since he has The Attractions, and Nick Lowe at the helm.
Speaking of Nick Lowe, “Jesus of Cool/Pure Pop for Now People” has to contend for any list like this, as does “Who’s Next.”
schrodingers_cat
@Baud: Your navel has eyes? Scary, you should get that looked at.
Ivan X
Classic Rock is Brown Music. The record covers are so brown. I was in single digits in the 70’s, so as a teen, I grew up loving punk, new wave, postpunk, and the many experimental (e.g. No Wave, Industrial) genres therein. All that shit existed as DIY fuck-you opposition to 70’s rock in all of its exalted self-importance. Plus, I like drums and bass more than guitars. I like guitars fine, but I like rhythms more. So I could write a similar set of rules for what I like sonically (lots of unaccented rhythms piled on top of each other! Melodic bass! Scratchy stiff funk guitar! Synth tones! Samples! Angst!). I won’t get into which is better because music is music, but, to quote New Order, the things that mean so much to me don’t mean that much to you.
smintheus
@SmokeyB: I think a lot of people would get together and dance to new records. I really couldn’t see the point in sitting around listening to them, and almost never bothered with liner notes; it seemed like an excuse to get stoned. That was before the progs came along and made rock boring.
RSA
@low-tech cyclist:
Exactly right. It’s really comfort rock for baby boomers, I think. On long road trips I sometimes scan through the available radio stations, passing by a classic rock station, and I realized that any song I heard playing I’ve already heard at least 50 times before.
Smedley Darlington Prunebanks (formerly Mumphrey, et al.)
It’a funny that you bring up Journey and Foreigner together. I’ll believe to my dying day that they’re the same band. I call them Jouriner.
trollhattan
@Smedley Darlington Prunebanks (formerly Mumphrey, et al.):
They even had a baby and called it Loverboy.
cleek
i don’t know why, but few bands make my teeth itch as much as Foreigner does.
Firebert
My life changed seeing The Ramones’ video for “I Wanna Be Sedated” on USA Network’s “Night Flight” show when I was about 15. (Our small town petitioned to keep MTV off our cable TV system lest we get exposed to such hedonism.) Classic rock is little more than loud conformism.
Ivan X
@Smedley Darlington Prunebanks (formerly Mumphrey, et al.): Nah. As someone who doesn’t appreciate either, they have a different vibe. Foreigner is more macho, lyrically. But the discussion reminds me of the episode of Aqua Teen Hunger Force where Foreigner and Loverboy are briefly confused.
Smedley Darlington Prunebanks (formerly Mumphrey, et al.)
Also, Waiting for a Girl Like You has to be the most musically pointless song ever written. It doesn’t go anywhere, it doesn’t get anywhere, it’s dull and meandering. It’s just kind of there.
Porco Rosso
Pete Townsend did not use a sequencer on Baba O. It was his Lowrey Organ’s. Marimba repeat setting.
Cool sound.
http://www.thewho.net/whotabs/gear/guitar/lowrey.html
https://youtu.be/6ZwOq0tTEPE
Mike J
Two Guitars Bass And Drum
Porco Rosso
https://youtu.be/vlLxAULuq9Y
Speaking of clavinets
patroclus
1972 was about the time that know-it-alls started predominating in music and it ceased being about song-writing and the music and more about how much you knew about the styles and genres and the industry and the contracts and the masters and the instrumentation and precisely what type of people bought and listened to what type of albums and records. You couldn’t just like a song; it had to be a particular type of song within the right genre produced by the right kind of company, with the right kind of instrumentation and the artists had to be the right kind of musician and the audience had to be the right kind of people.
(And I love singing along with “Don’t Stop Believing” no matter what anyone says!)
Mayur
I have genuine, non-hipster-ironic love for Journey, since I think that Steve Perry managed to stick together Sam Cooke and arena rock in a compelling fashion and had the vocal talent to carry it off. That said, I can’t listen to any of their hits any more, which has everything to do with the “classic rock” radio phenomenon lamented above.
Foreigner sucks. I would argue that Journey is the exception to the rule of shitty corporate rock.
The Dangerman
@germy:
Caroline Dale. Plays with Floyd/Gilmour and U2 a lot. Fine, fine stuff.
Baud
@cleek:
They give me fever of 103.
Mike J
@Firebert:
The Ramones were a return to classic rock, not a rebellion against it. From lyrics to arrangements to iconography, everything about them was a throwback. If they were in opposition to anything it was prog rock.
It’s my firm belief that anyone who bows a guitar should be smacked in the mouth.
trollhattan
@patroclus:
Lots occurring then in how music was disseminated and consumed. FM became relevant almost entirely because “album rock” proved a viable use for the formerly throwaway broadcast band. Single sales fell and LP sales soared. The 2:40 single mixed in mono for AM radio was no longer the gold standard.
Most cars still came with AM-only radios with a single speaker, but FM, 8-track and eventually cassette players changed the driving and listening experience. And boomers bought component stereos to play their LPs on something other than dad’s console or the old mono portable record player.
And out in California, Russ Solomon (R.I.P.) made Tower Records a destination store, further changing how music was distributed and sold until digital media arrived. He almost single-handedly educated two generations about music.
John Revolta
@Minstrel Michael: @patroclus: Well, Zappa used to claim that music was better in the 60s because the guys running the record companies were all a bunch of old farts who, when they heard all this new music, didn’t pretend to understand it……..they would shrug and say “What do I know? Put it out there“. Then they started hiring younger guys who claimed to know what the kids liked and they would go “We can’t put this record out………….it’s not what the kids want. I know……….I’ve got the same hair”.
SmokeyB
@smintheus: Guilty as charged buddy, wake and bake.
Steve in the ATL
There are so many classic rock songs that are fantastic. I really liked them the first 10,000 times I heard them. I no longer need to hear them ever again.
Same applies to any bar band playing “you shook me all night long”.
John Fremont
@low-tech cyclist: Agreed. I remember growing up in Philly back in the late 70’s and 80’s and the rock stations were allowed to be much more diverse in their playlists. Jimi Hendrix, Sly Stone and the Chambers Brothers were some of the black artists that were played alongside of the Grateful Dead, the Stones, the Kinks, Bruce Springsteen, Yes and the Southern Rock that was all the rage back then. Bands like the Outlaws, Marshall Tucker, the Dixie Dregs and Charlie Daniels Band would get some airtime from the DJ’s. After the 90’s deregulation squashed out a lot of that in favor of increasing improved metrics and ratings to behemoths like Clear Channel.
The Pale Scot
Old School, Daltrey and Townsend acoustic2014.
My sister, “Damn, Roger is 75 and still the hair the voice and the butt”
hugely
@Mayur: meh Journey and Foreigner are equal amt of lame – for my non-ironic love of pop/rock from 70s and 80s I submit Hall and Oates. I _hated_ at it the time (listened to too much Who’s Next, Pink Floyd, Cars, VU, and Kinks) now I kinda like it, plus all motown/philly sounds. Anyways this is a navel gaze post but fun nonetheless
hugely
@Baud: lol you win as always Baud. FFS
Shana
@raven: They were still pulling that shit in the late 70s/early 80s. Gave up, AIR, for Talking Heads’ Fear of Music show.
patroclus
@trollhattan: Granted, but what I remember is hanging out with a “friend” about that time who was a DJ at a tiny radio station while he was on the air and he asked if I wanted to hear anything and I made a bunch of suggestions which he abjectly refused because they were WAY too uncool and after 30 minutes or so of argument, I finally insisted on anything by Elton John (who he hated) and 30 minutes of argument later, he finally relented and played “Funeral for a Friend” which was the only Elton song he could possibly stand. That was the day I learned that rock and roll music (as a whole) was dead and that we were now in a world of sub-genres and balkanization and multi-furcation based solely on what self-described cool people’s opinions were.
hugely
also to Senor OP Jewish Steel Pedal:I think organ and keyboards have a huge place in 70’s CRV: Billy Preston, Faces, The Band, Talking Heads and more recent CRV Dandy Warhols, Ween, SFA
Doug!
Great post.
The other I heard some My Morning Jacket at the cafe and I loved how it sounded. Do they adhere to CRV?
mak
@germy: But: Jethro Tull
patroclus
@John Revolta: Bingo! Zappa was smart about a lot of things.
Ransom
CRV in the right hands can be really really good, and contemporary too:
Dr Dog: The Rabbit, the Bat and the Reindeer
Jager
@Minstrel Michael: Interesting to me about the Soundgarden cut, the entire song sounds like the extended soloing I heard on “8 Miles High” at a Byrds concert in 1970. And after watching the video I’m relieved to know that U2 isn’t the only band making pretentious videos. Of course I’m just an ancient old fuck, one of the small group of people who put rock on FM.
James E. Powell
@Just One More Canuck:
I understand that he cried all the way to the bank. There was this brief, shining moment when jazz fusion looked like the wave of the future, but instead we got glam, disco, and The Eagles.
Also too, how can anyone talk about Classic Rock Anything without mentioning Bad Company? Those who saw Scotland, Pa. will know what I mean.
trollhattan
@James E. Powell:
Bad Company and Lynyrd Skynyrd fueled a million frat parties all by themselves.
James E. Powell
@low-tech cyclist:
It is a truth universally acknowledged that white America prefers its African-American heroes to be dead.
John Fremont
@Ransom: I would throw in the Dead Weather as well.
Jager
@patroclus: Guys like your “friend” were so cool they ended up working at a 7-11.
vtr
The Doobie Brothers were briefly great, but too soon lost a couple of key players. They became a run-of-the-mill arena band to back up the excreble Michael McDonald.
We’ll be at the Paradise on Commonwealth Ave near B. U. May 18th for the Fratellis, but you can’t go because it’s sold out.
PaulW
did somebody just piss on my 80s Tampa Bay 98 Rock Childhood of growing up to Journey???
talk shite about Van Halen (pre-Hagar) and I will slap the taste out of your mouth.
Omnes Omnibus
@PaulW: Consider shite talked.
cs
It’s good to be Gen X. One of the greatest reasons is that the music of my teens is not currently part of nostalgia radio, and most of it probably will never be. Sonic Youth, Husker Du, Public Enemy, The Replacements, pre-1988 REM, etc. will never be part of the classic rock treadmill. Which lets my memories remain my own, and not corrupted by overplaying or over-commercialization.
Yellowdog
And where is Springsteen in all of this? Didn’t even see his name mentioned.
Mike J
@cs: As I pointed out above, the people who listened to the ‘mats in high school were the people who put Nirvana on the radio.
Jewish Steel
@PaulW: Van Halen songs sound like jingles for regional grocery stores.
Suffragette City
Or
Here we are, one magical moment
John Fremont
@James E. Powell: Hendrix also didn’t write anything about race in his brief run. The Band of Gypsies may have gone there had he lived but we’ll never know. Curtis Mayfield, Marvin Gaye, Sly Stone and James Brown all touched on racial issues during their carerrs but Hendrix never did in his music.
MoxieM
Sound to me like CRV = Penis Rock.
I love Throwing Muses (just played a reunion show!), without whom, no Sleater Kinney, Belly, Breeders, L7, et cetera.
Oh, then There’s Liz Phair; Aimee Mann, et cetera–possibly more toward your “CRV”
I’ll give you Joan Jett, but she’s sui generis.
How about the Yeah Yeah Yeahs? No bass at all, awesome sound, recorded and in person.
Other streams would include X (Ok, possibly boy rock with a girl singer, but not really); Siouxsie; the Slits. Um, I could go on.
But really, can we just say the dinosaurs are just that.
#TimesUp
divF
@cs:
Give it another decade, and you will start hearing the music of your youth being played over supermarket PA systems (assuming we still have supermarkets by then).
divF
@Brachiator:
This. Dave Marsh’s book “The Heart of Rock and Soul”, articulates (by looking at his top 1001 songs) the thesis that the core of popular music is African-American, specifically R&B and gospel. By the 1970’s that core was morphing into funk.
RSA
@divF:
Cool! I’m not knowledgeable about music, but I’ve had thoughts along similar lines–I’ll have to take a look. As a side note, it’s weird how much the definition of “rhythm and blues” has changed over the decades. More so than “rock and roll” for example.
Smedley Darlington Prunebanks (formerly Mumphrey, et al.)
@PaulW: The weird thing about Van Halen is that it’s loud. I mean, it just sounds loud. You could play it on the lowest setting, but it still sounds loud. Also kind of tuneless. I always hated Van Halen. You can slap the taste out of my mouth if you want, but I hate Van Halen.
12strings2hands
@germy:
Lou Reed, Street Hassle – like this?
tybee
@SmokeyB:
which means you started high school in 1968
as did i.
JLowe
I wonder where would Spirit fit into the framework? Or Brand X (awesome live in additional to producing industrial-grade sound power)? A few years back, I discovered Transatlantic who’s personnel had roots in bands such as Spock’s Beard and Dream Theater. My daughter the metal-queen introduced me to Nightwish and for awhile I was a Tarja Turunen fanboy. Perhaps my rock tastes were sculpted differently (drawing on listening to classical and electric era-Miles Davis jazz), but it seems as if CRV reflects only a small bit of rock’s evolutionary tree.
Herbie Hancock, circa Headhunters? Billy Cobham, specifically Stratus with Tommy Bolin on guitar? Little Feat? Frank Zappa? 801? The Tubes? Maybe Norbizness had a point in saying, “your favorite band sucks.”
Steve in the SFO
@RSA:
Well, “rock and roll” made a rather dramatic shift in meaning from “fucking” to “popular music with electric guitars”
Formerly disgruntled in Oregon
@MoxieM: I love Throwing Muses!
RSA
@Steve in the SFO:
I did not know that! Though now that you mention it, kinda obvious.
James E. Powell
@RSA:
Jazz also kinds sorta came from a sexual reference, though there are earlier citations with other meanings.
The Golux
Late to the thread, but I’d like to make the point that the classic “overdriven” guitar sound comes from the amplifier circuitry, not the speakers. (Caveat: I’m aware that to get the sound in “You Really Got Me”, Dave Davies literally cut the speaker cones of his amp with a razor. Nevertheless…) In the old days, the only way to get the overdriven sound was to crank the amp, meaning you couldn’t get that sound at lower volumes. Eventually, it dawned on engineers that the desired sound was coming from the preamp section, not the power amp section, so that later amps had both gain and volume controls, allowing guitarists to overdrive the preamp while keeping the overall loudness reasonable.
MoxieM
@Formerly disgruntled in Oregon: Oh Hey there other rare person!!
I am proud to say I turned my kid on to them. My work on this planet is done.
Amir Khalid
@Yellowdog:
Having the most accordion-friendly band in rock’n’roll outside of Weird Al’s is probably not very CRV.
J R in WV
Don’t like Van Halen either. Love Los Lobos, Taj Mahal, REM, Miles Davis, very many local musicians in WV, Pink Floyd, a wide variety of sounds. Lynard Skynard opened once for ZZ Top, who rocked. Skynard sucked in every possible way. Just saying. ZZ top was really good, did songs from their whole catalog. Wonderful.
I’m pretty fond of Lucinda Williams, too. We listen to a lot of classical music as well. The last few years I’ve been listening on Russian Piano Concertos, Rachmaninoff for one. But Los Lobos, they really rock. Here I am in Los Angeles, and Los Lobos is in Texas. Darn …
Jewish Steel
@Yellowdog: On Born to Run Springsteen was supposedly going to for a Phil Spector wall-of-sound, uh, sound. Mission accomplished! It sounds like some of those songs are mixed to two channel mono.
Jewish Steel
@The Golux: True! Plus there’s the deep, deep pedal rabbit hole. But I still find I get the best possible overdrive sound by just cranking it up. (My amp is older than I am too)
Jewish Steel
@JLowe: It is a big tent, the old rock and roll.
jonas
Minor comment: the Energizer “Oy!” guy didn’t have anything to do with punk rock — he was Australian-rules football player Mark “Jacko” Jackson. Sort of the “Boz” Bosworth of down under.
What Have the Romans Ever Done for Us?
@Mike J: The Ramones were basically a punk rock update of mid-60s surf rock. Not Beach Boys but real surf rock – Dick Dale, The Ventures, etc.
I don’t know, maybe it’s because it got so huge it ate everything else in Rock and became a parody of itself in like 2 years, but grunge never did it for me…much rather listen to New Order or Talk Talk despite what those bands might lack in CRV.
Not sure what you’re saying about CCR being a borderline case of CRV…they seem like an immaculate example of CRV to me. Also, you want to claim there’s something lacking in the Attractions (of Elvis Costello and) as a band, well, we’ll have to agree to disagree.
MoxieM
@What Have the Romans Ever Done for Us?: And Girl Group music. the Ronettes were a huge influence on the the Ramones, and Joey, for example, said so many times.
I am stunned at how sexist this thread is. Just stunned. you would think there were no women musicians of note. Ugh.
Also? White much?
Jewish Steel
@What Have the Romans Ever Done for Us?: CCR I think is CRV and ‘60s rock (which I did not explore in depth, I know) in equal measure.
@MoxieM: Classic rock itself is a sexist, white boy’s club. And some of those white boys straight up stole the labor of black folk. No sugar coating that. The phrase “Classic Rock Values” is meant to invoke “Family Values” and “Values Voter” and make you suspicious of the thing you love.