Mountain

Mountain is a one-hit wonder of classic rock. In their original incarnation they may have put out two and a half studio albums and half a live one in the space of two years, played a number of shows with (presumably) a full setlist – including Woodstock, just their fourth show as a group – and since that time re-formed and re-disintegrated several times, with any number of “comeback” albums to show for it, but very few people can claim to be even passingly familiar with any Mountain track other than “Mississippi Queen”. Having worked my way through a few 30-second soundbites of their other work, I can vouch for the judgement of history. Mountain was essentially an attempt to re-create Cream, but without anything like the star power of a Clapton, a Bruce or a Baker, although Mountain did count as a member a guy who had co-produced several of Cream’s albums. What ensued was mostly a bunch of nondescript white blues-rock, with an occasional riff worth hearing. “Mississippi Queen” is by far the most memorable of it all, although that can be difficult to judge in hindsight, given that years of overplay on classic rock format radio has essentially burned this track like a groove into everyone’s minds, and we all respond most readily to the familiar.

In thinking about this track I realized that the only lyric I could remember at all was “Mississippi Queen, you know what I mean”, which struck me as odd since in that context I really had no idea what he meant. What is a “Mississippi Queen”, anyway? A riverboat? A gigantic catfish? A flamboyant homosexual on a riverboat? A quick Google search turns up lyrics that seem to be about a simple visit with a prostitute, which answers the question but turns out to be a little disappointing, at least compared to where my imagination was prepared to take me.

In any case, “Mississippi Queen” is the best song Cream never recorded, and a prototype for later hard rock and heavy metal in the same way that Cream was.

Mississippi Queen

Lynyrd Skynyrd

Every weekend, all across America, small groups of middle-aged men – the ones with at least minimal musical ability, anyway – get together at parties and town parades, outdoor festivals and lodge meetings, small bars and anywhere else one might reasonably find cheap live music, and play covers of classic rock tunes. I put forward here the proposition that, without exception, every single one of these shows features one or both of the songs “Free Bird” and “Sweet Home Alabama”.

This is the case, despite the likely fact that most of the musicians playing these songs (1) are married, settled down or otherwise as mobile as a large boulder in a ravine; (2) have never so much as visited the great state of Alabama. Irony abounds in the world of classic rock, so it hardly stops there. Take “Free Bird” itself, as a piece of music, for example. After running through a few obligatory minutes of minimal (and, frankly, boring) verse-chorus stuff, the song spins off into pure jam-band land, 9 minutes of solid Southern-flavored guitar rock – three guitars in the case of Skynyrd, something of a trademark for their first couple of albums. I have no idea how many takes the boys in Lynyrd Skynyrd actually did to get all of the long-ass jam on tape, but it sounds like a bunch of musicians having a great old time, rocking out in a single session in a studio somewhere. They came, they jammed, and “Free Bird” was what they threw out for everyone that day. All of the cover bands, though, treat the thing like it’s sacred canon. Whether they have three guitars or just one, someone in the band has painstakingly transcribed (or downloaded) the tablature for the original “Free Bird” and has set about replicating it in every detail. “Free Bird” is a classic rock catechism. One does not find improvisatory freedom in “Free Bird” these days.

That reminds me of the one and only Eagles concert I saw, back in the mid-90’s when they came together for their first reunion tour. It was called the “Hell Freezes Over” tour, and spawned a live album by the same name, and as much as I figured these guys had run their course, I wasn’t complaining about it because the get-together resulted in the release of the last great Don Henley song, “Get Over It”. Or, at least, the last Don Henley song where his usual hectoring and lecturing was still fun to listen to. In any case, the concert started really nicely, because the boys had worked up what seemed to be a new arrangement of “Hotel California” to open the show, building up a series of acoustic sounds for an oddly low-key rendition of the band’s signature hit. But eventually the electric guitars chimed in, which wouldn’t have been a bad thing except for the fact that they were being used to play the solos from the album version of “Hotel California” note-for-note. This happened with every song afterward, even the Joe Walsh, Glenn Frey and Don Henley solo tracks they threw into the playlist. Midway through the show I started seriously wondering what I had thrown my $50 away for – these guys may have been Joe Walsh, Don Henley, Timothy B. Schmit and Glenn Frey, but that night they were little more than a cover band that happened to be covering themselves.

But I digress…where was I? Ah, yes, “Free Bird”. AOR and classic rock stations started airing “Top 50” and “Top 100” of all time lists back in the 1980s, and back then, through the 90s and probably even today, the top 2 songs were set in stone. #1, of course, was “Stairway to Heaven” (about which, of course, more later). #2 was always “Free Bird”. Individual rankings were pretty fungible after that.

Lynyrd Skynyrd is a viable recording and touring outfit today, but for the purposes of a classic rock radio station they had five studio albums and one live release worth considering. The brief existence of the original band was cut short by a plane crash in 1977 that killed all but two members. As with all such plane crashes, this naturally catapulted Lynyrd Skynyrd from the ranks of a good-to-great rock band to classic rock legends, a pinnacle they will only descend from when the generation that was around to hear the real thing dies off completely. This is mostly because, the efforts of two (or, so I hear, just one, these days) surviving members notwithstanding, there is no ragtag batch of 50- to 60-something oldsters around now to put out limp renditions of the original stuff, or new material that amounts to pale imitations of the original stuff, or new material in a style different enough from the original stuff to offend fans for whom the original stuff is now catechism…you get the point.

Rock bands can age gracefully, and so can their fans, but rarely do they ever manage to do it together. Lynyrd Skynyrd fans can remember Johnnie Van Sant and the gang in their prime, or even believe that they were cut down just short of a “prime” that can only be imagined. Their style never had a chance to grow stale or overused. They never had to face the potential compromises that were just a few years on the horizon – if not disco, then new wave, MTV, synthesizers, hair bands and metal, grunge…

What, you really think they would have been immune to all of that? Need I remind you that in their last couple of years they had already added a trio of female backup singers to the group?

The point is moot, because they’re dead and gone, and all we have left are the songs, in constant rotation on classic rock stations everywhere:

The “Classic Rock Canon”, Part 1: Lynyrd Skynyrd

Skynyrd packed a lot of great tunes on their first five studio albums, and a large proportion of them have found playtime on AOR and classic rock stations in the decades since. These are the most overplayed of the bunch:

Tuesday’s Gone

Gimme Three Steps

Simple Man

Free Bird (both studio and live versions)

Sweet Home Alabama

Saturday Night Special

Gimme Back My Bullets

What’s Your Name

That Smell

You Got That Right

A few more might make the list in a pinch:

Tuesday’s Gone

Don’t Ask Me No Questions

I Know a Little

If this stuff hits you right, I’d go ahead and splurge on all five albums – “Pronounced”, “Second Helping”, “Nuthin’ Fancy”, “Gimme Back My Bullets”, and the regrettably named “Street Survivors, a title that sounds more appropriate for a release from an 80’s hair metal band from L.A. than from a Southern rock outfit.

What Is "Classic Rock"?

So, just what is it that characterizes the songs that will go onto a "classic rock" playlist?

As is customary in this day and age, we start by going straight to Wikipedia. The world's go-to source for, well, everything tells us that "classic rock" is a radio format that evolved from the "album-oriented rock" or "AOR" radio format in the 1980s, which sounds about right, so long as you know your pop music and radio history. If you don't, you're probably still in the dark.

Without looking at Wikipedia, I will try to communicate my own understanding of what AOR was (and is). Prior to the 1970s -- prior, basically, to the Beatles and the cohort of acts that trailed in their wake -- pop music was almost exclusively a singles game. You cut a track, you released it to radio and onto a small piece of vinyl that people could put on their record players at home, people bought it and/or heard it, and you went on to the next one. Long-play records with multiple tracks on them starting coming out in the 1950s, but most popular acts didn't really make much use of them. They were seen either as repositories for after-the-fact compilations of singles that had outlived their original popularity (i.e. "Greatest Hits" collections), or just a bigger, more expensive version of the single itself (i.e. one song, maybe two if you were lucky, that had had some real care put into it, and then a bunch of crap to fill up the space).

The Beatles changed all that. While their first albums adhered to the formula, as they moved into the middle of their career arc (I'm thinking of "Revolver" and "Rubber Soul", here) they started filling up their albums not just with hit singles but with other songs of equal merit that were nevertheless not cut as singles or sent immediately to radio stations. Eventually they started putting out records like "Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band" and "Magical Mystery Tour", which have been touted as the first "concept albums". They really weren't true "concept albums" (which I define as a suite of songs that are interrelated in subject matter and/or musical content, meant to be taken as a unified whole rather than as individual songs) -- but the songs on these albums were more related to each other than to anything else the Beatles had done, and not just in terms of style.

Musicologists and historians of music, if you're reading this, just stop. I'm an amateur and I know it.

In any case, once musicians had discovered the potential of long-play albums -- i.e., that you could put a whole bunch of halfway decent tracks on them and make them as valuable as singles -- it set up a dichotomy between "singles" acts and everyone else. "Singles" acts kept to the old pattern of recording a song or two that was worth a damn and would make a ton of money in sales and radio play, and then filling up their albums with a bunch of crap. The proper term for the crap, still used today, is "filler". Everyone else started retreating to recording studios for ever-longer periods of time, often for months, racking their artistic brains until they had a set of good songs ("good" being a highly subjective term, of course) that could fill up a long-play 33 rpm vinyl record.

AOR stations, as the name implies, heavily favored this latter type of artist. But this doesn't get us any closer to a useful definition of "classic rock", now does it?

A list of AOR artists is perhaps more informative. They included: Led Zeppelin, Pink Floyd, The Who (from "Tommy" onward, anyway), Lynyrd Skynyrd, Bob Seger, Bruce Springsteen, Yes, Peter Frampton, ZZ Top, Queen, Rush, Eric Clapton (in all of his incarnations), Boston, Bad Company, Jimi Hendrix, The Guess Who, The Eagles, Thin Lizzy, Foghat and Kansas.

Assuming you know any of those acts, you now have a better idea, no?

That list, as (I hope) we shall see in the near future, is hardly all-inclusive, but it's a start. So what does it show? A lot of white guys, for one. No women to speak of. Now that I mention it, we could add Heart and early Pat Benatar to the list, if we really wanted to, but they're still exceptions to the rule. Jimi Hendrix stands out as a token black. But note that while black artists are rare on the "classic rock" format, nearly all of the acts who make the list practice some form of blues-based rock. They come to music, first and foremost, with an appreciation of black music. What comes out is "blues-rock" or "Southern rock" or even "prog rock", which is another way of saying that black music has been strained through a dense filter of white sensibilities, but this is really the common thread of "classic rock". This is something I will (hopefully) go into with more detail in the future.

As I go through various acts and add them to the "canon" of classic rock, I suppose I should have some criteria. Based on the list above, and the description before it, here's a rough baseline set:

1. "Classic rock" generally refers to music recorded sometime in the interval between the late 1960s (the onset of album-oriented rock music) and the early 1980s (the advent of MTV). Anything recorded earlier could be a precursor to "classic rock" but probably wasn't true "classic rock". Anything recorded afterward that sounds like "classic rock" probably did so intentionally, whether to adhere to the now-established format or as a reaction to other sorts of pop music that had appeared in the interim (such as "New Wave" and synth-pop, to take two examples of genres reviled by many "classic rockers").

2. "Classic rock" is just that -- rock. It is "popular music", but it isn't "pop". It will usually be heavy on the electric guitars and light on the keyboards. It will most often have one foot squarely in the blues. It will go especially well with beat-up old Camaros, dirty white t-shirts, canned, watery American beer, and smoke-filled bowling alleys.

3. Most classic rock acts did not record singles. They recorded albums, and if singles were to be involved, they were chosen after the fact.

I am sure other criteria will emerge as this goes on, but that's a start. Now, on to our first act...

A Beginning

Random thoughts. I have no idea what, in the longer term, this blog will be "about", but I tend to get interested in a lot of different things, so in the end it may wind up being "about" nothing in particular, and everything in general.

For now, my thoughts are on music.

I am not a musician. My training in music theory is limited to a couple of years of courses in high school and watching my daughters train on violin and cello by the Suzuki method. Mostly, I just listen to a lot of music, and I remember just about everything I hear.

Lately, I've been listening to a lot of so-called "classic rock". This is a radio format that has existed since at least the early 1980's, which, fortuitously, were also my "formative" years (i.e. junior high/middle school through college). These stations always annoyed me in the past; I used to describe them as "overplayed hits of yesteryear", except that oversimplified things a bit -- even if they weren't overplayed before, my point was, they were being overplayed now. I haven't listened to much radio for years now, so I don't really know how this format has developed since I last spent any significant time with it. Are early-90's grunge/alternarock acts, many of whom were influenced and inspired by "classic rock", now played on radio stations formatted for "classic rock"?

I don't really care. My project -- or, at least, my first project -- will be to do a band-by-band description, with some analysis, of a "canonical" classic rock format as it existed (or, perhaps more accurately, as I understood it, which may not be the same thing) in the late 1980s through the mid-1990s. Eventually, I will have a good running tally of the songs that made up a "classic rock" playlist back then, a canon of sorts. Maybe I'll even manage to suggest some "apocrypha", songs that by various criteria didn't make the grade then but should have.

We shall see.