The Allure of Listening - Chapter 6 - Cultural Defiance for its Own Sake

 Were the 45 rpm records and spoken-word diatribes of mid-decade 1970s a harbinger of punk or privilege? - 1975-77

     Long before Patti Smith’s introduction to the world at the end of 1975, the paramour of Robert Mapplethorpe had fascinated me with her New York adventures, chronicled in Creem magazine and elsewhere. I picked up Smith’s poetry chapbooks Seventh Heaven and WITT before graduating high school, and was astonished to find she had released an underground 45 rpm record, “Hey Joe”/”Piss Factory.” I had gotten so used to associating an LP with innovation and the 7-inch record with mainstream culture, the prospect of flipping the media expectations jolted my world – and it wasn’t long before Pere Ubu and DEVO released underground singles, long before the primary wave of punk hit US or U.K. shores. The arrival of re-imagined music led to a revival of 45-rpm singles in at least two instances – punk’s early days in 1976-78, and the grunge-indie launch of the 1990s. In both cases, the dormant market for 7-inch singles exploded anew.

    My last months in high school were strange times, with the first resignation of a U.S. president in history, making way for a Michigan native, Gerald Ford, as a temporary stand-in. The mythical nation of South Vietnam fell in the spring of 1975, youth culture seemed all but dead, and I put out a couple issues of another underground broadsheet, Tiger Mountain, in an attempt to explain it all. I followed the adventures of music writers like Lester Bangs in hopes of catching new elements of club culture, but except for hints of new acts being booked by CBGB in New York, I seemed cursed to graduate under the slogan “May you live in uninteresting times.”

    There was certainly a host of intelligent singers breaking the charts – Phoebe Snow, Harry Chapin, Roberta Flack. The problem was that they all felt so “grown up.” Top 40 culture had lost its sense of careless youth, even more so than FM AOR – even though album-oriented rock had been launched with the intent of being more serious and grown up than the Top 40. Odd, then, that KISS and similar arena-rock bands dominated the FM charts. The true start of the disco era was in the spring of 1975, long before The Bee Gees or John Travolta got involved. One band cracking the Top 40 in that spring was called Disco Tex & The Sex-O-Lettes, and Van McCoy released his seminal “The Hustle” at the same time.

    A big change in electronic music took place in mid-decade, though its implications did not become clear until the mid-1980s. Pioneers of both the analog synthesizer and modular synthesizer made the banks of electronics a visual centerpiece in their own right. Such maestros included Rick Wakeman and Keith Emerson in prog-rock, and Allen Ravenstine in proto-punk. Kraftwerk and Tangerine Dream led a krautrock invasion in mid-decade that awakened listeners to synthesizers’ possibilities. In 1970, Moog Music introduced the Minimoog to bring portability to the analog synthesis world (and Yamaha followed with the portable digital DX7 in the early 1980s). As krautrock grew in popularity even as the Minimoog dropped in price, bands that once considered only standard electronic keyboards could move to portable synthesizers. Many artists from Eno to Pink Floyd to Jean-Michael Jarre considered the VCS-3, manufactured by London’s EMS, to be the definitive mix of functionality and portability, and the VCS-3 rapidly became the primary choice for the touring progressive band. This was a positive trend until 1980s producers began to over-use the musical style, giving rise to the dreaded “1980s production wasteland”. In Chapter 9, we will look at how the supposed sins of the compact disc really reflected poor engineering and production choices made in pop music during the decade. For now, suffice it to say that decisions made by bands and individual musicians to add portable synthesizers in the mid-1970s eventually led to a poorer pop music production environment in the decade to come.

    It took a few months to appreciate the rich music environment I stumbled into at Michigan State University in the fall of 1975. Roscoe Mitchell of Art Ensemble of Chicago had begun a residency there at the start of my freshman year. Two campus organizations, ASMSU Pop and Showcase Jazz, regularly brought people like Keith Jarrett, Pat Metheny, Sonny Rollins, Steve Goodman, Bruce Springsteen, and Tom Waits to campus, while a local bar showcased Captain Beefheart and Patti Smith within my first year. Even when appealing to a wider student body with a free outdoor festival, ASMSU chose Bonnie Raitt, Little Feat, and NRBQ for its spring 1976 lawn fest. I had little to complain about.

    My father and I shared a few moments of common musical love by seeing Tom Waits live a couple times in the 1975-76 period, once on the MSU campus. Dad had always had a soft spot for scat jazz, be bop, and Dixieland jazz (and had his own retro jazz band), while I was a fiend for Waits’ drunken spoken-word albums from that late 1970s period. Dad wasn’t always able to follow Waits into the Swordfishtrombone years, but I gave him good marks for trying (as I would for his efforts with everything from Zappa to Incredible String Band).

    I was also lucky to move into the Case Hall dormitory with an overabundance of progressive-rock and jazz nerds. While I knew most of the favorites of my new companions, I grew to appreciate Genesis, King Crimson, and the jazz artists of the ECM label more profoundly, due to being fed a constant diet during stoner sessions and keg parties. Nevertheless, despite the abundance of campus riches, I still felt overwhelmed with ennui at times. The pop music controversy of the fall semester centered on Bruce Springsteen appearing simultaneously on the cover of Time and Newsweek.

    Those of us who had been with the Boss for the first two Columbia albums knew that the hype for Born to Run was not unwarranted, yet it seemed producer Jon Landau was unleashing such Svengali-like powers, he became the epitome of the professional in Joni Mitchell’s “Free Man in Paris” song, “stoking the star-maker machinery behind the popular song.” The move augured the rise of the major-label ultra-event, one factor that drove the reaction of DIY punk in the late 1970s, and later drove the arrival of 1990s indie rock after a decade of the 1980s where the big corporations ruled the entire supply chain of popular music. The larger than life appearance of the first two Fleetwood Mac albums to feature Buckingham and Nicks,  the eponymous 1975 release and its 1977 Rumours follow-on, set the tone in the mid-1970s for the type of ultra-event characterized by Michael Jackson’s Thriller! in the 1980s (not to mention Springsteen’s own Born in the USA, which brings us full circle back to the Boss).

    Patti Smith’s debut album Horses occupied a unique corner at the end of 1975 with her spoken-word poetry layered on Lenny Kaye’s minimalist riffs. Outside Patti’s universe, the initial punks to hit the scene were not enraged barons of accelerated 4/4 anger, like The Damned or The Dead Boys, but the acts associated with minimal chord changes and a sardonic dumbing down, exemplified by The Dictators in 1975 and the debut Ramones album in 1976. Playboy Records made a very belated release of The Modern Lovers’ 1972 black heart sessions in 1976, which prepared the world for both Jonathan Richman’s childhood regression in a reformulated Modern Lovers, and Jerry Harrison’s later role in Talking Heads, which was making some of its first CBGB appearances in 1975. The middle of my freshman year was when the first zines like Punk arrived, giving me ideas for later forays into indie publishing in 1977.

    There seemed to be fewer excuses all the time to check out the Top 40 singles of the week. Vapidity was a description that not only applied to the Barry Manilow breed of songwriters filling the charts, but also to the tactic of recycling favorite tunes of AOR FM-radio bands. Both Aerosmith and KISS had re-engineered versions of previous hits enter the charts in early 1976 – like a summer rerun, and just as pointless. There also were only a handful of bands, exemplified by The Sweet, Thin Lizzy, or Bay City Rollers, keeping alive the mid-1960s explosive poppy hooks. Even bands at the heart of AOR cred could use repetitive lyrics going nowhere, like Free or Foghat, as well as slow and largely uninteresting arrangements, like Elvin Bishop’s “Fooled Around and Fell In Love.” This made the mid-year arrival of The Ramones’ debut album all the more comical and critical. The four New York revivalists were deliberately repetitive, dumb, and loud, while waxing on adolescent silly themes. Many found irony in the fact that Paul McCartney & Wings’ “Silly Love Songs” was at the top of the charts just after The Ramones’ debut.

    Meanwhile, by attending parties of the MSU cognoscenti, I was learning of releases that qualified as a true pre-punk underground. They ranged from free jazz and improv, to a reimagining of issue-oriented folk. Judy Collins’ 1976 release of Bread and Roses sparked a bottom-up folk revival movement that was leveraged by women and gay groups as well as the nascent anti-nuclear movement, though because the Bread and Roses movement was decentralized and region-based, it was invisible to all but a few. Meanwhile, the heady improvisational world, led by pioneers like Carla Bley, Miles Davis, and Art Ensemble of Chicago, set a high bar for creativity that few in the rock world could ever hope to meet. This led me to conclude that if the first two Residents albums, and Bley’s Escalator Over the Hill, counted as a new underground, that must mean the album-oriented rock that defined my high school years was middle of the road music. AOR was now MOR, what a decline.

    What was true culturally was true politically and socially, with mid-decade winning the moniker of “Me Decade” from a media anxious to categorize and declare. Granted, there were fringe benefits to gazing at one’s own navel, such as the new-found obsession with gymnasium workouts, never a favorite in hippie years. The years between Nixon’s resignation and the fall of Saigon on the one hand, and Seabrook and anti-nuclear environmental concerns on the other, were never more than a brief hiatus, but the bicentennial represented the trough for political awareness in the country. True, a few brave anti-nuclear souls initiated the bicentennial Continental Walk for Disarmament, but except for the event introducing the world to folk singer Charlie King, there was little traction with youth in the nation. Gil Scott-Heron managed to turn ennui to the advantage of activists, releasing spoken-word tracks like “Bicentennial Blues” that bemoaned the empty state of the decade at midpoint.

    The one moment of furor at MSU centered on The Iran Film Project, a documentary effort sponsored by the shah of Iran and the CIA. Because the film was shaping up as a hagiography of the Reza Pahlavi family, Iranian students were incensed, but dared not come out in public. The protests of hundreds of students wearing blank square white cardboard around their faces set the tone for 1975-76 on campus, as did chants of “The shah is a U.S. puppet! Down with the shah!” (I was overjoyed to see Patti Smith later post a picture of herself surrounded by Iranian students with their paper masks.)

     It’s funny how both the arena-rock AOR traditionalists, and the protopunk malcontents, focused with equal fervor on disco as a symbol of all that was wrong in the world. Granted, disco’s exaggerated class distinctions and dress-up fake aristocracy seemed tailor-made for parody, so it would be difficult for many outside the mirror ball world to hold their tongues. But amidst all the Bee Gees and Average White Band soundalike hits, there were moments of pure enjoyment, characterized as guilty pleasure for the disco haters. Donna Summers’ “I Feel Love” (the first hit with a completely synthesized beat) stood out, as did Earth Wind & Fire’s “September,” KC & The Sunshine Band’s “Keep It Comin’, Love,” The Brothers Johnson’s “Strawberry Letter 23,” and so many others. A girlfriend dragged me to my first gay bar, Trammpps, during those years, where I got to witness a Cockettes chorus line dance to an augmented version of Polly Browne’s “Up Up Up in a Puff of Smoke.” Those kind of memories have as much staying power as one’s first Talking Heads or DEVO concert.

    My own deepest plunge into mediocrity during those months happened not with disco, but in a spontaneous car trip to Newport News, Virginia on the bicentennial weekend to drop off a friend. On the return trip, we stopped in Nashville for an outdoor Peter Frampton and Gary Wright festival that might have had some debauched moments, but seemed at the time to be the height of empty arena rock. During the late summer of 1976 I made a point of listening to more Ramones and following early press coverage of the Sex Pistols in London, just so I could feel a middle finger could be appropriately delivered to some corner of mainstream culture. It wasn’t until the punk wave crested in 1977-79 that I started asking if there was a method behind that particular madness.

In three weeks - Everything Everywhere - Was the punk tsunami new wave, no-wave, or rogue wave? 1977-1980

Copyright 2024 Loring Wirbel

 

The Allure of Listening - Chapter 5 - Tapes, Taping, and Subgenres: Struggles for Market Dominance

 Many new entrants take on the hard-rock core to define the finest music for driving around stoned   -- 1973-75

As older friends got their first cars and driving around country roads with beers and joints became the ideal way to spend the weekend, the 8-track tape was suddenly everywhere – decent fidelity and a looped playback, not requiring any rewinds or media flip-overs. In our part of mid-Michigan, driving aimlessly while impaired was called “taping,” but it was never clear to me if this was a reference to 8-track or cassette tapes, or something else entirely. On rare occasions, the desire by corporate labels to place tracks of equal timing on the four programs of 8-track tapes led to unexpected bonuses: Lou Reed’s Berlin, for example, featured four minutes of orchestrated music on the 8-track that was not present on any other format among the 1973 releases.

    Certain tapes became de rigueur early on: Commander Cody’s Lost in the Ozone, J. Geils Band’s Full House, Deep Purple’s Machine Head. But I learned a trick in that early 8-track era about music rights and marketing of pirate editions. At local gas stations and convenience stores, 8-track tapes were sold in unadorned packages for cheap prices, no legal rights assumed (“of course it’s legit, what kind of place do you think I’m running here?”). Because the pirate manufacturers did not wish to incur the wrath of large labels, it was only occasionally one might stumble upon a pirated version of Elton John’s Madman Across the Water or Neil Young’s Harvest. Far more often, one might find pirated versions of less popular niche artists like New York Dolls, Mahavishnu Orchestra or The Tubes. Of course, this fit in with my listening preferences, so I assembled a collection of outsider music on the cheap. It was only barely discernible in the early to mid-1970s that the smaller audio cassette was displacing the 8-track tape, in both automotive and home applications, due primarily to Dolby noise reduction improving the audio quality of the former (I do not recall ever seeing a pirated cassette, not sure why). The 8-track would not fade away until the introduction of the Sony Walkman in 1979, however.

    Friends were pretty forgiving at being introduced to the Velvet Underground or Mott the Hoople, but it was no surprise to find loud repetitive tunes like “Smoke On the Water” and “Lazy” retaining their place as top driving-while-impaired tunes. And the programmers of album-oriented rock took careful notice. Lee Abrams and the market analysts copying his model pressured stations to make sure that these hard-rock favorites were played over and over again on FM radio stations.

    In 2024, after the back-to-back deaths of Karl Wallenberg and Eric Carmen, a producer who had worked with both musicians lamented that it was hard to get World Party and Raspberries music on FM radio because of the influence of the “More Zep, bro!” contingent. As much as I want to be partially empathetic to the hormone- and alcohol-fueled teenage male, the Zep crew was in effect doing Lee Abrams’ job. Among my own group of friends, maybe a third were truly inquisitive and open, while close to two thirds were proud to demand the loud and familiar. To this day, many of the aging head-bangers who were in the classic-rock mainstream don’t want to admit they should be ashamed of what lunkheads they were in the 1970s.

    By 1973, the trend got worse with Led Zeppelin’s “Stairway to Heaven,” Lynyrd Skynyrd’s “Free Bird,” and at least three or four tracks from Steely Dan’s debut album. The most frustrating aspect of the dumbing-down of AOR was that these same tunes remained the most played a decade, even two decades later, hence giving FM-based AOR its nickname of “classic rock.” Few 1970s adolescents reaching the end of their teens saw any problem with being stuck in the hard-rock hits of 1968-75, as they were thoroughly convinced this was rock’s finest hour.

    To be fair, some complex rock works like Focus’s “Hocus Pocus,” Golden Earring’s “Radar Love,” or Edgar Winter’s “Frankenstein” were innovative bright spots of fun in the charts. But by 1973, I had not only given up on Top 40, I was even finding reason to be skeptical of progressive-rock luminaries. The second and third albums of both King Crimson and Genesis seemed to lag a bit. For Robert Fripp of King Crimson, my turning point for appreciating the band again was the rise of the Red-era ensemble. I heard Lark’s Tongues in Aspic while driving all night to Colorado in the summer of 1973, and immediately became convinced that the band with Wetton, Bruford, and Cross was the best instantiation of Crimson ever. Similarly, once Genesis released The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway, all was forgiven – at least until Peter Gabriel quit the band. In more mainstream environs, George Harrison and Eric Clapton won some brownie points for organizing benefits for causes like the new nation of Bangladesh. But because I was an early fan of Bob Marley and saw him live in 1974, I was all too aware that Clapton’s cover of “I Shot the Sheriff” represented a certain white-rocker ripoff of the reggae community, as much as it represented an attempt to give Marley greater exposure.

    The explosion of glam acts like Roxy Music, Bowie, New York Dolls, Iggy, and Lou Reed in 1972-73 captured my full attention, not due to gender questioning, but because the bands represented the kind of excitement and spontaneity I associated with 1966. Some bands broke through to Top 40 awareness – T. Rex’s “Bang a Gong,” Lou Reed’s “Walk on the Wild Side,” several Bowie songs from Ziggy Stardust and Aladdin Sane, and songs from the post-Country Life Roxy Music. Because of this, teen friends of mine were far more willing to accept glam rock in a little rural Midwestern town than I might have anticipated.

    It’s easy to read too much in the acceptance of glam as far as any real challenges to hyper-masculinity in rock, or as far as auguring a more collective approach to gay rights or women’s rights in music in the mid-1970s. As far as masculinity in performance, dozens of lead singers like Paul Rodgers followed the Jagger/Plant/Daltrey path into the “cock-rock” self-parody, and carried plenty of teenage males along for the ride. In fact, with the rise of hair-metal bands in the 1980s, many musicians combined hyper-masculinity with teased hair and makeup, leading to a message that was confused to say the least.

    As far as cultural messages for budding women or LGBTQ+ activists in the early 1970s, it was rare to see anything beyond the superficial Helen Reddy “I Am Woman” message. A group of Ann Arbor women activists centered on Meg Christian and what would become the Michigan Womyn’s Music Festival formed Olivia Records in 1973. Lesbian activist Holly Near had founded Redwood Records in 1971, but the label did not center on gay rights and lesbian activism until two years later. The two labels reached their heights of fame around 1976-82, but were scarcely visible in popular culture. As for male gay rights, despite the regular presence of outspoken activists in the 50 years following 1973, it was only the arrival of Tom Robinson in the British punk movement in 1976 that married queer activism and anti-Thatcher activism. Rarely did gay rights statements mix personal lifestyles and collective politics until the AIDS crisis of the 1980s.

   The arrival of punk rock in 1976-77 would be rejected by many more mainstream rockers who had accepted glam, both because punk artists defiantly tried to stay underground, and because many listeners who were teens in the early 1970s hit that point in their lives, often reached at the end of high school years, when the search for new musical experiences slowly waned. Subsequent observations of generations entering their college years or early 20s at later dates confirms that most teens hit the end of music experimentalism around 18; a small coterie of music lovers sustain the search for new music into their mid-20s; but only a tiny few maintain that interest into middle or old age. It became obvious to me before leaving high school that I was going to be one of those life-long explorers.

    I had my own set of prejudices. The Southern California Eagles/Jackson Browne sound did little for me, even though many were jumping on that particular bandwagon by the end of 1972. When I spent a week in Colorado in the summer of 1973, I developed a little more patience with the genre later known as Americana, and with the mainstream artists who had recorded at Caribou Ranch near Nederland, Colo. This type of music was bound to be overplayed on both hit radio and AOR FM stations – The Eagles’ “Hotel California” serving as an excellent example. But even after rejecting those particular songs that were played to death, it was still possible to find lesser-known Americana acts like Souther-Hillman-Furay Band, that were much more fun than the mega-stars.

    Over time, I found myself showing less tolerance for the hard rock bands that crossed over into mass popularity. By the mid-1970s I had written off many arena-rock bands of the KISS-Kansas-REO Speedwagon-Journey variety that seemed to go nowhere in advancing musical styles. To accentuate the tedium, 1974 seemed the year when it was required that every mainstream hard-rock band release a double-live album. Yet even among the pantheon of more progressive stars, I found it hard to get excited over Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon – Floyd had made more interesting albums, and would make more in the future. As for Yes’s self-indulgent Tales from Topographic Oceans, I don’t think I’ve forgiven them, even 50 years later.

    It’s odd that I can’t remember the first concert I attended. Perhaps there was a mainstream act I attended with my family in the late 1960s or early 1970s, but it was only the emerging acts of mid-decade that stuck with me, primarily ones that played Detroit. In that category were Roxy Music, Bob Marley, Suzi Quatro, Lou Reed, Bruce Springsteen, and The Who. I was especially lucky to catch the New York Dolls at the highly unlikely yet oddly appropriate venue of a Lansing NASCAR racetrack, Spartan Speedway, in a midnight show in May 1974, the same night as our Junior Prom. We came in tuxes and evening gowns, of course. David Johansen was rambling on about communist lipstick, of course. In 50 years of hindsight, the circumstances seem all but unbelievable, but at the time, it seemed as though the universe was behaving in precisely the right fashion.

    That feeling would repeat itself three years later as punk rock hit the Midwest. The biggest waves rarely come with any harbingers. You simply have to approach them in matter-of-fact ways, and only look back to reassess after the biggest waves subside. There is also a legitimate debate about which waves might be big enough to ride. The arrival of pub rock in 1972-74 through bands like Brinsley Schwartz and Graham Parker & the Rumour, led to power-pop legends such as Nick Lowe, Dave Edmunds, Robyn Hitchcock, and even Elvis Costello. At the time, the leading fans of pub rock held great hopes for the genre, but it had been overtaken by punk by 1976 to the extent of being remembered largely as a footnote by punk fans.

    The Vietnam War was waning and few other social or environmental problems arising to take its place for engendering outrage. Truth be told, Michiganders should have been up in arms about cattle being mistakenly fed fire retardant in 1972-74, with the result that all citizens eating milk, cheese, or beef in that period had a significant load of polybrominated biphenyls (PBBs) in their bodies. But the universal reaction among most college and high-school youth at the time was, “Damage already has been done, this should accelerate your path to becoming a vegan anyway.”

    I was finding it tedious to rally around unjust drug arrests. Finding many former Michigan radicals heading to rural homesteads, where they would sing Judy Collins’ “Cook With Honey,” didn’t strike me as much of an avant garde movement either – in fact, I could foresee many back-to-the-land hippies quickly becoming as conservative as their neighbors.  It was about this time I was introduced to a small cloister of East Lansing intellectuals publishing a quarterly broadside called The Spectacle, a media vehicle for the Situationists. As I voraciously swallowed the works of Guy DeBord and Raoul Vaneigem, I realized that these misfits had developed an ideology that matched the size of the cultural enemy that freethinkers were facing. I only realized in the following century that the Situationists had accurately predicted the rise of the Internet and social-media culture. I quickly scribbled their mission statement on my bedroom wall: “The Spectacle is the organization of appearances made possible through modern means of communication. The facility with which images can be detached and alienated from their sources, and reorganized for representation in accord with the present ideology of power, forms the basis for the unprecedented amplitude of the modern Spectacle, where everything once directly lived has moved away into its own representation.”

    This was why any nod by a musician to social change seemed so superficial and inadequate. Until the arrival of Queen Patti Smith in 1975, the so-called liberatory nature of rock music would look like just another co-opted set of slogans. After seeing The Spectacle tabloid, I dredged out the third issue of National Lampoon from 1970, in which Michael O’Donoghue’s “Crossing the Rubicam” showed how every for-profit company hijacking a slogan in order to sell stuff, helped to spell the demise of any movement that claimed to move beyond such a thing. These conclusions did not depress me, but helped to place any musician’s work in context. After all, the president was under investigation and soon to be on his way out the door, the draft had ceased to play a role in most young men’s lives, weren’t we all stoned and happy and ready for some mellow Southern California music anyway? (Plenty of women, LGBTQ+, and people of color were ready to answer in the negative, but little could rouse the nation from its mid-1970s slumber. The occupation of Wounded Knee, and the arrival of bands such as Redbone and Fanny, made for token concerns with indigenous rights, but most such music of rebellion did not register.)

    Much was made in 2023 of the 50^th anniversary of rap’s founding, but did it creep into national awareness? In a very limited sense, though what was more evident was the fragmentation of R&B into many subgenres: reggae and ska were critical new interpretive voices, particularly in Europe and Latin America; the first predecessors to disco were coming out via bands like Earth, Wind & Fire and singers like Sylvia (who preceded Donna Summer). The descriptive labels (both stigmas and positive labels) attached to artists were as challenging in the early to mid 1970s as they would prove to be later. Some Black women singers like Gladys Knight clearly wanted to retain earlier Motown traditions, while fashion-leaning ensembles like Labelle and The Pointer Sisters were paving the way for disco’s arrival. In fact, the first album of KC and the Sunshine Band debuted in the spring of 1974. In the buzz of R&B’s multifaceted new reality, early rappers like Grandmaster Flash were merely one voice among many. But a fragmented R&B environment could still generate powerful singles – it may be mostly lost to history, but Tower of Power’s “So Very Hard to Go” could move a listener as much as any song from Motown’s heyday.

    The era was an echo of 1966 in generating its own excitement even in the apparent calm before the storm. On the threshold of Patti Smith, Ramones, and Sex Pistols, it was easy to forget that Brian Eno and Robert Fripp released their first ambient collaboration album No Pussyfooting in 1973, and Eno released two jaw-dropping vocal pop albums in 1974, Here Come the Warm Jets and Taking Tiger Mountain by Strategy.  Fripp himself took King Crimson to the culmination of the Red-era trilogy, the dramatic Red. The former band Halfnelson re-branded as Sparks in 1972 with A Woofer in Tweeter’s Clothing, and released two critical albums, Kimono My House and Propaganda, in 1973-4.  Even David Bowie, who had annoyed a lot of fans with the deliberately-disco Young Americans album in early 1975, ended up using that album as a springboard to Station to Station and the Berlin albums that followed. (It’s eerie to watch Bowie’s debut of the title song “Young Americans” on Dick Cavett in December 1974, wearing white bucks and retro 50s fashion, in the same time period that Phil Ochs was debuting an Elvis Presley throwback in live sets. Ochs took his rockabilly into a depressive mode and eventual suicide, while Bowie redirected his disco to electronic mysticism and punk production.)

    In my senior year in high school, I moved out of home and into a small shared apartment in a bad part of Lansing. Music took on a special aura of snobbery, as I listened to more jazz, a few challenging works like Steely Dan’s Katy Lied, and headier singer-songwriters like John Prine and Steve Goodman. An old neighborhood friend who had moved to California came back for a semester, and we’d have little spats over who was the bigger intellectual, Donald Fagen or Jeff Lynne (she was Camp ELO for life). To this day, it’s hard to hear references to Matty Healy’s 21^st-century band The 1975, because I had a feeling that this was The 1975, and I had the distinct feeling something big was on the horizon.

In three weeks - Chapter 6 - Cultural Defiance for its Own Sake

Copyright 2024 Loring Wirbel

 

The Allure of Listening - Chapter 4 - Platter Potlatch

 The rise of Discus Obsessivarus, or "Collector Scum" - 1970-72

Our tumble-down Victorian house was badly in need of a facelift in the summer of 1970, and the teenage dynamic duo of Dave and Nate proved up to the task of hanging off eaves and leaning backward off balconies. They were surprised that a precocious and annoying 13-year-old was well-versed in bands that mattered, but they expressed shock that I hadn’t already joined a record club to maximize my listening options. They helped me scan the Columbia House 12-for-a-penny list, and my introductory package of LPs included the debut eponymous albums of Johnny Winter and Eric Clapton, Janis Joplin’s Kozmic Blues, Traffic’s John Barleycorn Must Die, Joan Baez’s One Day at a Time, and other titles lost in the haze of a half-century. Not only was this a rich initial feast to be augmented every few weeks by supermarket purchases, but albums made an ideal present to beg from relatives – Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young’s Déjà vu and Led Zeppelin’s III were Christmas presents for the new era. I quickly got my first exposure to releases outside the Columbia House mainstream. My introduction to glam, for example, was Alice Cooper’s Love It to Death. It’s fair to say that many youth not yet in high school became album-heads in late 1970, in part because of the media hype surrounding the back-to-back deaths of Janis Joplin and Jimi Hendrix.

    Somewhere in the early 1970s, I joined with millions of other “serious” music fans in losing interest in the Top 40 and pop-music radio in general. Sure, I’d consult the lists in the late 1970s to see how punk was faring, against both disco and teen heartthrobs like Andy Gibb. Even in the 1980s and 1990s, I was dimly aware that a Top 40 existed, but radio (at least the continuous-hit variety) seemed like an irrelevant environment by that time. In the 21^st century, songs were introduced primarily through playlists, or as soundtracks to popular shows, but still the Top 40 survived in odd little I Heart Radio niches. But the mere fact that I could zone out one music media venue so quickly in 1970 gave me an object lesson of how young adults leaving their high school or college years could suddenly zone out on musical interests in general. The fleeting nature of consciousness makes it all too easy to practice tunnel vision.

    I juggled multiple budgets in order to stay current with new LPs, while trying to fill back catalogs of the weirder artists that really appealed to me, like Frank Zappa and Captain Beefheart. The Ann Arbor/Detroit collective of musicians loosely associated with John Sinclair – including the MC5 and Iggy and the Stooges – made me feel as though Michigan was an important defining base for radical culture. So what if Sinclair and his White Panthers were slightly behind the West Coast? John Lennon, at the peak of his radicalism with Yoko, always seemed a year or two behind the times, but that did not cut into his effectiveness. Wayne Kramer and Rob Tyner from the MC5 taught me what “rhetoric” meant, while Iggy, already a terror to middle-class parents in 1970, prepped me for the glam-rock era when his re-formation of The Stooges put the band in the center of the Bowie-Reed crowd. I remember my parents telling me in 1970 that they didn’t mind most of the bands scheduled to play at the Goose Lake festival, but “that Iggy, he’s just a threat to society!” Yep.

    The deaths in rapid succession of Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, and Jim Morrison predated a distinct fragmentation among not-so-underground AOR artists. Joni Mitchell and Neil Young were among songwriters opting for heady introspection, and savvier listeners were turning to borderline introverts like Nick Drake as well. British hard rockers like Led Zeppelin were setting the stage for a brasher (and more predictable) class of rockers ranging from Humble Pie in early days to AC/DC later in the decade. In fact, Led Zepplin’s diverse and superb III album did not get the audience it deserved because O.G. fans insisted it didn’t “rock out” enough. In the latter years of driving to cassette and 8-track tapes, this particular listener of “heavy music only, please” became increasingly annoying (see Chapter 5). This put innovative songwriters like Pete Townshend in something of a quandary – how would one strive for something akin to a concept album while rocking hard enough to please the masses? (In the case of The Who, percussionist Keith Moon solved the problem by treating any composition with a bit of manic intent.)

    Because 1970-71 represented the precipice before the arrival of Ziggy-era Bowie, Blue Oyster Cult, and many other larger-than-life acts, it’s easy to forget how conservative AM pop radio became by late 1971, as though everyone needed a rest. There was more Carpenters, Bread, Cat Stevens, Cher, and Carole King than ever before. John and Yoko, after a string of provocative singles, released the era-defining Imagine in 1971. It felt as though the world needed a break after living through 1960s chaos. Entering high school in 1971 might have meant frosh dances in previous decades, but I was head-down obsessed in album rock. Getting stoned was still a couple years away, but there already existed an attitude of taking music too seriously that interfered with the physical joy of an upbeat pop song.

    As late 1970 waded through 1971 and into 1972, singles experienced more longevity on the charts – both for decent songs like Stevie Wonder’s “Superstition,” Roberta Flack’s “Killing Me Softly,” or Carly Simon’s “You’re So Vain,” but also for the dreck that made up most of the Top 10. Some chart analysts say it was the vacuity of the charts in the latter half of the 1970s that pulled people to either punk or disco (with a smattering of true rap options just beginning in that era), but a more careful examination would prove that the singles charts had lost most of their sparkle even as the 1970s began. Hence the domination of the 40-minute long-playing album in that decade.

     Just as some entering high school became obsessive statistics gatherers of a favorite outdoor sport, or detailed monitors of TV shows and movies, I was one of the music nerds who ordered Schwann LP catalogs so I could develop a full picture of musicians in the pop and jazz fields. It was Schwann that introduced me to several fringe artists of the underground-beyond-underground, from Patrick Sky to Pearls Before Swine.

     My pledge to follow liner notes as closely as some follow score cards only lasted a decade or two, as I learned much later in life of all the details I failed to pick up by neglecting the smaller-print liner notes for CDs. It wasn’t long before I learned about music fidelity, though I lived with crap turntables and preamps for years. It was only through the college-age older siblings of friends that I learned names like Technics and Sony. Given the 21^st-century vinyl revival based on the supposed better fidelity of an analog source in reproducing sounds, it seemed ironic that the two formats to challenge LPs in the 1970s, 8-track tapes and audio cassettes, took market share from LPs based on their portability and ease of use, since their fidelity was hardly comparable to vinyl.

     It’s easy in retrospect to forget how significant the growth of LP sales was in the first half of the 1970s. In the watershed year of 1970, more than 500 million units were sold worldwide, amounting to 40% of all physical media. The numbers sold per year remained above 300 million well into the 1970s, when cassettes in particular began edging out vinyl sales. While much ink has been spilled over the 21^st-century vinyl resurgence, particularly after prices surged in the wake of pandemic shortages, the number of LPs sold in 2022, for example, registered only 41.3 million physical albums  (8.2% of 1970 totals), accounting for 43 percent of physical albums sold in that year. Statista Inc, is quick to point out, however, that if streaming and downloading is factored in, LPs accounted for only 5 percent of equivalent album listening in 2022. Thus, 1970 represented the top of the curve in several senses.

    The evolutionary rise of the creature known as “Collector Scum” happened slowly and subtly. Before the advent of tapes or CDs, corporate labels released only mono and stereo versions of an album (and mono ended up being the one with more collector value over a 50-year period). Occasionally, you might get production mistakes that would result in higher prices for a supposedly flawed product – The Beatles’ banned “butcher-block” cover for Yesterday and Today was a perfect example. But the more collectible LPs arrived courtesy of the plausibly-deniable pirates who released bootleg LPs, specializing in live performances or unreleased demos from top-selling artists. One of the finest legacies of the 1970s bootlegs came in the experimentation with different colors of vinyl for the LP, not just a yellow or a transparent red, but even splatter-rainbow colors for some choice bootlegs. The vinyl revival of the 21^st century brought with it the return of special colors of vinyl for limited-edition LPs, but few remembered that the pirate manufacturers of the 1970s are the ones who really brought colored vinyl out of the preschool children’s-specialty market, and into the rock mainstream.

    In the final months of junior high and the summer prior to entering high school, I experimented with producing a mimeographed equivalent of an underground newspaper, though the cultural issues to get excited about were only a whisper of the 1965-70 period. City-specific tabloid alternative newspapers were expanding tremendously in the 1971-74 era, like the Lansing-area Joint Issue, later to become Lansing Star. But except for the occasional large demonstration, these newspapers’ claim to a counterculture centered primarily on recreational drug use. Even as Richard Nixon’s Vietnamization made the prospect of a draft slowly wind down, there still were significant protests against the war, and in favor of nascent women’s rights, gay rights, recognition of indigenous people. Yet although memoirs from Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin became best-sellers, there was a definite feel by late 1971 that youth revolt had entered a waning phase.

    If drugs were the only countercultural option around, then that would be a necessary accompaniment to music. I tried weed for the first time just shy of my 15^th birthday, in the spring of 1972, and added a few hallucinogens not long after. It provided an interesting perspective, but I looked on in frustration as a significant number of teens seemed to prefer the new downer, Quaaludes, which failed to attract my interest at all. My definition of altered consciousness centered on artists like Zappa and Beefheart and the related mind expansion, not in hollering “Yeah!” to down and dirty blues. That cleaving was the first parting of ways I experienced from mainstream arena hard-rock, as I spent more time with glam rock, progressive rock, and experimental artists.

In three weeks - Chapter5 - Tapes, Taping, and Subgenres - Struggle for Market Dominance

Copyright 2024 Loring Wirbel

The Allure of Listening - Chapter 3 - The Mass-Marketing of Underground Sounds

 Remember that 'free-form radio' has almost always been an oxymoron. - 1969-70

Thanks to some stock-theatre bit parts and backstage set design work, I had a little bit of disposable income as early as the summer between sixth and seventh grade, but in 1969, the notion of blowing it all on record albums was still a year away. Nevertheless, innovative trends were afoot in what passed for a Lansing hipster community that would lessen the magnetic appeal of Top 40 radio, give a wider audience to albums from first-time garage bands, yet at the same time, set up the framework for a new conformity that would make album tracks like “Stairway to Heaven” and “Free Bird” all too familiar within five years.

     The independent DJs splitting off from Michigan’s WKAR and other campus-affiliated radio stations gave rise to what was then called “free-form radio,” a term that would seem infused with irony all too soon. Models for the “play what you want” format had been developed in 1966-67 by pioneers like KSAN in San Francisco, and soon spread to every U.S. city with a campus radio license. The fact that most such licenses were in the FM band helped hasten the move of commercial pop stations to the higher fidelity and looser formats of FM.  I learned of such stations relatively early thanks to friends’ older sisters and brothers who were abandoning Top 40 for the new free-form formats, and as long as the stations remained fresh (up until about 1973-74 or so), they became a vehicle for hearing bands like Ten Years After and the early Fleetwood Mac.

     Even in those early days, it was apparent that not all was as randomly unpredictable as the hype suggested. Certain DJs loved to hear Led Zeppelin and Pink Floyd over and over again. The short-term result was that musicians chasing other forms of innovation, from Bowie to Slade, got short shrift on such stations. It wasn’t long before coalitions of urban-contemporary production companies complained that the new FM underground was racist. The more astute DJs favored radical Black bands such as Last Poets, Sly & The Family Stone, and Gil Scott-Heron, but as far as such stations avoiding latter-era Motown, the music producers certainly had a point.

    In my later high-school years, I harbored a conspiracy theory that a music market analyst named Lee Abrams was single-handedly responsible for the closing of the American music underground. It certainly was an exaggeration of what happened in the 1970s, but I was on to something. Abrams, a band manager who founded an analytics company called Burkhart/Abrams, was part of a nationwide group called “Young Doctors” who wanted to inject predictability and profitability into free-form radio. By late 1969, the phrase “album-oriented rock” was being bandied about, but Abrams felt that the stoner DJs shouldn’t just play any album track that came to mind – rather, the alleged free-form should be given a format that quickly made FM underground rock as tightly structured as AM Top 40. In the days of 1969 prior to my own album buying, this formatting helped to guide my listening, but it became clear all too soon that stoner-rockers were being sold a bill of goods. (Abrams had a multi-decade career, remaining in programming until 1988, then co-founding XM Satellite Radio and staying until 2008. He jumped to Tribune Co. that year, but resigned in an email scandal in 2010.)

    While the administrators of college FM stations were clamoring for more conformity and predictability in their playlist, by the early 1970s, commercial FM stations were the biggest customers for the Burkhart/Abrams “SuperStars Album Rock” formats. Over the next three or four decades, college-affiliated stations tried to preserve a greater or lesser veneer of free-form. Those at state universities or affiliated with National Public Radio were halfway to AOR, but open enough to help drive punk/new wave, Paisley Underground, OG rap, and 1990s indie rock. Stations at smaller fine arts colleges, like KFJC at Foothills College in Los Altos Hills, CA, were proud of playlists that moved from free-form to dissonant and deranged – in the 1980s, KFJC heavily promoted a morning noise show called “Lose Your Breakfast Club.” There are high-profile stations like KEXP in Seattle that still try to preserve a free-form style in the 21^st century, but an astute listener will notice that even these stations favor certain tracks on new albums.

     The struggles for FM conformity were still in their infancy in late 1969. Woodstock took over the media weeks before I entered 7^th grade, though it deserves mention that festivals earlier in 1969, like Denver Pop Fest, drew tens of thousands of attendees, but were utterly forgotten in the wake of the coalescing of the half-million denizens of Woodstock Nation. The festival drew my attention at the time, but the greater musical implications only solidified in early 1970, with the release of the documentary film and the publication of Michael Ross’s Rock Beyond Woodstock, which summarized where Woodstock performers and other outsider musicians were heading in the new decade. The book was one of the factors that kicked my LP purchasing into high gear.

     In the fall of 1969, however, I was only a window-shopping underground rock tourist, save the rare exception of purchased seminal albums like The Beatles’ Abbey Road. The long withdrawal from Top 40 radio came concurrent with my transition to middle school, and there were structural similarities. Elementary school was a unified framework under a single educational director. Middle school was a suite of subgenres of education, all taught under different maestros as pre-teen consumers traveled from class to class. In the music realm, the fascinating subgenres of underground rock were so fun to explore, I barely noticed what was happening to Top 40 as the outsiders left the stage.

     Occasionally, one could hear some AM-radio examples of heavy-riffed rock, not only from old familiar acts like The Rolling Stones and The Who, but from newer pop acts like The Guess Who and Three Dog Night. But the Top 40 was infiltrated by greater numbers of syrupy ballads each week, providing a freak-era equivalent of the 1960 dominance of teen ballad acts like Frankie Avalon, through singers such as Engelbert Humperdinck and Frankie Valli. There was also the ever-growing influence of bubble gum, which many seemingly mature pseudo-hippies in moustaches and Edwardian dress appeared to love and promote with inane chewy-chewy-yummy-yummy lyrics. It was evident the manic 1966 days of one new song by an artist every six weeks were long gone. A song like Dylan’s “Lay Lady Lay” might stay on the charts for months.

    Soul and R&B acts were more prevalent than ever in the charts, but this time it was more than Berry Gordy’s Motown – Motown was entering an expansive and interesting latter period, but there were also labels from outside Detroit, even outside the U.S., introducing the world to Edwin Starr, Peaches and Herb, The Foundations, The Delfonics, Freda Payne, and Peggy Scott & Jo Jo Benson.

    The latter half of 1969 was notable for the cleaving of sides in the much-touted Generation Gap. The young adopted a sense of hubris following the media hype over “Woodstock Nation,” recognizing they could no longer be dismissed as ragtag bums without a purpose. But the later splintering of Students for a Democratic Society into mainstream and Weather Underground components, following October’s farcical Days of Rage in Chicago, showed that there was a dedicated minority of street fighters who were sure America was ripe for revolution.

     We only sensed vague resonances of this in small-town Midwest, but I was well aware at the time that Vice President Spiro Agnew was touting the value of the “silent majority.” It was clear from the number of adults around me who rooted for the cops in Chicago in both 1968 and 1969, and for the National Guard in Ohio in 1970, that there would be no significant revolution of radical youth on the horizon. Thankfully, truly violent talk of an overthrow petered out as rebels moved to the country, focused on academia, or got zoned out on drugs, but the splintering of the music community into “Which side are you on?” was obvious as AOR moved to college radio. Ultimately, it was to the detriment of the underground-rock listener, as there was less appreciation for soul/R&B or many other styles that were outside the rock underground.

    Paradoxically, though, some of the 1969-70 releases with the most explicitly rebellious messages, such as Jefferson Airplane’s Volunteers and The Rolling Stones’ Let It Bleed, seemed to have more staying power than standard-issue hard-rock and blues releases from the era. And even if fewer musicians seemed to want to stand on the vanguard of movements as compared to civil-rights pioneers in 1963-64, there were several times when artists went out of their way to flip an oversized middle finger to the music industry and the society at large. Neil Young, for example, worked hard with Reprise to make “Cinnamon Girl” a Top 40 hit in the late spring of 1970, but after the Kent State killings of May 4, Young and his cohorts in CSNY pulled out all stops to make the memorial song “Ohio” a hit to eclipse “Cinnamon Girl.” When some CSNY fans were dumbfounded in the 21^st century at the conservative fans who were angry with the quartet for their antiwar message, they had obviously forgotten that the song “Ohio” generated a fair amount of outrage among middle-of-the-road Americans at the time of its release, and even annoyance among some young fans wishing the band could just stick to “Suite: Judy Blue Eyes” material.

    Meanwhile, Top 40 label marketers and program planners seemed to go out of their way to alienate music rebels. True, there was some invasion of charts by people like Dave Mason, Derek & The Dominos, Santana, Delaney & Bonnie, and Janis Joplin in early 1970, but the bulk of the upper reaches of the Top 40 was comprised of syrupy hits from Bobby Goldsboro, Dawn, The Partridge Family, and Barbra Streisand. The invasion of Top 40 by MOR easy listening was eerily similar to the bland takeover precisely ten years earlier, when first-wave rock and roll was displaced by Annette Funicello and Fabian. In fact, older purveyors of dreck taught their children well, as 1950s heartthrob Sal Mineo helped Bobby Sherman become the top bubblegum artist of 1970.

    In the summer of 1970, I was experiencing my first growth spurt and trying to contemplate how to listen to music “like a grownup,” which in my case meant snubbing easy listening and adopting hippie-snob mannerisms. Sure, a 13-year-old could (with parental assistance) hit the downtown Lansing “freak mall” of Free Spirit, with its Sounds and Diversions record store, but the wealth of quasi-underground albums was confusing. I had increased disposable income thanks to some summer work, but I needed a spirit guide to steer me into this new mode of listening.

In three weeks - Chapter 4 - Platter Potlatch

Copyright 2024 Loring Wirbel

The Allure of Listening - Chapter 2 - Octagonal Purple Prism Lenses

 

Destroyed by hippie powers - 1967-68   

If there was a particular personal relevance to The Beatles’ release of Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band a few days after my tenth birthday, it did not reside in the music itself, nor in the odd fashion and art advances taken by the band. It didn’t reside in the wider cultural tsunami hitting on the eve of the Summer of Love. Instead, it jolted me into realizing that the long-playing album was becoming a statement in its own right, favored by bands that were getting far too ambitious to be contained by two sides of a single.  There was no hint of any imminent death knells for the 45 – the spring had been the era of Aretha’s “Respect,” “The Rascals’ “Groovin’,” Tommy James’ “I Think We’re Alone Now,” Martha and the Vandellas’ “Jimmy Mack,” The Buckinghams’ “Don’t You Care,” The Supremes’ “The Happening,” and songs from dozens of other bands seeking to continue the spirit of ’66.

    But in a sudden flash, the strategy of creating a musical statement midway in length between a 30-minute TV sitcom, and an hour-long TV drama, made perfect sense. The Beatles already had been breaking boundaries aplenty, in the multimedia marketing for the ‘Rain”/”Paperback Writer” single, and particularly in the strange instrumentation and arrangements for both the Rubber Soul and Revolver albums. But fans had not experienced the level of storytelling evident in Sgt. Pepper. The LP suddenly was meant to be taken seriously.

    The purpose of the long-player no longer was to stuff hits and covers into 40 minutes, but to let an artist “say something,” as superfluous as that might often be. While my friends had rushed to buy the first two albums by The Monkees in order to gain maximum hits per dollar, I’d opted for The Monkees’ Headquarters, the first album with no true Top 40 hit. I started ransacking the $1 LP bargain bin at the D&C Store, snaring such puzzling but critical artifacts as Tim Buckley’s Goodbye and Hello, and Donovan’s Sunshine Superman. I wasn’t searching for something to explain the hippies or psychedelia, I was merely graduating from the equivalent of short stories to full-length novels.

    The first good listen and look at Sgt. Pepper came courtesy of my neighbors the Fitzgeralds, who returned from a trip to San Francisco with The Beatles album in tow, along with purple octagonal prism sunglasses for the kids. Early June preceded most of the national news stories on Haight-Ashbury. It represented an era before Scott MacKenzie’s anthem “If You’re Going to San Francisco” had cracked the charts. Yet the Bay Area’s role as hippie central had been marketed in shop windows and TV ads as far back as mid-1966, so it was no surprise to see small-town middle class parents pick up hippie relics to bring the kids back home.

    The era for a true innocence of hippie culture resonated somewhat with the 1966 vs. 1967 debate for pop music’s height. If hallucinogen use was considered a central tenet of the Summer of Love, the good times only extended from Timothy Leary’s early 1960s experiential parties to the first be-ins of 1966 featuring the Grateful Dead and the early Slick-less Jefferson Airplane. Even in that year, many Merry Pranksters were pushing the limits of informed consent in their distribution of LSD. But by mid-1967, the Summer of Love already was exposing its unpleasant side - speed and smack were replacing LSD and pot, at least in the Bay Area.

    Pundits are right in suggesting the West Coast Summer of Love only made a difference to the 100,000-odd teens traipsing to Golden Gate Park that summer, as well as to smaller groups of youth in other large metropolitan areas. Maybe a few middle-American savvy adolescents caught an interview with members of the Jefferson Airplane or the sponsors of various be-ins, but most had more mediocre connections, often sparked by parents bringing home psychedelic relics. Mama showed me Marshall McLuhan’s The Medium is the Massage [stet] that summer, and although it was fascinating, the only connection that stuck for a pre-teen boy was the photograph of the nude female cello players wrapped in Saran Wrap. I told mom it must be “chello-phane,” and she thought that I was some kind of genius. The pun just seemed obvious.

    My own mecca for that summer was the beach scene west of Mackinac City, where dad’s friend Ozzie had a beach bachelor pad. I got to listen to some longer jazz works just as I was discovering the virtues of LPs. I also satisfied prurient interests with a stack of Ozzie’s Playboy magazines featuring a pictorial for the opening of the latest 007 epic, You Only Live Twice. Since the theme song was sung by Nancy Sinatra, she will always be associated unfairly with soft-core porn in my strange mind.

    I started picking up on snippets of music theory through Alfred d’Auberge piano lessons that began in 1966, augmented with guitar lessons two years later. Such a music education transition was near-cliché for pre-teens at the time, often involving negotiations initiated by parents who demanded piano lessons as a prelude to guitar. I had a particular love for woodwind sounds as well, so I began fooling around with tenor sax long before we had school band classes.

    From midsummer 1967 to the summer a year later, there was a running battle in AM radio over where maturity and bubble-gum would stake respective claims. There was no end to the stream of psychedelic bands with three-minute gems, from Strawberry Alarm Clock to Electric Prunes to Blues Magoos to The Status Quo to The Balloon Farm. Time signatures, keys, and instruments for hits such as “Incense and Peppermints” and “Crimson and Clover” were taking AM singles to places well outside known safety zones. Was it legitimate acid-trip experience that drove expansion of acceptable sounds, or was it marketing? The bands responsible played a schizophrenic dance of making songs palatable enough for the Top 40, while mixing the songs with longer jams that would form the backbone of a (self-declared) serious album. The dual life of Sky Saxon and The Seeds exemplified the path many bands were taking. Ironically, for a band that later defined disco, The Bee Gees during those years struggled to outline what sort of hippies they were.

    Outside AM radio, experiments all but inexplicable to pre-teen minds were under way. Even though both artists eventually produced radio-friendly singles, Jimi Hendrix and Cream both introduced albums that took music well beyond its previous confines. Without Are You Experienced? and Disraeli Gears, it’s safe to say that wilder forays in outsider music like Capt. Beefheart’s Trout Mask Replica would never have seen the light of day.

     But what is often forgotten in the reverie for the psychedelic golden era is that many of the bands later defined as bubble-gum – Ohio Express, 1910 Fruitgum Company – also hit the charts for the first time in late 1967/early 1968. A certain percentage of the bands no doubt planned their own careers based on pre-defined agendas pushing what was later known as Sunshine Pop, with Spanky & Our Gang and Friend & Lover being examples of consciously-promoted diatribes for positive thinking. But did the record companies and advertisers play an equal role in pushing bubble-gum music as an antidote to the rebellion breaking out among members of middle-class youth? “Yummy Yummy Yummy I’ve Got Love In My Tummy” never felt like a conscious counter-revolution, it only made identifying cultural referents all the more difficult and surreal for a pre-teen.

    It’s equally fair to point out that, because the LP as a unified art statement was still in its infancy in the latter half of the 1960s, the result was often less than stellar. It’s easy to remember Surrealistic Pillow, Mamas & Papas Deliver, and Buffalo Springfield Again among the era’s highlights, but many LPs of 1967-68 didn’t have the staying power of those recorded and released from 1969 on. Even the best garage bands continued the 1964-65 trend of filling an album with at least 40% covers of songs from other bands. While culturally exciting, the psychedelic 1967 and global-revolution 1968 actually represented two years of a musical trough between the explosive free for all of 1966 and the era of album-oriented rock that really took off around 1969.

    In our precariously overstuffed elementary school, fifth and sixth grades were relegated to temporary trailers in the parking lot. This provided a certain gravity and cachet in moving out of fourth grade and into trailer-trash land. It’s a universal truth (at least in this country) that middle school is a dress rehearsal for high school, but it seemed equally true that fifth and sixth grades prepared the near-tween for practicing cliques and crushes and team sports. Kids were already swapping rings and going steady at 10 years old in my rural environs, so it seemed natural that some were pretending to be adults well before teenage years.

    Radio pop became a slippery mix in the 18 months after Sgt. Pepper. One could choose to survive on a strict diet of Doors, Jefferson Airplane, and Canned Heat hits, crafted for a Top 40 market. But the diet was richer thanks to late-period Motown acts like Temptations and Impressions, as well as R&B coming from way outside Detroit, like The Foundations from the UK. The most puzzling ingredient to fit into the pre-teen diet was bubble gum and other syrupy and frothy goodies, from Bobby Goldsboro to Dion. Sometimes the lite-pop artists surprised us with their gravity, like Dion’s “Abraham and Martin and John,” arriving soon after the dual 1968 assassinations of Martin Luther King and Bobby Kennedy. Often though, a new single by The Grass Roots or Gary Puckett and the Union Gap was pure pop and nothing more.

     There was scarcely a long-player I was interested in purchasing between Sgt. Pepper and the The Beatles’ 2-record White Album of December 1968. But there were many album covers that dimly captured my attention in the intervening months, suggesting the existence of a world outside my hometown that was rapidly growing scarier and harder to ignore. News footage from Vietnam was omnipresent in the months leading up to the February 1968 Tet Offensive. New uprisings were bursting out in Prague, Paris, Mexico City, Warsaw, seemingly everywhere at once. Our own country shifted from figurative battlegrounds in late 1967 and early 1968, to the literal horrific scenes at the Democratic Convention in Chicago in August 1968. Yet when New Left boomers look back to this era and claim that a soundtrack of revolution was directly laid out at that time, the reality was more nuanced. A typical musical diet might be centered as much around “Ode to Billie Joe” as any Rolling Stones hit of the time.

     There was one such Stones hit that was a game-changer for me, however. In June 1968, we were getting ready to leave Grand Haven after breakfast at a nearby diner, and came back to find my beloved basset hound Lancelot floating in Shepler’s Marina, where he had drowned after coming loose from his leash on the boat. This trauma spelled a quick end to the family’s boating years, and it put family members in a funk that lasted the summer. A few days after absorbing the loss of Lancelot, I heard “Jumping Jack Flash” for the first time. It was not as explicitly political as “Street Fighting Man,” but it seemed a way to crystallize pre-adolescent sadness and rage. Even at an immature 11 years old, it allowed me to feel I was in the streets of Paris or Chicago, greeting the second half of 1968 with a primal scream.

     The summer of 1968 was ugly following the dual assassinations in the spring, but something was evident pre-Chicago that would come back to bite young revolutionaries a year later, as Students for a Democratic Society was morphing into the ugly aberration of the Weather Underground. If you were 18 and watched the uprisings in Mexico and Czechoslovakia, and read Zap comix and stayed stoned, it seemed evident that the entire world was ready to follow youthful revolution. Yet Richard Nixon and Spiro Agnew conducted their summer campaign speaking to the “silent majority,” which Agnew was convinced could obliterate any media-enhanced youth revolution. There was plenty of cultural evidence in the latter half of 1968 that suggested not only that Nixon would win, but that his silent majority concept was right. Plenty of Americans loved to see cops beat the crap out of hippies in Chicago. Plenty of Americans stuck by their country-western and nightclub crooner music, and would have nothing to do with album-oriented rock. It was more than a generation gap. It was millions of people rejecting youth culture. It just wasn’t so evident during the remaining months of the 1960s.

     The early winter months of 1969 carried the distinct memory of a 6^th-grade dance, flashing lights and a DJ spinning “Touch Me”, “Crimson and Clover,” and “Ramblin’ Gamblin’ Man.” No doubt a few parent-chaperones were apoplectic about the age-appropriateness or lack thereof, but I don’t remember extreme touching, even among the cool kids. We were all shy of 12, looking ridiculous in attempts to look hip.

Coming in three weeks - Chapter 3 - The Marketing of Underground Sounds - "Who is Lee Abrams, and why does he want me to eat this Free Bird"?

Copyright Loring Wirbel 2024