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