There’s never any point in arguing about musical tastes, so I won’t. No critic will ever persuade me that Lou Reed has talent, and I’ll never convince a critic that my favorite bands are worth a second listen. So, while I’ve never much respected rock critics, I’d never bother starting a BBQ Pit thread to trash them for their different opinions.
But it drives me absolutely bonkers when critics state and re-state and re-state idiotic theories that were NEVER valid in the first place, and haven’t gained any validity since.
Specifically? Today, I read (for what must be the trillionth time) “In the 1970’s, rock and roll radio was dominated by art-rock bands like Yes and Emerson, Lake & Palmer. Punk rock was a necessary reaction to the pre-eminence of art-rock, and while punk never achieved great commercial success, at least it deserves credit for killing off the bloated excesses of art-rock.”
Look, it’s no secret: in the 1970’s, I was a huge fan of most of the leading art-rock bands. I had an ELP poster over my bed, have owned Yes’ “Close to the Edge” in 3 formats… yes, I was a typical 70’s geek.
And THAT’s why I know the critics are full of crap! There were NEVER any radio stations that played art-rock around the clock! There was NEVER a time when ELP dominated the airwaves. And I know, because I’d have listened to such a station gladly. I was SEARCHING for radio stations that played such music! And I was not living in a small market, either. I was living in New York City, where you’d THINK there’d be radio stations catering to every taste.
There were two major FM rock radio stations, back then: WPLJ and WNEW. NEITHER played much art-rock. “Lucky Man” was the ONLY Emerson, Lake and Palmer song in heavy rotation. As for Yes, there were exactly TWO songs in heavy rotation: “Roundabout” and “Your Move/I’ve Seen All Good People.” And that was about it for art-rock. You NEVER heard King Crimson. You NEVER heard Genesis. Indeed, on WPLJ, you were far, far more likely to hear Stevie Wonder or the Bee Gees than you were ELP.
So, while I won’t bother arguing over the merits of the music, I am prepared to argue facts. A critic has every right to say “ELP sucked.” If he does, I’ll simply ignore him and crank up “Tarkus” louder. But if he asserts “ELP dominated the radio airwaves,” I’ll spit in his face, because he’s either a lying sack of manure or just an ignoramus parroting what he’s seen other critics write a million times.
One more thing: punk rock had NOTHING to do with the demise of art-rock. Nothing at all. There was never a single Yes or ELP fan who switched over to punk after hearing “Never Mind the Bollocks.” The death of art-rock was 100% self-inflicted: that is, the leading art-rock bands started putting out terrible albums that even their own fans didn’t like. in short, Johnny Rotten didn’t kill ELP. “Works Volume 2” and “Love Beach” did.
Dude, same deal as with the news. There needs be a story with dramatic tension to keep the interest of readers. If there isn’t one, it has to be invented.
astorian I couldn’t agree more. Remember, the most important thing to many music critics was to keep the masses fixated upon the Rolling Stones and to try to ignore Led Zep.
YES and their ilk they despised even more because they were even further away from the roots rock Stones.
good news for us old prog fans. Great bands like Radiohead are huge and definately prog. They are just smart enough not to proclaim themselves as such. There’s nothing sonically on Kid A that King Crimson didn’t do first… er, getting sidetracked.
There’s always hope, and great new music is made all the time.
check out The Fire Theft (formerly Sunny Day Real Estate).
Astorian, you’ll probably take my explanation with a grain of salt since I consider most art-rock (with the exception of some songs by King Crimson and Jethro Tull) to be soporific hyper-pretentious noodling, but one thing you have to consider is that many rock critics weren’t even born or–if they were–busy watching Sesame Street in the early 70’s when art-rock was at its peak. History is written by the winners and that’s definitely true in the area of rock and roll where most rock critics and historians hated prog and loved punk. These writers, in turn, passed their opinions down to the next generation of rock critics who, being too young to remember music in the early 70’s, accepted it as the gospel. That’s why the superficial explanation about art-rock and punk you complained about in the OP is so common today.
As for the issue of radio airplay, I didn’t really start listening to rock and roll radio until the late 70’s but, when I did, I remember hearing a lot of Yes, ELP, Jethro Tull, and some other art-rock bands. (I grew up, by the way, in Northern California and Eastern Washington.) Maybe you didn’t hear them as often as Led Zeppelin, the Beatles, Aerosmith, the Stones, Van Halen, Queen, or Styx, but their songs popped up fairly frequently (too frequently for me). If you really want to talk about a type of music that was given the short-shrift by rock and roll radio at the time, however, it was punk. I don’t remember EVER hearing the Sex Pistols or the Ramones on the radio at that time. Elvis Costello received scant attention at best as did The Clash and The Talking Heads. Maybe a few college stations were playing them but their wattage was never powerful enough to get to the suburbs where I lived.
I would hear the ocassional Yes, Tull and ELP song on album oriented stations. But they NEVER dominated the airwaves, even at the height of their success. Mostly because their stuff was too long for radio. Only their shorter tracks made it, for the most part.
Then, as now, it was mostly drivel that dominated the airwaves. This was, of course, before the birth of ‘classic’ rock stations. And they concentrate mostly on drivel, too.
And I’ve always heard that punk was more a reaction to disco than art-rock.
I have to disagree with you there. The most well-known rock critics - Lester Bangs, Robert Christgau, Nick Tosches, Richard Meltzer - started in the late 60s, and a few others - Greil Marcus, Nick Kent - started precisely when prog rock was at its height of popularity, the early to mid-70s. All detested art rock while championing the more “punk” bands available at the time: THe Velvet Underground, The Stooges, The New York Dolls. So I don’t think you can attribute it all to rewriting history after the fact. Truth is, most of the “respected” critics always thought ELP, Yes, et al were shit. IMO, they knew whereof they spoke.
Have to disagree there, too. Remember the story of Malcolm McLaren “discovering” Johnny Rotten wearing a Pink Floyd shirt with “I Hate” written in above the logo? The Clash and the Ramones both spoke out against bloated art-rock, too, and if I dig through some old magazines I can find the quotes for you, if I must. The Ramones, in particular, talked of “stripping the music down to what made it fun”, and their ideas of good music are well-represented in their choice of cover versions. Clem Burke, of Blondie, an early “punk” band on the CBGBs scene: “We want to be one of the great bands, not like the Grateful Dead”. In fact, Blondie’s a good example of punk’s embrace of disco over art-rock (“Call Me”, “Heart of Glass”). So are the Clash (“Ivan Meets G.I. Joe”, “This Is Radio Clash”), Joy Division (became New Order), Gang Of Four (“I Love A Man In Uniform” and all their later albums), and Johnny Rotten himself (ever heard “Metal Box” or half of P.I.L.'s output?). In fact, the only quote I can find in print badmouthing disco is from Lou Reed, who was himself more classic rock than punk by the late 70s.
And, although I was born in 1970, I can tell you I heard a lot more Yes on the radio than I did the Clash or the Buzzcocks in the late 70s, so I agree with NDP on that.
You are right. However, let me clarify that the rock critics I was referring to in that sentence you quoted are not the earlier generation represented by Bangs, Christgau, Marcus et al., but instead the newer critics who have been writing for only the last 10 to 15 years. I think what Astorian is complaining about is the tendency of some recent writers to just regurgitate what Bangs and the others had to say about art-rock and use it to draw a simplistic (and inaccurate) conclusion about both art-rock and punk rock.
What folk are calling Art Rock is what I’d describe as Progressive Rock.
Art Rock is another thing entirely, 70’s group Renaissance,(not the 1990’s rave club thing of the same name) perhaps Yes would be included.
In th UK during the 70’s it was pretty hard to hear anything other than chart material during the day, it was only on a night, and quite late on at that, that one could hear true rock.
Bands like Wishbone Ash, Uriah Heep, Doors, Ten Years After just never got any airtime at all.
Punk was treated in it’s day in the same way as rap was a few years ago, it was newspaper material only, loathed by broadcasters and derided by most critics as being artless, skilless, and immature.
Punk took some time to really get going, the Sex Pistols and Siouxsie and the Banshees were the ones to break through into popular public awareness but there were punk bands before them.
One can reasonably say that punk only hit the public radar in around 1976-7 by which time Prog Rock had already run its course, punk didn’t kill it, merely jumped on the grave.
That explains the continued heavy sales of bands like Rush, Pink Floyd, and Yes despite the conspicuous lack of airplay compared to classic rock bands like the Rolling Stones, ZZ Top, Aerosmith, Ted Nugent, etc.
Sorry critics, perhaps the record buying public buys the output of certain artists for years because it appeals to them. Could it be quality? (not talking about flash-in-the-pan/newest-big-thing stardom the critics are so fetishistically fond of)
Heh, good one. Actually, I recall TTD bringing out an album a few years ago, but what I heard from it was utter tripe. Still, Introducing the Heartline… sounds crisp to this day, even though it is 15 years old (dammit, has it been 15 years??).
But I’m with you. Prog rock never sustained momentum because of good press - it sustained momentum because of a large and loyal fan base, pretentious press snobs be damned.
I, too, am new to the term “art rock”, and would describe the music listed by the OP as prog rock, or symphonic rock. Different cultures, I suppose.
Y’know, experimentation and prog aren’t synonomous. When Radiohead experiment, it’s with purpose and without the wank propogated by Yes et al. And the King Crimson comment is just wrong… there is no resemblance.
check out “Lizard”. Has the brass, and much else in a Very similar vein. Many people who make comments about Crimson have only experienced one incarnation of it, not realizing the profound dissimilarity between (for instance) the Belew/'80s KC to the Wetton/'mid’70s KC to the totally differant sound from even earlier on such albums as “Islands” and “Lizard”.
It’s impossible to sum up an entire decade in one short sentence - it’s much too long a period of time. There was alot (some might argue too much) “art rock” being played - just not exclusively. The early 70’s was an entire mish-mash of genres. I’ve heard alot of tapes & read quite a few playlists from that long gone era. I wasn’t old enough to recall any of it first hand, but I’d sum it up as follows:
FM “Rock” Radio emerged in the late 1960s. Prior to that time, FM radio was limited to a few Adult Contemporary & Classical Music stations - with alot of dead air thown in for good measure. In NYC, the premier Progressive, Free-Form station was WNEW-FM. In late 1967 - Metromedia decided to do a format change: from an A/C “Women Only” station to (for lack of a better term) Progressive Rock. On an October evening, a new on-air personality named Rosco (later on Disco 92) opened his show as follows:
Wanna take a mind excursion? The hippest of all trips. The return to reality. Join me, Rosco, in Metromedia stereo - on 102.7, WNEW-FM.
Where he then proceeded to play Richie Haven’s “High Flying Bird” from the ‘Mixed Bag’ album.
Things got more “progressive” and more experimental over the next few years. There were no playlists or Program Directors / Media Consultants in the conventional sense. The people who spun the music spun what they wanted to play - Billboard charts be damned. Personalities like Jonathan Schwartz, Alison Steele, Dennis Elsas, Pete Fornatale, et al. did play alot of of what you define as art rock. Yes, King Crimson, Atomic Rooster, Circus Maximus, Procol Harum, The Nice, Gentle Giant, The Move, Rotary Connection - followed by Jethro Tull, ELP, Genesis, Roxy Music, Pink Floyd, Alan Parsons, pre-PONR Kansas, etc.
As FM free-form rock radio became more and more popular, stations like WOR-FM, WABC-FM (later PLJ) and WNEW-FM began changing. By the mid-1970’s they were all referred to as AOR (Album-Oriented Rock) stations. Formats became more ‘canned’. They odds of hearing ‘21st Century Schitzoid Man’, ‘Long Gone Geek’ or ‘Echoes’ fell considerably. Glam Rock was now in vogue followed by Arena Rock. Playlists still included Progressive bands, but room was made for acts like Bowie, Bad Company & The (yuch) Eagles. By 1975 free-form was dead.
Even in the early 80’s, when I started listening to FM radio in NYC, I remember things differently. I guess it depends on how you define “Heavy Rotation”.
I heard the following ELP cuts quite often:
From The Beginning,
Hoedown,
Fanfare For The Common Man (LP version),
Karn Evil 9, and
Still…You Turn Me On
As well as Peter Gunn & Pirates every once in a while.
Pre-90125 Yes received even more regular airplay:
Starship Trooper,
And You And I,
Long Distance Runaround,
Perpetual Change,
America,
The Fish,
Yours Is No Disgrace, and
Heart Of The Sunrise.
With the exception of “The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway” I’ll concede there wasn’t too much Gabriel-era Genesis to be found.
I can’t cite it here, but a review of WNEW-FM’s top 1027 of all-time that was played 7/1982 has many, many tracks from progressive bands.
I’ve never heard the theory that punk rock was solely the answer or anti-thesis to Art Rock. I don’t know what the scene was in the UK at the time of Punk’s birth, but I always worked under the assumption Punk was born out of the entire music scene: Disco, Arena Rock (like Boston), the left over Hippies (Jerry Garcia & Company), Progressive (Pink Floyd) and Commercial acts (like Elton John & Fleetwood Mac). Punk died a quick, painless death in 1977. Though you might consider Blondies first 2 LP’s & bands like the Ramones New York Punk - but I don’t think it much resembled the British Punk of the Pistols, the Damned or early Stranglers. Punk got glossy and quickly evolved into new-wave (borrowing it’s rhythm from Disco). Hardcore British Punk’s descendants on this side of the pond are more closely related to the Dead Kennedys and other hardcore bands - not the more slick NYC Punk/No-Wave bands that played CBGB & OMFUG’s at the close of the decade.
Even though I’m guilty of it too, I think it would things would be alot more dynamic if the Critics, Radio Stations, Record Labels and public got away from categorizing and pigeon-holing of music by genre. But who am I to argue? Until I move offshore and set up a pirate radio station, I guess I have no right to complain.
Sidenotes:
Vin Scelsa’s Idiot’s delight (streamed) on WFUV 90.7FM (Fordham U, NYC) is probably the last free-form radio format in existance.
Mike Agranoff’s folk epic, entitled “Ballad of the Sandman” pretty much sums up the demise of FM radio
