I sure used to, but that just ain’t how music is marketed these days.
I am a firm believer that Bob Dylan’s “Pat Garret and Billy The Kid” is just one song.
In high school, my friend and I made regular expeditions to San Jose’s venerable “Underground Records” and came back with the latest new releases and occasional bootlegs. His parents were pretty cool so we got to listen to the new albums in their living room on his dad’s nice Heathkit system. We usually flipped a coin to see who got to listen side one with his Koss Pro4AA headphones.
In college I shared a house with a couple of other guys; one of the first things we did on payday was buy a new album or two or three. On weekends the place was party central and it was like one long listening party.
I didn’t really get into this until CDs were introduced. Sure we listened to a few vinyl albums in the day, but when CDs came into play in the mid-80s we would spend evenings listening to what suddenly became available.
We had a lot of drunken nights being mesmerized by:
Pink Floyd
Led Zeppelin
The Doors
The Who
Deep Purple
The Moody Blues
Crosby, Stills and Nash
Neil Young
Lynyrd Skynyrd
Stevie Ray Vaughn
etc.
We did it all the time, back in the '60s . . . especially when a new Beatles album came out.
We did this a lot in the 80s.
I’m happy that the music industry has moved back to a singles format.
I grew up during the “golden era” of record albums 1966-1986. Most artists are not talented enough to fill a 45 minute platter. You’ll notice that bands quickly retreated from trying to fill the 75 minutes available on early CDs. Now they might pad a “deluxe edition” with demos and live tracks and even then rarely make seventy minutes.
However, I’m saddened that people no longer share music. There is very little new music on car radios for the occupants to share in, and it’s all mechanized playlists anyway so there’s little local flavor and personality. I assume that college dorms are still filled with kids playing the stereo full blast and annoying everyone on the floor. I hope so. But maybe everyone’s moved off-campus into more private quarters.
I saw that someone said his friends didn’t like his music. I didn’t like a lot of my friend’s music either. But I heard it enough that I developed a tolerance for most of it and grew to like some of the rest. Being forced to share in someone else’s reality expanded my world and taught me about new things.
Growing up with Top 40 radio, I was exposed to jazz, soul, country, pop and rock all at the same time. My impression of today’s music is that it’s broken up into cliques and there’s little overlap. I remember when MTV had music, it eventually was broken up into shows for different audiences instead of throwing it all out there to learn from.
This tight categorization has hurt current music in my opinion. Bands often sound the same because they all listen to the same records, surf the same websites for new releases, watch the same videos. In the 60s, rock bands borrowed from Indian ragas, surf music, jazz, vaudeville, classical and Magyar trance music. These days, if a heavy metal band invokes a Middle-Eastern melody it’s because they got it from Led Zeppelin, not a Moroccan bazaar.
But then, I’m an old fart and all new music sounds the same and equally bad. As it should. Better rap than retreads of the Rolling Stones.
Fortunately, there are a few artists with enough good ideas to fill a CD with good songs. But yes, too many bands have only a few really good ideas. I suppose I’m biased because I’m a big Todd Rundgren fan, but his 2004 album Liars which clocked in a 73:24 doesn’t have one bad song on it, or a single song that I’d skip.
Sad, but true. I’m 52 and my wife is a few years older than me, and she remembers just how wildly diverse the top 40 playlist was.
One of the things I do is shoot concert video. I shoot established musicians and bands, but my bread and butter is the School of Rock. I’m coming up on my 70th School of Rock show. The School is for kids between the ages of 7 and 18, and I’ve found the opposite is true - these kids are musical sponges. They learn the music of the shows they are going to be doing (the next show I’ll shoot is Stax vs Motown, followed by Nirvana then Wilco) but they’ll explore other stuff.
I can’t find a link to it, but I read a really great music column by this grizzled old writer. He attended a relative’s wedding, and had one of the most interesting and wide-ranging conversations about music in a very long career - with a 16 year old cousin. This kid had heard all the important music of his own generation, as well as the writer’s and everything in between. And had explored the roots of a lot of it. He knew the Stones catalog, and the people they cited as influences.
He wound up realizing that his formative musical years were fairly impoverished. Buying an album, or even singles, consumed every spare piece of change he could get his hands on, so he either had to have some idea he’d like it, or be willing to gamble a substantial portion of his disposable income. The kid, on the other hand, had so many ways to discover music, that he could and did.
I don’t think the sameness of current songs on radio is a failure of the imagination of the current generation of musicians. The failure is one of imagination on the part of record company executives. Frank Zappa gave an interview where he made the case that things were better in the 60s because the record company guys didn’t have a clue about music, that they’d release almost anything because they didn’t know what would sell.
So there is plenty of new music being produced that is not cliche’d crap, but you have to look around for it. The good part is that there are all sorts of tools that can help you. For all the crap people give MySpace, it was a great tool for discovering new music.
I’ll give you a for instance: My wife clicked on somebody’s MySpace page, and saw an interesting link “The Reverend Peyton’s Big Damn Band”. She followed it, and heard their song Plainfield Blues. We saw that they were going to be playing a Chicago club in a couple of days. They put on an amazing show, and we became friends, and have followed their career ever since. They are playing 1940s style country blues…and were voted “Best Band” on the freaking Van’s Warped Tour. The average age of a Warped Tour audience member is 17. They are playing Charlie Patton type blues to an audience of teens!
So I’m confident that, should you wish to look, you’ll find any sort of music being produced today, influenced by music of every style and period. But you can’t expect the industry to deliver it to you.
Sure, in that strange time period from about age 17-19 before I was old enough to go to bars. Usually Genesis, Rush, Beatles, Stones, Yes, Who, Boston, typical classic rock stuff. This was in the late 1980s.
Since I bought my first album when I was 8 years old, I have done this. All thru high school, all thru college, and still do (whenever Blue Elk or someone cares to come over and listen).
When I get CDs from Zia or Amazon, I always sit down and listen to each album while I rip mp3s and read the liner notes. I still use the CD player in the car, partially because I like getting used to hearing a song in a certain place and partially because I think it’s important to give an artist a chance at proving they can fill up the whole stage, so to speak… if ya catch my drift… ya know what I’m sayin’? Word.
I grew up in the late 70s and early 80s.
Entire albums would be played while we were all together, but it was mostly background. We never gathered just to listen to the albums. We usually gathered to get high.
This is encouraging to me. I really like music. I’ve paid enough attention to it over the years that I know where I can move to after I’ve tired of a genre. Sixties/Seventies rock bores me. Modern rock doesn’t connect with me, nor do I think it should try to. But from Sixties British Invasion, I learned the about blues, from Seventies art-rock I learned about jazz. The singer-songwriter fad turned me on to country.
And that’s where I am today. I own three times as many rock albums as jazz & blues together, but I haven’t listened to any of them in more than than five years.
Many people lose nearly all connection to music when they hit their thirties. They remain stuck on their old favorites and don’t know a pathway to continue enjoying new music.
I don’t often agree with Zappa, but he put a lot of thought into music. He has a good point. Despite recorded music going back to at least 1878, the industry did not fully understand how to leverage it into a business. there’s a great book called How The Beatles Destroyed Rock’n’Roll that spends only a few paragraphs on the titular subject but devotes a lot of time to how the popular music industry developed, and how the various genres developed. Another, Appetite for Self-Destruction describes how the industry killed the goose that laid the '60s golden egg.
But isn’t that their job? Shouldn’t I expect them to deliver it? Instead, the internet delivers it. And that which feeds, also destroys.
I’m not looking for much “new” music now. I feel that popular music became the primary realm of the young back in the Forties and they have no obligation to speak to me directly. But I do listen to a lot of previously unknown music. Mostly period pieces from the Fifties and Sixties but there are still newer musicians of interest out there for me though. For someone who loves a wide variety of music, the web is is every Tower/Virgin/HMV record store at my fingertips for a fraction of the cost. And I don’t have to listen to the clerk’s favorite techno while I’m browsing.
The OP should never set foot in my home because he’ll be sitting and listening to full albums for at least 200 days non-stop. By which time I’ll have accumulated a few more weeks’ worth of interesting things to hear.
I do, albums. I have CDs and a music server that I can zip about on and listen to specific songs and move on. But albums are different, now. Gone are the days of slapping a crusty old Foghat down and trying to hit song 3 on a side. My vinyl rig is semi-expensive by general accounts, not by high-end audiophile accounts. I put the needle down at the start of the album, lift it off at the end, flip the album and repeat. So it’s albums at a time as long as it’s albums - CDs or digital? Phffft, mix it up.
Sure. We did that a lot. In fact, that was basically all we did (well, and smoke dope).
My best, and probably fondest, recollection of those times is from November 10, 1970. I remember the precise date because the next day, Remembrance Day in Canada, was a school holiday so we could stay out late. It also stands out because that was the night I was first introduced to the guy who would later become my closest friend.
The playlist from that most memorable evening would have included:
Hot Rats - Frank Zappa
In the Court of the Crimson King - King Crimson
Let It Bleed - The Rolling Stones
Ummagumma - Pinkfloyd
Uncle Meat - Mothers of Invention
And, without the slightest doubt, we listened to each album above (and in general) in its entirety.
I wonder what they did in the days with cylinders…or 78’s…was life actually fun back then?
No, their job is to make giant piles of money. It’s taking forever for the record business to come around on the reality of how things have changed. They still prefer to promote a tiny number of artists to sell millions than a large number to sell hundreds of thousands. Below that, the artists have figured out that they don’t really benefit much from record companies.
I wouldn’t know - the Tower and Virgin stores in Chicago closed years ago. But I’m sorry to see them gone. I met my wife at Penny Lane Records in Kansas City, and a knowledgeable record store employee was a treasure that still hasn’t been replaced.
I’m 52 and still looking for new music all the time. My side job shooting concerts helps keep me musically nimble. Two of my most recent professional shoots were country star Mark Chesnutt and the afrobeat band Hearts of Darkness. I really dug both.
Well, back then, from what I understand pretty much every family had musicians, and instruments. Musical entertainment was provided by sheet music and do-it-yourself. Pre-recorded entertainment was a luxury.