As someone said back then, “The 60s had the Beatles and hippies and Woodstock and Hendrix… and all we get for the 70s is a 50s revival!”
Beats disco.
The DFW classic rock station 92.5 KZPS has been a fixture here for, shit, decades now? They play the usual Rolling Stones, Pink Floyd, Led Zeppelin, Tom Petty, etc. mentioned in this thread.
Damn near had to pull over the first time they played Nirvana, about a year or so ago. The hell? That’s not classic rock, that’s stuff from … well, lessee here counts on fingers Kurt Cobain died when I was in high school, and that was, what, 5 years ago?
… more?
Wanna feel older? KRTH 101 has been an oldies station in Los Angeles for as long as I can remember. In high school (late 70s-early 80s) they were the Elvis/Beach Boys station. When my kids were in middle school, they called it the Michael Jackson station.
Recently I heard KRTH playing “Seven Nation Army” - WTF? That’s a recent song, it came out just …uh… 16 years ago? :eek: To my son starting his senior year of high school, that’s older than Sgt. Pepper was when I started my senior year, and that album was old, man!
I think it is generally agreed that Rudy Vallee was the first “teen heartthrob” singing star, some 30 years earlier.
Per Wikipedia: “He was one of the first modern pop stars of the teen idol type.”
I know. I came to the realization a while back that me listening to 1990s music today is now equivalent to someone listening to The Beatles when I was a kid.
A few years ago, I saw a teenaged couple sitting together at a Culvers restaurant. They were probably 15 years old or so – the boy was wearing a Led Zeppelin t-shirt, and the girl was wearing a Bob Marley t-shirt.
My first thought was “That’s cool, they’re into old-school music.” And, then, I started thinking – they were wearing t-shirts for artists whose prime had been 35 or 40 years prior. When I was their age, it was 1980, and for me to have been wearing a t-shirt for an equivalently-vintage music act, it would have been for someone like Benny Goodman or Les Paul. :eek:
And being into the Beatles is time-equivalent to being into ragtime in the 60s.
A Les Paul t-shirt actually sounds cool now.
As for the thread topic, I mentioned this in an earlier post that somehow disappeared into the ether but I use the term “classic rock” with a bit of reluctance and disdain because it was created by radio programmers in the late 80s rather than developing organically.
1977
Fair enough. I was sorta going for the idea that with the advent of Sinatra and the resultant targeting of music specifically to kids, that rock and roll was made possible economically. The record companies learned they could market to kids. Not that someone else wouldn’t have come along if Sinatra hadn’t.
The recording technology in Vallee’s day wasn’t really advanced enough to allow for segmented marketing. When singing to crowds, Vallee used an unpowered megaphone.