We turn now to the topic of Classic Rock, it's always been there right?
Well, it turns out classic rock was in many ways a kind of radio creation.
in a minute, we'll talk about as being developed in the
1980s through radio consultants and spreading as a radio kind of format.
But let's talk a little bit about what was
happening in the 1990s, in the 1980s and 90s that
really sort of prepare the way for what we might call the sort of creation of
rock history in many ways. one of the most important events of the
1980s is the, the, the transfer of, or the changeover in technology
from analog recordings cassette tapes and, and vinyl records to CD.
this starts to happen in late 1982
as the two big companies, Sony and Philips, sort of
combine forces to develop CD technology and to standardize it.
You know, the original claims that were made about
CDs is it was the tremendous improvement in audio quality.
When you listen to a CD, you are getting the very best quality, something
that, with an analog system, you'd have to pay lots and lots of money for.
With a simple CD
player, you can get all of that kind of fidelity.
It's digital, so the information never wears out or wears down, you know?
Actual vinyl records do kind of wear out.
You can wear a record out and it starts to sound
not as good after you've played it a bunch of times.
and the idea was that CDs are forever.
They're prefect, they're digital it's all good.
So what they started to do is they started to try to
talk consumers into rebuying all the music they already had on record
on CD.
And well, you wouldn't think that kind of thing worked, but actually it did.
And people did start to buy the the records again on CD.
Because not only were they, you know,
supposed to be released with better audio quality.
But they very quickly found out that if you just added a
couple a bonus tracks, things that people didn't already have on a CD.
Heck, get them to buy the whole record all over again and at twice the price.
A pretty sweet
deal for the record companies and during the 80s, once they got this, this
CD transition going into the 90s, they were making tons and tons of money.
It was a real boom for them, this, this transfer to CD.
And what also became a time when people began to
realize that they could sell tremendous amount of back catalog.
That is, stuff that had already been recorded years ago, the
cost on it had already been covered so now it was almost
entirely pure profit, but we had to repackage it in someway.
We talked about bonus tracks with CDs, but then, these boxed sets started coming up.
Well, boxed sets in classical music had been
the norm back when they were when people
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using records, even when they're going back to the first,
the original records, '78 albums were kind of a boxed set.
The idea of putting a bunch of music together, but
here, you, you not only give people a bunch of
music that they already like, but you give them some
stuff that they haven't heard before previously unreleased or bonus tracks.
And you give them a little booklet that kind of explains all
the sort of context around it, give them important recording dates and personal.
And make it look very much like, kind of a
musicology, a kind of a pop musicology to give people a
kind of almost a kind of a scholarly interest in this music.
And so, in the, in the late 80s into the 90s, you get this explosion as part of the
CD boom of, of a lot of material that really is sort of historically based.
Almost like sort of collectors or archivists as we sort of
pulled together these, these boxed sets and theses, these news CDs
with extensive notes, you know, and and bonus tracks.
At that the same time that's happening, oh, by the way, with regard to CD reissues
one thing record companies didn't plan on was the technology of digitizing a tune.
That worked great for them during the 90s when they could get people
to pay 16.99 because there was one song on the CD they wanted.
But by the end of the decade, the beginning of the 21st century,
when, when Napster came along and figured out a way
to take those digital files and share them on the internet.
The gang was almost up right from the get go.
The, the idea of sharing mp3s on the internet
quickly has seriously eroded the status of the music business.
But that's a story for another day.
So while all this CD reissuing was going on there was some radio formatting and
consulting going on.
Now, radio consultants were, were nothing new.
Top 40 was, was organized by radio consultants who worked nationally.
In other words, they would go to a station
and say, here's a format, here are the songs
you should play, here's how you should do it,
this is what will get you the maximum audience.
Of course, if you're able to get the maximum audience, you can
charge more for your advertising, so,
that's really what commercial radio is about.
Selling your advertising.
They're giving you the music to keep you listening,
so you can, so you can hear the ads.
a guy at the end of the 1970 who's very famous for, for sort of
establishing the, the FM radio playlist
as the guy with the name of Lee Abrams. but the classic rock
format is a developed by a fellow named Fred Jacobs in the mid-1980s.
The first classic rock station goes on the air in Lansing, Michigan in 1985,
but by the end of the 80s, it's a securely established radio format and
every town has got at least one classic rock stations, if not maybe two or three.
What classic rock does, because it gives you the impression that you're
listening to radio back in the 70s, back in the heyday, right?
Except that all of the songs that are played probably still have to be only four
minutes long.
And they're really picking and choosing just those things
that they think people will continue listening to it.
Because, remember, the whole idea of
having a format is keeping people listening.
So well, some stations have tried to develop
a kind of a deep tracks format, where they've,
you know, tried to include other kinds of things
that you might have heard back in the 70s.
but, the most successful approach for a long time
was really to do almost a kind of a classic
rock top 40 radio, giving you the
impression you were back in the 70s listening
to radio, but actually with playlist, it probably
never really existed that way in the 1970s.
What it did, is that, together with the CD reissue thing, it made people think
about rock ready in terms of, think about rock music in terms of its history.
In terms of the way in which groups sort of become kind of, as we say, canonized.
Songs became canonic, they were the ones that sort
of represented the repertory of late 60s, 70s, and early 80s' rock and roll.
In addition to that, we get the emergence
of the first really important, or commercial, rockumentaries.
Rockumenatries had been done, certain, certainly going all the way back to the,
the the documentary of Bob Dylan or The Band's, The Last Waltz.
We can think of a number of ones.
But what really starts to happen is on
MTV and VH-1, they become the leading proponents of
certain kinds of, of, of programming that really
sort of lends itself to sort of historical interest.
So for example, on VH-1 in 1996, you get the debut of, of Pop-Up Videos.
So you're watching a video, probably a video you've seen a million
times, but there are all these little sort of facts popping up.
Some of them are really interesting fact, some of them are just silly and
they're really, they're for your amusement.
But you can, they can become rather addicting
because it's kind of a fun thing to
watch as even music that you don't very
much like by artists you don't care very much.
The Pop-Up Video for it is actually kind of cool and fun.
other shows that are, that are released in 1997
that play a big role, Behind the Music and
Legends, both of them sort of devoted to kind
of of quasihistorical surveys of an individual artist and
their career.
interestingly if you look at a bunch of
these, you begin to see certain patterns emerge.
One of them is that, no matter how many times you watch
Behind the Music or Legends, hardly any of the music by the
artist they're talking about is ever included, because of course, that would
need to be licensed and that makes it more expensive to produce.
So here they are, talking about the career of
an artist, and hardly playing any of their music.
Another thing is that every one of them follows a kind of a predictable rags to
riches kind of story, you know, early
beginnings, rise to fame, first success, tragedy strikes.
Where are they now?
The story is almost always the same in these things.
Is that because everybody's career moves by the same?
No, but it's a kind of story we like to hear.
And remember, these things are
historically flavored entertainment, not really history.
But to that end, they get people interested
in history, interested in learning a lot more.
They develop
a real sort of sense of rock history.
in 1995, both, there's, there, there are, there are two big
sort of multi-video sets that are released about the history of rock.
One from Time-Life and one from PBS, each of them ten episodes of
roughly about an hour at least, that survey the entire history of rock music.
Those are for people now who are really starting
to get interested in the history of rock music.
And then, you get in 1995, late 1995, the
release of the Beatles Anthology, first on commericial TV.
There was this a multi-evening special showing at the end
of 1995, and then on a much expanded sort of videos.
you get the history of the Beatles told by the Beatles themselves.
You see, by the end, by the second half of the
1990s, all kinds of forces are conspiring together to create this sense
that rock has a history.
It's an important and interesting history, and here are various kinds of things you
can buy or shows you can watch that can get you involved in this.
And to a certain extent, university courses start to pop up all
over the place, because now, this all seems a lot more legitimate.
And well, here we are on Coursera talking about
the history of rock music in many ways as
a kind of a consequence of some of these
things that were happening through the rise of classic rock
radio and the rise of this kind of
rockumentary rock history kind of mentality in the 1990s.
I would be remiss if I didn't mention the
establishment of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.
Now, the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame is established already back in 1983.
But the actual building in Cleveland opens in 1995 the same
year as the Beetle's Anthology is released, the PBS and Time-Life
series are released.
And the next year, Pop-Up Videos start, and the next
year after that, 1997, Behind the Music and Legends start.
So you see, it all kind of comes together.
By the year 2000, in Seattle, the
Experience Music Project opens, and we've got two
big museums, and all of the stuff going on celebrating the history of rock music.
Well, it wasn't just that rock's history was available in
all the kind of ways that I've been talking about.
But older musicians were still popular in the 1990s.
That is, they didn't just go away, or stop being in the music business, or open up
an insurance business, or a car dealership, or
something like that after they'd been in the limelight.
No, a lot of these musicians not only stayed in
the music business but continued to have pretty good success.
So here's a quick list of some from the 1960s,
you of course got the Beatles returning with two new songs
used by creating old tracks that had been recorded by John Lennon then adding the
Beatle, the other three Beatles on. Free as a Bird and Real Love in 1995 1996.
we've got the Rolling Stones having a big album in 1994 with Voodoo Lounge,
I mean I'm talking number two on the pop charts, number one in the UK.
Eric Clapton's Unplugged album from 1992 a number
two album here, number two in the UK
with a big single on it, Tears in Heaven.
so Clapton, the Stones, the Beatles, all still on the charts in the 1990s.
From the 1970s, you've got Peter Gabriel.
His album from 1992, Us, goes to number two on both sides of the Atlantic.
Santana is back with an album called, Supernatural,
number one on both sides of the Atlantic.
And that song Smooth, a number one
hit, featuring Rob Thomas from Matchbooks Twenty, Matchbox
Twenty on lead vocals.
We'll talk about them in just a little bit.
So you've got artists from the 60s, artists from the 70s
who are having success in the 90s, artists from the 80s.
Sting with Ten Summoner's Tales in 1993, Bruce Springsteen
with his Greatest Hits in 1995, number one on
both sides of the Atlantic and U2 with Zooropa,
number one on both sides of the Atlantic in 1993.
The thing is, by the mid-1990s,
every new release didn't just compete with other new releases.
They competed with other albums from the 60s, the 70s, and the 80s.
If you put a new record out, you just didn't have to
compete with the attention of other new records that were out that week.
You had to compete with this whole catalog
of rock music that was being rereleased, CD reissued.
And new artists didn't just have to compete with other new artists,
they had to compete with a whole other generation of artists for attention.
So if you're a new artist in the mid 1990s, you gotta, you gotta
compete with Paul McCartney, Eric Clapton, Peter
Gabriel, and Bruce Springsteen to get any attention.
And so, we see this kind of layering now of, of the rock public and an interest in
history and a kind of a real kind of segmenting out of rock culture.
Rock culture starts to become something that you don't just
give up after you get out of your 20's or something like that.
People hang with it throughout their lives, and including to the present
day, people are still listening to music, you are taking this course.
Listening and thinking about music from the 50s, 60s, 70s, and 80s,
all of this stuff really starts to come together in the 1990s.
So having talked about the presence of rock's
history and our awareness of rock, let's turn
now to a survey of some
groups that I call the
new rock traditions .