ah yes, remember White Bird....
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Carly Simon is classic rock?
- Thread starter vchimpanzee
- Start date
WBCY called itself Charlotte's Best Rock and they played her and some other women who I wouldn't think of as rockers. The playlist seemed like Top 40 to me and there wasn't a Top 40 FM at the time. It may be WBCY didn't play R&B or disco. Broadcasting Yearbook called it AOR, while the real album Rocker, WROQ, was listed as "adult rock".
Not sure what you're objecting to. Radio makes the cookie cutter formats. Listeners don't care about format names. They either like a song & artist or they don't. Many FM album rock stations in the early 70s were eclectic. Jocks knew about "mood and feel".
A wide of artists from Jackson Browne, Traffic, Hendrix, and countless others I could name existed on the same station. To some people Carly Simon had a few Rock Classics. Consultants may not call it Classic Rock, but who cares? This music is 50 years old and many people still listen to it...
Not objecting to anything. The question was asking whether Carly Simon' music could be considered Rock. I simply answered no, I don't believe it is. When other's kept trying to unsuccessfully make the case it is, I responded with a 'still no'.
That's such a BS statement. Radio plays music people that make up the largest audience wants to hear. You call it cookie cutter because as a listener, you don't understand how the process works.
Then why do stations identify their programming with a name or slogan?
Who's they? Listener's? So you're speaking on behalf of millions of radio listener's every day? Think about your comment for a second.
More BS. FM AOR stations during the 70's were running computer generated playlists, or some sort of music rotation.
No they didn't, because radio stations didn't allow them to pick music, other than an occasional slot. Music listeners had all but fled music on AM. Nobody in their right mind, at least who wanted to be successful, would allow their airstaff to decide the sound of a station.
Sure they might. But, they would be wrong.
You just called it 'cookie cutter'. Which is it?
LOL, Kelly A! How can we make people understand??!! Okay, how about this take: what qualified as Rock in the 70s might not have transformed/morphed into what many people think of as Classic Rock today. Don't get me wrong, nobody does it better than Carly Simon, but IMHO, she doesn't blend in well with Led Zeppelin, Pink Floyd, Lynard Skynard and the Who.
Conversely, a lot of songs that were considered Rock in the 70s now show up on AC and Adult Hits stations. Boston's "More Than a Feeling" and "Renegade" by Styx are songs that, with the passage of time, don't seem as hard as they once did. Just my two cents.
Much of what you said is wrong. I worked at stations and had quite of bit of freedom with the playlist. Programming hired people they could trust. You may not believe it, but it was true. Many of the FM album rock stations I worked at were in Top 30 markets. Even in the 90s, some of us still had some input on programming. Yeah, that era may be gone--but it did happen. Radio faces many challenges now, but much of their misery is self inflicted incompetence. When listeners(and owners) are no longer passionate about the product, growth is impossible...
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When Lee Abrams came up with Superstars around 1972, he moved from North Carolina and one station to a consultancy that did about 100 AOR stations. They mostly destroyed the briefly successful Progressive Rockers of the very late 60's and first years of the 70's.
Superstars stations had controlled playlists, rotations and cut out the deep album cuts; while sold to listeners as "album rock" it was really almost Top 40 rock songs.
But the vast, vast majority of successful rock stations followed researched playlists, firm rotations and music logs. While there were a number of broader stations, those were AAA formatted, and those began disappearing 35 to 40 years ago. In a few markets, like Portland, Denver and Chicago, they have endured, the listeners now are mostly in their 60's.
As BigA has commented multiple times, the labels lost their focus on rock, and that has significantly enhanced the fragmentation of the overall genre.
Beyond the labels, we have the youngest two generations that have a vast majority interest in rhythmic music, not rock. So, without label support and the aging of the core listeners, this is becoming a geezer format.
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Really? So the challenges don't include increasing competition from other 'digital' sources? I can tell you're for whatever reason bitter about radio, but you seem to have lost perspective with that sort of comment.
Listener's are selfish. And I don't mean that in a pejorative sense. They consume the media that's convenient for them. Back in the day you seem to be stuck in; that was tuning in the local radio station and format(s) of choice. Now there are smartphones which not only serve up hundreds of audio or video choices, but games, navigation, textual communications with friends, E-mail, creating your own playlists, podcasts, and even live video chat, all in the palm of their hand. You don't think that's stiff competition for traditional radio?
Radio is one way 'broadcasting', and is still around. To assume that people are going to just dump their smartphones and go back to carrying around a portable radio because somehow jocks will be allowed to play their own music, lacks an understanding of media today.
From people I knew and/or visited some of the early AOR stations were quite loose. They all eventually tightened up or dropped the format. Even KZEW (The Zoo 98 FM) in Dallas had left some discretion to the jocks. Sure, there was a music rotation/music wheel and fixed very defined breaks but jocks could build sets by category per the music wheel, choosing songs. Another FM, KAMC, encouraged jocks to build sets by theme or sound. Actually that was tougher because the PD required a balanced sound with some attention to the week's list of most popular tracks. Outside that short list of most popular, a jock could not repeat a song twice in a week. I was a kid when I visited but my goal was to get the skinny on how to imitate the station at home as if I was on that station. So I asked the far from unusual questions and I took notes. I usually had to talk about my part 15 to get them to open up..
Any mention of rock gets the geezers going, doesn't it? Pretty much tells you who cares about the genre these days. Raging against the dying of the light, I beileve it's called.
And my take too. The reality in the day was; AOR stations now considered to be 'classic rock' couldn't get away with playing down-tempo female artists. Whereas I'm sure there were rare exceptions in small markets, your point about maintaining proper flow to prevent shock and tune-out would prevent an AOR station in the day from playing a Carly Simon song in the same quarter hour as Zeppelin, Aerosmith, or Who. Carly Simon was relegated to Top 40 stations in the day, which is fine.
Yet, Classic Rock stations continue to fare very well in the ratings and attract good numbers in younger demos (in a lot of markets). This is new music in some cases to the younger crowd; for a 57 year old geezer like myself, it’s about the music and the era.
Carly Simon and others in that genre were played in the early FM Rock (Progressive days); those stations had a loyal, but small core. Once the stations morphed into AOR (or a competing station did), the ratings climbed. The fact that a lot of good music was being released also helped the AOR format greatly. The core artists of that time frame (Zeppelin, Skynyrd, Van Halen, AC/DC) are now the core of Classic Rock. The arena rock bands and harder rock bands were popular with the “new generation rocker”: as a result, the Carly Simon, Joni Mitchell, Harry Chapin sound wound up being removed from the playlists.
Carly Simon and others in that genre were played in the early FM Rock (Progressive days); those stations had a loyal, but small core. Once the stations morphed into AOR (or a competing station did), the ratings climbed. The fact that a lot of good music was being released also helped the AOR format greatly. The core artists of that time frame (Zeppelin, Skynyrd, Van Halen, AC/DC) are now the core of Classic Rock. The arena rock bands and harder rock bands were popular with the “new generation rocker”: as a result, the Carly Simon, Joni Mitchell, Harry Chapin sound wound up being removed from the playlists.
"Good numbers" is a relative term. For those who have access to radio in their mom's minivan, classic rock is probably their preferred option. Not sure in total what the trends are for Gen-Z or younger going out of their way to seek-out classic rock formats on radio.
As has been discussed here; classic rock now commonly covers decades into the 90's and early 2,000's. Even Gen-Z remember some of that music from the days in their car seat holding a sippy cup.
This.
There's a lot of selective memory about what the album rock stations of the 1970s sounded like---and most of that impression is actually what album rock stations sounded like from about 1977 onward.
Y'know where I first found out that Joni Mitchell's "Hissing of Summer Lawns" came out? When I heard cuts from it on KMET and KLOS.
Just yesterday, I listened to an aircheck of Bob Coburn on KGB-FM in the summer of 1975 that begins with him talking about how "that Janis Ian thing" blew him away. It was "At Seventeen"---weeks ahead of Top 40 and Adult Contemporary airplay.
As far as Carly---absolutely. Album rock stations in major and other markets played the debut album, "Anticipation" and "No Secrets" (the album with "You're So Vain").
If I'd gone purely on memory, I'd have guessed that's where Carly faded out of album rock play, but the archives of R&R show "Hotcakes" did well for her there, too---and the album I absolutely would not have considered to be right for the format---1975's "Playing Possum"---it was #5 on the R&R Album Airplay 30 the week of May 2, 1975. Scroll to page 16:
In fact, the transformation took a while. Here's a page from the April 27, 1979 R&R in which Lee Abrams talks about dropping "fringe pop" artists like Linda Ronstadt and Billy Joel to "concentrate on the heavy rockers":
That's Abrams not only reading his stations' listeners but using that intuition to push acts and music he liked. In his XM days, the playlist of Deep Tracks had what seemed to be every song Yes ever put out, and Lee was always proud of his role in pushing and popularizing that band. I was in the Little Rock area when it got its first fulltime AOR station, KLPQ, in the late '70s, and still remember hearing Yes, EL&P, Alan Parsons Project, etc. excessively -- only a few tracks by each, of course.
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