LOL about the MOYL, Aramondo!
I remember a conversation that a fellow jock and I had about the music we were playing -- Stones, Zeppelin, Who, et al. He and I really didn't see eye-to-eye on a lot of things. But we were in accord that what we were playing was going to be 'the next Solid Gold'.
The conversation was in 1978.
AoR was starting to become a clubhouse solely for 15-year old males at the time, with them wearing red-and-black youth colors and cheap T-shirts after concerts, and clogging up the request lines with noisy and overlong 'where are the chicks' paeans out of helpless protest at those gals who'd departed for Disco. The two of us jocks, at the doddering old age of 30 then, thought we could see the bottom falling out of the genre. It appears that even in our relative naivete we were on target. In retrspect, we'd been watching the very last of the two-gender formats collapse.
Anyway, in more recent times he and I and others also had expressed the distinct possibility that Classic Rock would close up shop and hobble off to a retirement commune in Woodstock *before* Oldies would fade. After all, Oldies had some 16 years of legitimate juke box songs to use as a substantial sonic base -- roughly 1958-1973 -- while Classic Rock had about half that tenure. And there cannot be enough new Tom Petty and AC/DC product to keep things at Classic Rock afloat for long anymore.
And, Classic Rock had far fewer years worth of material than Oldies had from which to stick themselves to a permanent 300-song list. The soft-rock stations seem to be updating themselves with far more grace.
But your MOYL line still has me chuckling. Heck -- Pat Boone's cabaret version of 'Stairway To Heaven' itself is fifteen years old! One day his version might be the 'In The Mood' of the next Beautiful Rock format.
