THE UNFORTUNATE AUTHORITY ON FIGHTING AUTHORITY

I think it’s generally accepted that there are more than a few classic rock tunes. From Chuck Berry’s “Maybelline” (1955) through the Sonics’ “Strychnine” (1965), the Dictators’ “(I Live For) Cars and Girls” (1975), Sonic Youth’s “Death Valley ’69” (1985), Bikini Kill’s “I Like Fucking” (1995), and onward, there are a lot of truly classic rock songs. It is nothing less than a perversion of our mother tongue that none of the aforementioned tunes can legally be referred to as classic rock in the way the term has come to be used.

The reason for this can be pinned almost entirely on a guy who resembles Bilbo Baggins’ favorite doughnut vendor—a pseudo-hip ass-hat named Lee Abrams. Still lurking around the corridors of power somewhere, Abrams was the turd who winkled out how radio stations might earn a few more bucks by making their DJs work from an approved playlist with minimal talking. This actually began happening in the mid-’70s, more or less destroying the “free form” format then available from a hip FM station or two in almost every major metro area (as well as more than a few in the boonies). Regarding this loose arrangement—which allowed music freaks to spin great records only they knew existed—Lee moped that it was just “some guy in a basement in Brooklyn, burning incense and playing whatever he pleased.’’ Yeah, okay. What’s the fucking problem? Apart from the incense.

Abrams was basically a numbers guy. And his obsession with data about music rather than music itself became the driving force in radio programming. His basic theory held that unfamiliar songs made listeners less susceptible to advertisers. To combat this, even album-oriented music shows must avoid weird, long, or savage content at all costs. His various format inventions, “Superstars Radio’’ and “Classic Rock” among them, allowed this ratfucker to put commercial FM radio in a headlock as ruinously tight as George “The Animal” Steele’s. And he subsequently helped the same rigid noose onto the unsuspecting neck of satellite radio. If you wanna hear the same 500 songs on infinite repeat for the remainder of your natural life, Lee Abrams is your man.

Classic rock as a designated format fully flowered during the 1980s, when the ripples of punk and hiphop began to be felt outside their respective ghettos. Abrams’ soul-sapping “innovation” was to present a bland blend of the most popular long-haired white-dude music, recorded from the mid-’60s through the late '70s, as long as it had been created in the U.S. or U.K. and released by a major label. While there were plenty of great tunes tucked in amongst the dross being passed off as the authoritative list of rock music’s high points, the inability of DJs to follow their own instincts of what would sound cool meant that even good songs lost their sheen by dint of endless repetition. The dullness of Abrams’ conceit is about as appealing as the thought of attending one of Jann Wenner’s Glee marathon viewing parties.

I’m not suggesting there are no boss classic rock tunes. Each of us surely has a bunch of songs whose opening chords transport us to another time, place, and universe. But if that song is Supertramp’s “Breakfast in America” or Foreigner’s “Waiting for a Girl Like You,” I believe you need professional help.

Surely one of the great pleasures of listening to music is hearing new stuff. Or hearing a relatively obscure tune in a place you don’t expect it. I still remember the electric charge I got from the yearbook montage sequence of Wes Anderson’s film Rushmore. When the music started, my brain immediately tagged it as the Who, but I couldn’t figure out what tune from Happy Jack or Sell Out it might be. Then Kenny Pickett’s vocals kicked in and I realized (incredulously) it was the Creation—a band whose profile in the U.S. was sub-Lilliputian, but whose best songs are classic slabs of freakbeat at its finest. And yeah, “I Can See for Miles” would have sounded great too, but hearing something more obscure provided a rush with a more serious kick. When you encounter something great and unknown, it toggles your hunter-gatherer instinct. It makes you feel like it’s important to discover what the hell is playing. It’s a whole mother experience than sucking on the teat-of-the-known.

Abrams was in the lead of the generation of radio consultants who also balkanized the airwaves. Music by Black artists (unless they were named Jimi) generally got segregated out of rock altogether into urban subcategories, no matter what they sounded like. I mean, listen to the Isley Brothers’ live version of “Ohio/Machine Gun” or Funkadelic’s “Maggot Brain” and tell me they are not classic rock tracks. Meanwhile, women were more or less erased from the space-time continuum unless they were Joan Jett or one of the Wilson sisters (who are, of course, great, but not the anomalies the format implies they are). In a similar way, anything that had anything to do with punk got branded alternative no matter what it sounded like. If you can explain to me how a song like the Heartbreakers’ “Chinese Rocks” doesn’t absolutely exhibit the qualities inferred by the genre’s name, I will personally squeegee your car’s windshield for a full calendar year.

Depending on where and when you mark its birth, rock is a musical genre now in its sixth or seventh decade. For people with deep knowledge of the music, there is a well-developed sense that despite the many style evolutions rock-qua-rock has gone through, there is an essential whatsis connecting the music of Eddie Cochran and Fats Domino to the latest record by Puppet Wipes or Gee Tee. At the very least, these sounds share a sense of excitement and/ or discovery, but work best when they draw out your interest, making you curious about what else these sonic shamans have got up their sleeves, in terms of both their current material as well as influences who inspired them.

I recall hanging out with guitarist Dave Alvin in the early ’80s, talking about how we each first got turned on to the blues. His story was similar to most suburban white kids I grew up with. He’d really dug the first Cream LP, and when he read the songwriting credits he started wondering who these guys were—Skip James, Muddy Waters, Willie Dixon, Robert Johnson. When he started checking them out, he was blown sideways by their raw power, and a blues hound was born. That is the way things are supposed to work. And in a healthy radio environment, these connections can be explored in an open way, rather than relegating classic rock’s forebears to celebrity-branded concentration camps.

Here’s something Lee Abrams wrote in Personal Nuggets from the Audio Attic:

THERE’D PROBABLY BE NO LED ZEPPELIN WITHOUT: Howlin Wolf, Muddy Waters, etc.... the genuine Blues giants.

At the time, I thought the original Blues versions were too loose, too organic and guys like Led Zeppelin made the songs palatable to the masses by infusing the electric British sound. In recent years, I’ve gained a whole new appreciation for the pure emotion transmitted in those early original recordings.

Gee, ya think?

Thankfully, not everything is under the thumb of this porcine dud. There are DJs like Brian Turner who play music as free as squirrels, as well as stations like Brian’s old digs, WFMU, that are fully invested in letting their staff explore music without artificial barriers. So you may well hear some bona fide classic rock artists here and there in the mix, but the experience is absolutely oppositional to the bullshit you’ll swallow on formatted stations. Even potentially great satellite stations (like Little Steven’s Underground Garage) can be a bummer when you start to notice rote repetition of “highlighted" tunes. Do they think we’re too stupid to enjoy records we haven’t already heard a jillion times? Perhaps, but there are still outposts of liberated aesthetic sanity scattered around the world, and many of them have an internet presence.

It can be easy to just accept what the cultural pigs and greedheads make most easily accessible to us. But to do so surrenders our inalienable right to kick out the motherfucking jams on our own terms. All these dicks are trying to do is force us into branded faux-hip cul-de-sacs where they can pick our pockets clean while we snooze to the watered-down musical pablum they shovel in our direction. And it really kinda sucks that they’ve been able to make the inroads they have, but it’s good to remember that even some of the cornerstone chunks of classic rock were considered underground crap by squares back in the day. And now’s as good a time as any to begin reinvestigating the multitudinous styles of actual classic rock, all smooshed together in whatever ways sound good to you. Just take it one step at a time.

As Jack Kerouac once pointed out, “Walking on water wasn’t built in a day.” Dig it.