This course, part 2 of a 2-course sequence, examines the history of rock, primarily as it unfolded in the United States, from the early 1970s to the early 1990s. This course covers the music of Led Zeppelin, the Allman Brothers, Carole King, Bob Marley, the Sex Pistols, Donna Summer, Michael Jackson, Madonna, Prince, Metallica, Run-DMC, and Nirvana, and many more artists, with an emphasis both on cultural context and on the music itself. We will also explore how developments in the music business and in technology helped shape the ways in which styles developed. Emerging out of the experimental and ambitious years of late-60s psychedelia, rock splintered into a variety of styles in the 1970s as the music business continued to expand. By the end of the decade, punk and disco had challenged the excesses of the hippie aesthetic, as rock became more commercially streamlined and radio friendly. The emergence and rise of MTV transformed pop music and propelled the careers of Michael jackson and Madonna, while heavy metal and hip hop dominated the late 1980s. Nirvana leads alt-rock's return to simplicity in the early 1990s.
Country Rock
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From the course by University of Rochester
History of Rock, Part Two
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From the lesson
The Growing Rock Monster (1970-77)
A series of styles continue to develop the combinations of late-1960s psychedelia: blues-rock, southern rock, progressive rock, jazz-rock, theatrical rock, country rock, and singer-songwriters. Rock becomes increasingly ambitious. [Read Chapter 8 and work through listening guides for that chapter, viewing dedicated video.]
Meet the Instructors
John CovachProfessor of Music and Director
Institute for Popular Music
We said in our last video that we would stay in southern California and talk
about country rock. And I'll get back to southern California
after sort of fleshing out the roots of country rock before going back into a
little of what we talked about in the history of rock, part one.
The idea of blending country music together with rock and roll, at the end
of the 1960s. It really was a kind of a bold thing to
do because, culturally, in this country country music was the music of relatively
conservative, what we would today call sort of red state.
Kind of people who had no respect or regard for hippies and hippie music in
rock and roll. we often associate red state people with
country and western music and that being sort of very much sort of juxtaposed
against rock. So, when people like The Byrds went to
Nashville to record sweetheart of the rodeo in 1968.
They were really doing something that nobody had really thought of doing
before, the idea of blending together country music and country musicians with
rock musicians. And I have to say that some of the
country musicians did not were a little bit leery of these rock and rollers.
So this, this music has its, its roots in the music of The Byrds, it has its roots
in the music of The Band, if you think about the music from Big Pink which we
talked about last time, 1968. a song like The Weight or from the next
album The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down from 1969 really embrace a sense of
country Americana, sort of southern culture.
Bob Dylan does Nashville Skyline in 1969. Crosby, Stills and Nash, Young use a fair
amount of, of, of country influences, in their music from 1969.
so, when we think about the roots of this, we can see this coming from song
oriented kind of music, very, sort of, polished lead vocals.
Maybe not so polished with regard to Dylan, although he does a little bit more
real singing in Nashville Skyline then maybe in some of his other music.
rich vocal harmonies are a part of all this.
Lot of country touches, you'll find banjo popping up, steel guitar.
A lot of use of the acoustic guitar, this kind of thing.
It was in many ways this, this, this reaction among this earlier music we're
talking about, the Byrds, the band. Bob Dylan was a kind a kind of a reaction
against the excesses of psychedelic music.
It was about going back to acoustic records, acoustic sounds, going back to
sort of roots kinds of sounds, and a really embrace of Americana.
and this apparent simplicity seemed more honest to some people and more authentic.
It wasn't full of all of this what they might have seen as studio trickery.
It really just kind of got down to a singer, a song, an acoustic instrument.
And so in many ways, shared a lot of aesthetics with the singer songwriter
movement that we just got done talking about.
One important precursor to country rock who doesn't, that doesn't often get
mentioned is Creedence Clearwater Revival.
In fact its another group like a group like Three Dog Night or Grand Funk that
don't easily fit into our story about the history of rock, but nevertheless, a
group that played an important role in the formation of rock's history.
Creedence Clearwater Revival came from San Francisco.
But they were not really emblematic or representative in any way of the
psychedelia that had been going on there during the late 1960s.
John Fogerty, the lead singer and songwriter of the group, had a voice that
sounded like it was somewhere between country western music And blues, right?
And a lot of people thought that John Fogerty was a black guy because the way
that his the way that his voice sounded. So, there was a real kind of southern,
and also, sort of country approach. The country stuff comes out in, in songs
like Proud Mary from 1969 from the album Bayou Country.
Or Bad Moon Rising, from the album, Green River, also from 1969.
Or Down on the Corner from Willy and the Poor Boys.
That album, also from 1969. So when you see that, you see this sort
of embrace of the country, kind of sound. We should probably also add to this early
Linda Ronstadt music. Linda Ronstadt and the Stone Poneys.
We're kind of a pre-cursor. Especially coming up from the LA area, to
Country Rock. In fact, when we talk about Linda
Ronstadt and the Stone Ponies, it leads us to a consideration of a group, who
really, pretty much, wrapped up this Country Rock thing for the first half of
the 1970's. There was no group that was more
emblematic of Country Rock during this period, than the Eagles and they in fact,
started a couple of them. Started as backup musicians to Linda
Ronstadt, Glen Frey and Don Henley. And specially broke off from Linda
Ronstadt to form their own group in 1971. She was very supportive of them.
She was a much bigger star, at the time they were nobodies, they were just, you
know they set a gig backing up an important singer.
She was very supportive of them and they went off and they formed their own group
they called the Eagles you de, declare reference to the Byrds, the Byrds, the
Eagles, you get the idea there. and they really decided to embrace the
country songs, very much song oriented, very much about the singers.
This is not a music that emphasises a lot of In a sort of fancy guitar playing,
though there are some fancy guitar solos in this music it really emphasizes the
vocals, very much like Beatles' music did for example, and lush harmony vocals.
Lots of singing on these Eagles records. What's interesting about the country
influence and the southern California sound is those first couple of albums
were produced by Glyn Johns, a British producer who had worked with the Beatles,
and the Rolling Stones, and the Who, and all of these big British acts.
And those first couple of albums were all recorded in London.
So while we listen to those records and we get the idea of sunny, southern
California skies At least some of them were recorded, on rainy, London days, and
produced by a Brit with fantastic studio chops, Glen Johns.
He did not always get together, get, get along with the band very well and there
was There was a certain amount of friction, we'll talk about that in a
minute. The first album, Eagles, 1972, features
the song, Take It Easy, written together with Jackson Browne, who will figure into
our story a little bit later when we talk about later, the 70s.
But he was a very important singer, songwriter as well.
Take it easy features all the elements that I'm talking about.
You know, It's got some banjo in it, it's got lush harmony vocals, it's got a kind
of country twang to the, to the lead vocal.
It is sort of a prototypical, if, if in the court of the Crimson King is the
prototypical progressive rock track, Take It Easy is the prototypical Country Rock
track for the 70s. Other songs on that same album Witchy
Woman and Peaceful Easy Feeling, a very successful debut record for the Eagles.
They follow up in 1973 with Desperado, which is actually a concept album based
on the old west. I think they got the idea, the old west
concept album thing, a little bit from Crosby Stills and Nash and Young's deja
vu, which was still pretty fresh in their minds.
But wherever they got the idea, it was a concept album in country rock.
You know, we don't usually think of country rock and concept album, because
country rock is about simplicity and you know, Americana and that kind of thing,
concept albums are all about pomposity. But actually, between Desperado and an
album we'll talk about in a couple of weeks, Hotel California you can really
see The Eagles and the concept album you know sort of going hand in hand more than
one might expect. Anyway this album was kind of a
disappointing followup in terms of sales despite the fact Desperado Has become a
kind of an emblematic song for the Eagles in the years since and also the song
Tequila Sunrise. So it was kind of a sophomore effort that
did not really did, did not really come together for them like they hoped it
would sales-wise. At least I think aesthetically it was a
fantastic success. then we turn to the third album, On The
Border from 1974. It goes to number, number 17.
And here where the band decides that they don't like Glyn Johns' production because
they think he's trying to emphasize their country sound a little bit too much.
They want to be a little bit harder rocking.
Glyn Johns tells a story, he didn't think that they were going to be very good at
the harder rocking stuff. And so, he's out.
Some of the albums record in London They moved that, they take everything back to
LA, they record back there. I think it's in LA, but anyway they
record the rest of it in the United States.
And the album, as I say, goes to 19, goes to, goes to sev, number 17 in 1974 and
has the big number one hit, the Best of My Love.
the last of the series of early of early country.
rock tunes for the eagles, is One Of Those Nights, the most expensive, the
most successful of those One Of Those Nights.
Number one in 1975 with tracks like one of those nights, Lyin' Eyes and Take It
To The Limit. after that the eagles kind of morph into
a different kind of group and we'll return to them when we talk about the
second half of the 70s. And we talked about the big album, Hotel
California and The Long Run. Those albums become kind of mega albums
for the group and really characterize a lot of what's happening more in the
second half of the 70's than these early country rock albums do.
So, just to go over a little bit of what we've talked about this week in a, in a
general kind of way, before we finish up for this week.
And look forward to talking about black pop in the 1970s next week.
let me just sketch out some of the things that we've been talking about.
I'm making an argument that we can connect our music from basically the
psychedelic era, all the way really through the end of the 70s.
Around this idea of the hippie aesthetic and some of the things that all these
groups, whether they more sort of ambitious groups or more sort of and
groups that relied more of simplicity. All of them sort of embraced some aspect
of this hippie aesthetic idea. And that's really what brings all of that
music together. we see in the first half of the 70s the,
the branching out of different styles coming out of Psychideli into specialty
styles. And that's what we spend the week talking
about. But we also see the building of the music
business. We see the business getting bigger than
anybody ever expected it to do. What that does is it brings more money
into the business. And a lot of people would say what had
become an amazing variety of styles in the first half of the '70s get more and
more homogenized down into safe bets of things that people know they can sell a
lot of. Because everybody wants that big album
and go searching for it. That a lot of that music last half of the
70s is referred to as Corporate Rock. It's, it's music that was sort of people
would say, cynically constructed. Simply to sell now a lot of people would
say that's hogwash because in fact that music from the second half of the 70s
constitutes a lot of what's considered classic rock these days.
We'll wait for that discussion til we get there I just want to give you the shape
of the decade. At the end of the decade.
We're going to see the arrival of punk rock, which seems to want to defeat the
hippy aesthetic, and also disco, which whether it wants to defeat the hippy
aesthetic or not, stands in juxtaposition against it.
The other thing that we haven't mentioned that I think is worth mentioning, just at
the very tail end of this, is the important Development in technology that
follows this. And this is mostly in recording
technology. People talk about the Beatles' Sargent
Peppers having been recorded on a couple of four track machines.
By the time we get to the end of '60s and into the '70s increasingly more tracks
are available to to artists. And so what started as four track becomes
eight tracks at the end of the 60s, then 16, the 32, 48, and so you'd get these
enormous number of tracks that are available to record on, and these
musicians tend to fill them up with things.
So the arrangements got longer increasingly sonically complex.
And so when we talk about Steely Dan taking all of those different kinds of
tracks, going through separating them out in ways that you can actually hear them
very clearly in a stereo mix. That kind of technology that recording
technology plays a big role in the development of sound.
Also the recording of the, the development of things like synthesizers
which which now become portable and become a big part of the arsenal of, of,
of a lot of these styles. You find them in all kinds of places you
wouldn't expect them. You expect them in progressive rock but
you don't expect them in some of these other kinds of style.
So technology and its development along with the development of the music
business as a bigger and bigger sort of multinational concern, really helped
shape some of what happens to music stylistically.
Well, next week we'll turn to what was happening in black pop music during the
1970s. A kind of a parallel track in some
interesting kinds of ways which lead to a kind of cultural misunderstanding of
disco at the end of the 1970s.
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