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.
Mainstream Rock 1975–80
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From the course by University of Rochester
History of Rock, Part Two
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From the lesson
Mainstream Rock, Punk, and New Wave (1975-79)
Rock style from the early 70s are streamlined and labeled corporate rock, as the music business expands even further. The mega-album. Punk reacts with a return to simplicity. New wave develops the punk attitude. [Read Chapter 10 and work through listening guides and dedicated video.]
Meet the Instructors
John CovachProfessor of Music and Director
Institute for Popular Music
In this video let's spend a little bit more time talking about some of the things,
the bigger sort of events that shaped the second half of the 70s in the history
of rock music here as we go forward talking about the period between 1975 in 1980.
In the last video, I talked a bit about how FM radio changes over the course of the 1970s
and mention that you know it's FM radio starts
from a kind of a free form you can play anything you want,
the disc jockey is in completely in control of what goes on the air and it becomes as
FM radio sorts become something that's popular
more and more stations begin to switch to this rock format.
It becomes the album oriented rock format.
And as it becomes more popular there's a possibility that
of profits being made of more and more money being made from advertising.
And so they like any radio station they want to have
only songs on the radio that people want to hear because the worst thing
that could happen if you're somebody who
runs a radio station is perhaps to have somebody dive
for that button and change the channel because having ears on your station,
the more of them you have,
a lot gives you the ability to sell that number to your potential advertisers.
We have to remember as we talked about in
television in previous lectures in part one of this course,
radio --commercial radio is not
just radio it's commercial radio they're in it to make money.
They're in it to sell advertising.
They don't make money from giving you the music free over the air.
And if you like the music and you go off and buy the record or whatever
download the file or pay for it on
iTunes or some service like that they don't make any money from that.
What they make money from the advertising.
If they can get you listening to music you like,
they can sell your advertising and so and the more ears
you can get on the station the more you can charge for advertising.
And you can see how there would be a real force on a radio station
which is driven by a profit motive not by
a public service motive when it when it comes to FM rock radio.
You can see how there would be a real force on them to try and
construct a playlist that kept people listening as much as possible.
That's- that's the way it works.
And what tends to happen is that you get- as the 70s unfold
the disc jockeys end up having less and less say about what goes on the air.
They don't- they don't lose all say they're still- we have even in the late 70s we have
specific disc jockeys in big cities breaking particular bands.
The the cars in Boston for example.
That's a story that is a good reference for that point but that's in the late 70s.
But still what you got are program directors beginning to control play lists and
consultants who are brought in to tell
the program directors what kinds of things they should be programming.
All of this leads to a much bigger FM radio business
and much more opportunity to get ears on your music if you're in a band.
But it's a little bit small or a whole to
get through in terms of being able to get your music to work
and so instead of in the first half of the decade where you had
big long tracks you know that might go on for eight or nine minutes you know.
Now, the maximum radio,
radio song is about four maybe five minutes at the outside.
So we've kind of moved from AM radio when in
the 60s when these songs were between two and two and a half minute.
AM becomes sort of pop radio at the end of the 60s into the 70s.
Rock radio moves to the FM band.
At the end of the 60s and in the 70s rock radio was
really FM radio not so much AM radio, right, FM radio.
But by the time it gets to the mid-decade it looks an awful lot
like AM radio from the early 60s in the sense that it's highly formatted.
It's almost a kind of a top 40 kind of format and instead
of it being two minutes to two and a half minutes for
each song it's like four to five minutes for each song.
A lot of musicians from the first half of the decade didn't like
that so much and there was a lot of push and pull and this kind of thing.
So it's important to note that that's
a big part of what's happening in the second half of this decade.
We talked before also about the development of concert venues it's
important to realize that as we as- we
said in the last video that the first tours by groups in the 60s
were- I mean they were certainly organized but it wasn't a big concert business.
Now you've got people who are in the business of doing nothing but promoting these tours,
providing sound systems for these tours,
providing lighting systems for these tours.
It really becomes a big,
being on the road with a band becomes a kind of
business you can do full time and make a lot of money.
And so this between the radio and the big, the growing live cut,
this creates a lot of opportunity for bands to get out there play
and get their music heard and to and to sell some product.
But the biggest thing and the thing I really want to focus on in this video,
the biggest thing the kind of shapes the second half of the 70s from
my point of view is the rise of what we'll call the mega album.
The mega album becomes-
it actually comes as a bit of a surprise within the music business.
I mean everybody who owns a record company wants
to sell a lot of records but some of these records that we'll talk about,
some of these artists from the second half of the 70s sold in numbers far
beyond the wildest fantasies in dreams of record company owners and investors.
I mean all of a sudden the thing really explodes in a fantastic kind of way.
And so what I want to do is focus on a few of the artists that sort of
got this whole mega album thing going.
And as I said in the first video the mega album itself is viewed by many people as
really sort of having triggered a kind of a dumbing
down of rock to try to go for the biggest possible.
Let's dig into some of these records.
Now let's start with Peter Frampton.
Most people will- we'll talk about the Frampton album from 1976 called Frampton
Comes Alive as being one of the first big mega albums and boy that album sold like crazy.
Peter Frampton and guitarist, vocalist,
songwriter had worked with other groups before he went on a solo career.
Humble Pie is the one that most people may be familiar with the album from 1971 rock and
the Fillmore is a live double live album that
features Steve Marriott of course as the lead vocalist,
the rhythm guitarist of Humble pie but also Peter Frampton on lead guitar.
Frampton left that group on very good terms with with with Steve Marriott
and did three solo albums in the period between 1972 and 74.
Something's happening was the third one and got
some radio airplay but all of a sudden along comes
this Frampton Comes Alive album, a live record.
We talked before about Kiss.
How kiss is first big album was a live album.
Here we go with Peter Frampton but this was a really gargantuan record for him.
Number one of course in 1976 with three big sort of radio hits and chart hits,
Show Me The Way, baby I Love Your Way and Do You Feel Like We Do.
Interesting about Do You Feel Like We Do is that Peter Frampton was
the one who became famous for using something that was often called to talk box.
The Talk box was, you play your guitar and that signal would go from your amp into
a little speaker driver that would
be connected to something that looked like sort of I don't know like
inch wide surgical tubing and that would come
up the microphone and you put that in your mouth.
The sound from the guitar would then go into your mouth and you could shape it
using your mouth and your lips and the sound would then come out the microphone.
So it would sound like the guitar was actually talking.
And so when you listen to that you'll hear him say-
doing the title of the song Do You Feel Like We Do.
And the crowd responding and all that.
And boy that still plays a lot on classic rock radio but boy did
that tune ever really kind of make him into a star along.
I again I say,
Show Me The Way and Baby I Love Your Way.
Well, another big album from that time is the Eagles Hotel California from 1976.
The Eagles we talked about in the first week
of the class as being an important group associated with country rock.
But by the time they get to this record
Bernie Leadon the guitar- the original guitar player in
the group is out and Joe Walsh who had previously
been in the James Gang had a bit of a solo career came from Cleveland,
plays the James gang came from Cleveland was into the group and this hotel california,
what a big album this was for the Eagles.Three hits on that New Kid in Town,
the title track Hotel California and Life in the Fast Lane.
Kind of a concept album about- I guess you know what can happen to you if you sort of get
stuck in the California lifestyle you know you
can check in but you can never check out kind of thing.
If you check out the album cover notice the parallels to the Sgt.
Pepper album cover when you open up the gatefold on the inside it looks very much,
is very much influenced by the Sgt. Pepper cover.
This is not the first concept album we've gotten from the Eagles remember in week one.
We talked about the album,
Desperado as being kind of a concept album from that group.
But again Hotel California a big record.
And then the long run follows in the late 1970s.
Some of the guys who worked on the album say it took so
long to record they like to call it a long one.
But anyway, The Long One.
Another big album that really sort of put the Eagles into the-
into the category of like mega megastars of these gigantic sales.
But maybe the group that sort of takes the real prize
here for the mega album is Fleetwood Mac.
Fleetwood Mac originally starts out as a blues band in England in the late 1960s.
The Fleetwood Mac comes from Mick Fleetwood the drummer and John McVie the
bass player the early band featured Peter Green on lead guitar.
We talked before about the Peter Green version of Fleetwood Mac having done
Black Magic Woman which later then became a hit
for Santana and a very close cover version.
At the end of the 60s early 70s that group had a instrumental hit,
UK number one instrumental hit in 1968 with
Albatros and then Peter Green leaves the group,
Christine McVie comes in.
And then Bob Welch comes in for a period of time in the early 70s.
The group has some critical success but not the kind of success
that would await them in the second half of the decade.
Welch leaves the band incomes,
income a couple of Americans,
Lindsey Buckingham and Stevie Nicks who had performed
together and released an album together as Buckingham Nicks before this.
They come into the group and in 1975 they released the number one album Fleetwood Mac,
does pretty good has
three three hits on it and gets a lot of FM radio play those hits would be,
Over my Head, Rhiannon and Say You Love Me.
But nothing prepared anybody for what happened after that.
In 1977, they released the album, Rumours.
Not only was it number one.
It spent 31 weeks at number one.
That's over six months at that- in the top slot of the album charts
selling oodles and oodles and oodles of records and
making Fleetwood Mac into the biggest,
some of the biggest that may be one of the biggest acts in
the entire entertainment business tracks from that Rumour's album,
Dreams, Go Your Own Way,
Don't Stop, all staples of classic rock radio now.
But hardly anybody who knows rock music in the 70s doesn't know those Fleetwood,
those Fleetwood Mac tunes from the end of the 1970s
maybe they hate them they don't like them because they think they're too
sort of soft rock or whatever but
still it's hard to imagine that they don't know them very well.
So when you think about what's happening in this whole idea of
the tremendous expansion of profit in
the business and when you think about these albums from
the second half the beginning of the second half of
the 70s Peter Frampton's Frampton --Comes Alive,
The Eagles -- Hotel California and then Fleetwood Mac's --Rumors,
you can see how a record business people would be just you know have their mouths
watering for this kind of a mega hit because there was so much money in it.
And so the criticism would be that this shapes a lot of their thinking,
every band they bring out they hope as a Fleetwood has got to Rumours and up you know,
Fleetwood Mac a big mega album.
And so the sense is that they're going with- that it's a it's a big lottery it's
a multimillion dollar lottery and they don't want to
invest their money in bands that don't have a chance of winning.
Everything just because one winner takes care of
a lot of losses that you have on the other losers.
And so this is the strategy.
So let's talk about some of
the other bands that make up the second half of the 1970s focusing
first on continuities that is bands that maintained
pretty much the approach they used in the first half of the 1970s. That's next.
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