Category: Reconsidering The 70s
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Just A Couple Of Prog-Rock Blokes
I’ve never much cared for the “progressive-rock” band Yes (except for their 1985 reboot, saying which always starts an argument with my Yes-fan friends). And in saying that, I’ll stipulate a lot of that disdain was my own adolescent “too cool for school” arrogance about music. But “a lot” ain’t everything. “Progressive Rock”, with its…
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I’ve Seen All Good Bassists
Music geeks over the weekend noted the passing of Chris Squire, longtime bassist for prog-rock icons Yes. Now, as I’ve written innumerable times, I really listen to music on two levels; is the music technically adept in some way – singing, instrumental chops, production – and does it grab me in the liver and say…
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Rethinking The Seventies: The Eagles
If I’ve learned one thing after leaving my post-adolescent years, it’s that there are few things in the world more useless than rock critics. Not every rock critic. Not all the time. But as a job classification, rock critics are somewhere between supermodels and professional reality-TV contestants in terms of useful output generated per unit…
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Rethinking The Seventies: Boston
It’s one of the driving forces behind radio station formatting; people tend to become most attached to the music that they heard in adolescence – from about 12 to the early-mid 20s. That’s the time of one’s life when hormone-addled emotions grab and internalize emotional markers for the rest of peoples’ lives. Music is, of…
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Reconsidering The Seventies: James Taylor
In the wake of the breakup of the Beatles – who were probably the last musical group in history on which nearly everyone in the music-fan world, black, white, “serious”, pop, alt, mainstream – agreed, many different currents in pop music battled for public mindshare. One genre that’d been largely waiting in pop music’s wings…
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Reconsidering The Seventies: The Who
One of the key tenets of being a late-seventies, early eighties musical “rebel” was rejecting not only the bland corporate rock and jet-set superstars of the seventies, but affecting a studied boredom with the sixties. The Beatles were fun, but they were old news. The Stones had turned into a multinational enterprise more famous for their glam…
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Reconsidering The Seventies: Fleetwood Mac
In the seventies, back before Michael Jackson, Prince and Bruce Springsteen completely rebooted the sales charts, Rumours by Fleetwood Mac was the ultimate, inescapable soundtrack of the last half of the decade. And as such, being the hipper-than-thou, too-literally-cool-for-school wanna-be rock’nroll animal, I hated it. Hated the nasal yawping of Stevie Nicks. Hated Christine McVie’s banal cooing,…
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Reconsidering The Seventies: Baseline (Reboot)
(NOTE: I first ran this piece almost a year ago – April 17 2013 – fully intending to follow through and write this series. And then…I didn’t. But now I am. So I’m going to re-run the piece from waaaay back when, and try to do a new piece roughly every Friday). As I noted…