Seasoned rock critic Dave Thompson has just unleashed his most ambitious work to date yet. I Hate New Music: The Classic Rock Manifesto (Backbeat Books).
The title alone will polarize a crowd of rock critics. In a very humorous and tongue-in-cheek way, Thompson makes a sound case for the 8-track tape, Boston’s entire recorded output, and hails Lemmy, Phil Lynott and Eddie as unsung rock gods worthy of inclusion in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.
Check out the excerpt below.
Chapter 1 – Lenny Kravitz For President, or, Piss Off, Sonny, And Take Your Vapid Whining With You
Classic rock is music without frontiers. It is music that was created within the most unfettered of environments, devoid of any expectation or notion beyond creating a great record. Just as Beethoven, Bach and Brahms never sat down and said, “I think I’ll write some classical music today,” so neither Ted Nugent nor Nazareth ever woke up and thought, “I’ll write a classic rock song today.” But they accomplished it anyway, because they understood the first cardinal law of rock and roll:
Be true to yourself.
To have one’s music branded classic rock is a privilege, not a right, to be earned via one of the hardest roads that any song could travel. It is not enough to have gained the love of your listeners and the respect of your peers. Pearl Jam achieved both of those goals long ago. But admiration alone is like water down the drain if your music is a featureless, harmless drone, and longevity is the price we pay for not encouraging a band to break up sooner.
A classic rock classic needs substance and soul before it can attain that standing. It could be a bluesy belter, a progressive charmer, a metal monster, a hard rock cruncher. It can be anything it wants to be. But, from the instant the first downstroke ricochets into earshot, to the second when the final notes echo off your brainpan, the song must stand not only as a magic carpet ride for the listener’s soul, but also as a sonic record of a singular moment, firmly cemented in time and place. Play Pearl Jam’s first album today and all it will remind you of is the last migraine you had. Play their latest and you will be asleep before the first song has stopped sounding like cold Hot Tuna.
There was a “golden age” of classic rock, a decade long span that stretches from the first glorious flourishes of FM rock radio in the late 1960s to a point somewhere around the mid- to late 1970s.
But, from “Born to Be Wild” to “The Boys Are Back in Town,” from the searing blues of Free to the operatic bombast of Meatloaf, classic rock is not about dates or time frames or history. It is about snatching the listener out of the humdrum here-and-now, and taking off . . . heading out on the highway, looking for adventure, and climbing so high ...
Which is precisely what we did.
The audience at which classic rock was aimed was the wave of baby boomers who hit high school and college in time for the ‘70s. Born a little earlier, they’d have been wetting their panties for the Dave Clark Five. A little later, and they would have been raining phlegm down on the Clash. Later still, they’d have been treated to such distinguished delights as Mr. Mister and Simply Red.
But demographics have nothing to do with the reasons why the music still resonates. Classic rock in its purest guise might be indelibly looped into a specific passage of time, but the power of the music reaches infinitely beyond that, to create a timeless bubble in which all men are equal, all albums are exciting, and all riffs rock your socks off. You listen and you are filled with a freewheeling sense of absolute invincibility. You concentrate and you want to play air guitar.
Deathless moments of endorphin-pumping pleasure abound. That moment in The Song Remains the Same, where Jimmy Page, playing “Stairway to Heaven,” unleashes the most strident solo of his life, and that despite being weighted down by that most extravagantly preposterous of all period accoutrements, the double-necked guitar.
The drum solo and scream that reignite “Won’t Get Fooled Again,” once the keyboard passage has run its course. The pregnant pause as Springsteen counts the band back in for the final verse of “Born to Run.” And the tiny break in David Bowie’s “Young Americans” when he proves that he, too, knows what we’re talking about, and demands, “Ain’t there one damn song that can make me . . . break down and cry?”
That’s it! Records that hit you on so many levels, so many fronts, that your skin prickles, your hair tingles, your eyes fill with water, and there’s not a g****** thing you can do about it. Tramps like us, baby! Down at Dino’s bar and grill. If I leave here tomorrow ...
Time and place are irrelevant. So are musical labels. All that matters is that the moment hits you hard, and classic rock does it. By comparison, the only money shot that matters in modern music, by which we mean just about every rock record made since 1976 (and certainly every one since 1980), is the sound of the cash register clattering. You want to know the real difference between the Foo Fighters and Focus? About $30 million.
Steaming out of the sound track to Easy Rider (and no, they don’t make movies like that anymore, either), Steppenwolf’s version of (the magnificently named) Mars Bonfire’s “Born to Be Wild” may or may not have been the first classic rock hit. Seven or so years later, Boston’s “More Than a Feeling” was probably the last. But, again, such accolades are meaningful only if you want to play fascist with chronology. Having already delineated the classic rock era, we will now disassemble it.
Any number of Beatles numbers, from the existentialist undercurrents of “Help!” through the backwards guitar psychedelia of “Tomorrow Never Knows,” bristle with both the intellectual and the impulsive energies that define a classic rock song. So does Dylan’s entire Highway 61 Revisited cycle, as it builds toward the savage entertainments of “Desolation Row.”
At the other end of the timescale, Meatloaf’s Bat Out of Hell was so deliciously extravagant and geared for grandiosity that you can quite forgive the Loaf for thus inspiring any number of subsequent heavy metal squawkers. Likewise, the Kinks emerged from a decade-old chrysalis as occasionally overachieving English eccentrics to people the late ‘70s and early ‘80s with a string of solidly excellent albums, plus the last essential double live album of the age.
Perhaps the most vibrant influence on what became classic rock, however, was Donovan, all the more so since he seems among the most unlikely. Beloved though this tousle-haired ragamuffin remains, his reputation today is still so bound up in the winsome hippie-dippiness of his later ‘60s work that even oldies radio only sniffs around a handful of songs, not one of which is “Atlantis.”
But “Season of the Witch,” a track from 1966’s Sunshine Superman album, not only helped dictate the musical paths that the still-formative psychedelia would take, it has also become the subject of some staggeringly adventurous covers, themselves emblematic of all the energies that what we now call classic rock would demand.
Powerful enough for the song to transcend any performer, period renditions by Vanilla Fudge, Pesky Gee (forerunners of Britain’s legendary Black Widow), Al Kooper, Mike Bloomfield, and the jazz-rock fusion of the Julie Driscoll/Brian Auger Trinity all toyed with the song’s potential for elongated experimentation.
Richard Thompson, Stephen Stills, and Dr. John have each brought their unique energies to bear on the song, and while Cindy Lee Berryhill and Tom Constanten, who have done more recent takes of “Season,” may or may not labor under the conceit that they are contributing something “new” to the song, their performances are two more toward an eclectic number that even “Born to Be Wild” cannot claim. When FM radio first crackled to life, “Season of the Witch” was as much an airplay staple as any of rock’s harder-hitting contenders.
Don’t forget … we’re giving away five copies of this great new book. So if you’d like to read more click here and win yourself a copy!