One of the more popular formats of radio is the classic rock format. Whether one is looking at music from a particular decade, like an 80’s station, or one has a “Jack” format that plays hits from the 60’s, 70’s, 80’s, and beyond, there are some similarities that these stations have, beyond the fact that the formats are often designed by radio consulting firms working for large companies. Among the most obvious of them is the fact that such stations present a picture of the past that is heavy with revisionist history. To be sure, most people who listen to the nostalgic music of the past, hearing the soothing sounds of music from their youth, or their parent’s youth, as the case may be, are not consciously aware of the fact that classic radio is largely an anachronism that presents as a unified whole that which was separated originally, and also presents the music of the past through its contemporary relevance and popularity. This gap between the past as it actually occurred and the past as it is remembered is, of course, a very large and complicated problem, large enough to fill books. The problem of the music history of classic radio, though, is at least small enough that it can be broached here, to be expanded and revisited if necessary in the future.

The core of classic rock is the music of the 1970’s, which was, as every decade’s music is, a complicated affair. In the 1970’s, there was a sharp split between more polished and commercial music on AM radio, whether easy listening (what we call adult contemporary nowadays) or album-oriented rock and pop music in general, and more daring rock and disco music on FM radio. While both of these strains contained very popular musicians and hit songs and albums, they existed on parallel planes—by and large, people either focused on listening to songs on AM radio or on FM radio, and among the various genres within them, whether that meant listening to urban-oriented disco and R&B stations or outlaw country or mainstream pop. There were, of course, stations that attempted to play hit music of all kinds, but it was mainly the American Top 40 with Casey Kasem [1] and similar shows that allowed people to listen to a variety of music at the same time, whether one was listening to Led Zeppelin or ABBA, Dan Fogelburg or the Bee Gees. On the charts these songs may have been adjacent from time to time, and on the album charts they certainly were, but in radio, there was a great deal of segmentation and segregation. It should be noted that this is exactly the case today. If you listen to hit radio, for example, you will likely only hear songs that have “crossed over” with a short playlist of maybe 20 to 40 songs that play over and over again, and may not even include all of the top 40 songs in the country. Similarly, if you listen to an adult contemporary station or an alternative station, you will listen to songs, and enjoy songs, that will be played in moderately heavy rotation for months and months, and years and years, without having ever been played on a top 40 station or appearing high on any sort of mainstream pop chart whatsoever. An example of this would be a song like “Such A Rollercoaster” by The Bleachers or “Cigarette Daydreams” by Cage The Elephant, to give two examples at random.

One may not think this is important, until one contrasts contemporary hit radio with the way that it appears through the filter of nostalgia. This is true for several reasons. For one, there are a lot of songs that are popular in a given period whose popularity is not enduring because the songs are viewed as novelty numbers whose popularity is a sign of temporary insanity rather than something that anyone wants to remember in following decades. For example, the song “Waiting For A Girl Like You” by Foreigner hit #2 and was held from the top spot by Olivia Newton-John’s “Physical” and Hall & Oates’ “I Can’t Go For That (No Can Do),” but has endured better than either of those two songs in the intervening decades [2]. Likewise, a song like “In The Year 2525” or “Macarena” can be a #1 hit for weeks, or even months, but with the passage of time what was once a popular and enjoyable song becomes an embarrassment that no one wants to be remembered, and so such songs become trivia items and are not part of regular rotation. In contrast to this, a song that was not particularly popular originally may receive heavy airplay because it becomes an icon of a given time, even if at the time it was released its airplay was not all that impressive. For example, “Centerfield” by John Fogerty and “Wouldn’t It Be Good” by Nik Kershaw didn’t even make the top 40 of the Hot 100 chart, but both are well-remembered, the first song because it became a fixture at baseball parks [3] and the second because it had an inventive music video that was played during the mid-80’s on heavy rotation on MTV at a time when Britpop was particularly popular on that station. Likewise, “Tiny Dancer” became a particularly popular song as a result of its inclusion in the Cameron Crowe film “Almost Famous,” giving it a retrospective importance that far overshadows its original single sales and radio airplay. Classic radio’s pattern of revisionist history allows music that was once popular but has since become an embarrassment to be forgotten in exchange for those songs which have gained in stature by being recognized for their qualities even if they were neglected when they were first released. It gives radio deejays an opportunity to give a different picture to the past as remembered than it was originally experienced, by placing next to each other songs that would have never appeared on the same stations at the same time when that decade was still around, and giving attention to songs that were widely ignored at their first release before being polished off and given attention by later filmmakers and cultural figures.

There is something gained and something lost in this perspective. For one, the organic wholeness of a given age of music is not often that is possible to experience at the time without the benefit of hindsight. What is a mere fad and what is a lasting and influential pattern requires time for the good and the bad to be separated, to see what aspects of a given song are copied, to see which artists endure in popularity, to see what songs capture the feel of an age. For example, “Fortunate Son” by Credence Clearwater Revival did not even crack the Top 10 during its run on the charts, and this from a band that somehow managed to get 5 #2 hits (without a number one), yet the song is widely remembered as a song expressing discontent with apparent inequalities about how the college-educated children of wealthy families were able to gain deferments from Vietnam while less fortunate sons were sent to fight and die in the rice paddies and rain forests of Southeast Asia. What may make a song uncomfortably topical in the present, and therefore less popular than escapist fare, makes it a fitting document of the past in retrospect. Yet if we judge the past by our memory of it, we whitewash the shameful and embarrassing aspects of it, covering over the bad haircuts and fashion, and playing up the quirky and unusual aspects of the past that were ignored or derided at the time but whose worth over time became easier to understand. In revising the past, we make ourselves appear better discerning and more tolerant and open to a wider view of the world than was the case at the time, viewing with fondness in retrospect what we were ignorant of or hostile to while it was first occurring. Unless we are unusually honest, it is easy to neglect that the past, as experienced, is not so different from the present as it is experienced today, in that we are often deeply divided, involved in our own little worlds, and all too often tragically ignorant about the most important trends in culture and society until after their effects are clearly seen. Someday, those who are young now will realize when they are old, when their fond memories of youth become the subject of nostalgic radio formats reminding them that they are young no longer, and that their memories have become music history.

[1] https://edgeinducedcohesion.wordpress.com/2014/06/18/keep-your-feet-on-the-ground-but-keep-reaching-for-the-stars/

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waiting_for_a_Girl_Like_You

[3] http://sports.espn.go.com/mlb/news/story?id=5216466