In the beginning there were beats.
Then there were rhythms.
Then there were melodies.
Eventually there were words.

Introduction... Timeless Music Can Affect Society... Conscious Music Defined... The Mainstream and Other Streams... Art Versus Commerce... Now Where's the Real Money?... Downturn of the Century... Listening for Clues and Dancing for Pleasure... The Beginning of Conscious Music... A Quest for Nature... Waves of Surf and Electric Folk... The Beatles Lead the British Invasion... Folk Harmonies Heading West... Doorway to Experimental Songwriting... Kaleidoscopic Storytelling... Battle of New Ideas... Deeper into Stream of Consciousness Music... Painting Dark Pictures... Escape to Other Worlds... Distorted Guitars... The Issue of Drugs... Just a Little Further Out There... The Blending of Styles... The Mix of Country and Rock... Classical Merges with Rock... Jazz/rock Fusion... Turmoil, Freedom and Adventure... Social Commentary Soul... Spy in the House of Suspense... Heartbreak of the Love Generation... Dawn of Modern Rock... Storytellers Reach Beyond Self-Image... The Softening of Harsh Words... Exploring the Dark Side... Rock Moves On... The Mainstream Begins to Fragment... 1974: End of the Golden Era... The Mellow Journey... Still Searching for Other Worlds... Reflections of the Rock Movement... Birth of a Disco Nation... Simple Blanket Buzz Words... Rock Gets Harder... New Directions with New Wave... From Activism to Apathy... Ethic in Transition... Dylan Revisited... Jazz Never Died... Nostalgia Becomes a Part of Current Consciousness... Return of the Old World... Kicking off the 80s with Country Tradition... Electronic Storyteller Music... Video Versus Imagination... Blurring the Identity of Rock... Messages from the Arena... Celebration of the Underdog... A Call for Substance Over Style... Toward a Peaceful Revolution... Bigger Than the Ego... Angels and Devils... Lost Messages... War of the Senses... The Status of Women... Imbedded Dance Messages... Sex and Other Topics... Small Town Messages... Fall of the Rock Gods... Visions of Modern Romance... Enter the Nineties... In Search of Alternatives... The Rebirth of Rock... Corporation Meltdown... Theater of the Mind


INTRODUCTION

The idea that music can influence people's thinking or lifestyle goes back many centuries. The fear that music potentially has this power has always lurked in the back of the minds of the powers that be and the more frightened people in society. This fear of music as a social influence is understood if you can just put yourself in the role of that small group of elite zillionaires who want to buy and sell the world their way. It is supposed to be politics and religion that shape the overall psyche of any given culture. We are all supposed to yield to protocols of church and state and accept them without question, as cultural principles are drilled into our minds at a very early age.

TIMELESS MUSIC CAN AFFECT SOCIETY

Once in awhile a creative songwriter comes along and shocks the world with revealing lyrics that challenge the common thinking and stimulate compelling conversation. Many times rock and roll has taken listeners deeper than politics, and many times it has shown that politics isn't deep at all. Regardless of the message, a song with communicative lyrics and a unique melody stands a better chance of being timeless than a song with incidental lyrics and a bland melody. Every song needs to have its own fingerprint and identity. That's what makes it memorable - and powerful enough to evoke memories.

CONSCIOUS MUSIC DEFINED

I define conscious music as music of the mind. It can be anything built on originality that inspires more imagination. It can be songs with a unique lyrical message or music that sounds compelling because it clearly offers a new sound. If the artist consciously puts a lot of effort into crafting a creative musical idea that demonstrates a sense of purpose beyond mass marketing, it probably qualifies in my book as conscious music. On the other hand, there are also some effortless songs that qualify if the message is moving enough.

What I don't consider as conscious music is anything that's based on an obvious formula and intended to fit in with a trend as part of a marketing scheme. Romantic pop ballads are usually too generic in theme to be included, but there will always be exceptions if the song is unique. Just because a song becomes a hit doesn't disqualify it as conscious music. In fact, the bigger a conscious song is, the more consciousness it will inspire.

THE MAINSTREAM AND OTHER STREAMS

There is a wealth of conscious music to be found through various media. Call it underground, alternative, independent or whatever. I mainly focus on the best of what's been popular, but I know from working in radio that some of the best music never gets airplay. So I try to talk about what has happened at the crossroads of art and commerce over the years, based on books and research I've studied, people I've talked with in the industry and my own experience in radio. It's not so much a report as it is me rambling about the evolution of rock and roll, while at the same time I understand that everyone has their own take on the same story. I'm just pasting together bits of information I've collected throughout my life and I'm trying to make some sense of the musical timeline that has brought us to the present.

ART VERSUS COMMERCE

The music industry has a tendency to paint a false dilemma concerning art versus commerce. If you consider that a lot of the biggest-selling music since the sixties has been, in fact, conscious music, the truth becomes clear that the growing absence of conscious music in pop culture has less to do with lack of demand and more to do with lack of quality decision-making at record labels.

Conscious music is innovative art, and innovative art sells if it's good enough. The idea that every possible melody or storyline has already been written is just a cover for lack of imagination. This false idea is also fueled by those industry gatekeepers who try to keep shallow trends moving, even when they start to burn instead of earn money. The truth is that there are infinite possibilities for songwriting.

NOW WHERE'S THE REAL MONEY?

Who are the biggest sellers? Well, topping the list would be The Beatles, who offered a vast library of conscious music. Who's the biggest concert act of all time? If it's not The Grateful Dead, they are near the top and most of their songs had a conscious message. What album spent the longest run on the charts in history? That would be Pink Floyd's Dark Side Of The Moon, one of the most conceptual albums ever made. Who's the most critically acclaimed songwriter of all time who has also sold millions? That would be social commentary songwriter Bob Dylan. Who's the biggest reggae artist who artfully mixed politics and philosphy in his music? Bob Marley. Since the sixties there have been many conscious artists who have experienced incredible commercial success including The Rolling Stones, The Doors, Neil Young, U2, R.E.M., The Police, The Clash, Nirvana and Pearl Jam.

DOWNTURN OF THE CENTURY

The new millennium seems to have a shortage of conscious artists, as I write this in July 2003. Most pop, rock and so-called alternative artists simply don't fit the definition anymore, no matter how you stretch it or who defines it. The business minds behind such artists do not seek to inform or inspire the public, as their only goal is to quickly package and sell supposed marketable material with no regard to art, even though that ill-advised stance has cost the labels dramatically. If they hadn't moved down such a dissolving path I probably would have never bothered to write this.

The music industry does better when they put faith in the more educated (through school and/or self-taught) audience, who have always embraced creative music. The reason the labels began to focus on generic music instead of creative music is they went overboard in their history, signing too many artists and then using "art doesn't sell" as an excuse to put out the safest music possible based on research and what has sold in the past. One way of testing how far musical creativity has fallen since the mid-nineties is ask yourself: how many new artists since 1996 can be considered among the greatest artists of all time?

LISTENING FOR CLUES AND DANCING FOR PLEASURE

For many people pop music doesn't have to be great. It just needs to be adequate. For many people music is just background or for dancing. Most people don't demand deep messages or creative twists in music. Yet from the sixties through the nineties, the creative geniuses were winning at carving out a place in history while everything else was simply disposable. Dance/pop, in general, although viable in terms of keeping a dance floor packed, is usually not in the same realm as the conscious music I'm about to describe in detail, which is usually meant for listening more than dancing.

Most dance floor favorites, especially with 1970's disco music is more about "shakin' your booty" than thinking about the world around us. Dancers care more about beats than message or originality, and this is not to discredit dance music, which is certainly more relevant than lyrical songs when it comes to an organized public event promoted as a dance party. On the dance floor the dancer is the star and the music is secondary and replacable.

On the other hand, rap, hip hop, reggae and worldbeat tend to be conscious dance music. Other forms of music that tend to be conscious listening music include rock, folk, blues, jazz, new age and country & western. I guess another way of putting it is that these forms of music communicate the human condition beyond the standard one on one relationship songs that say the same thing over and over again. Many of the world's best reggae and worldbeat artists sing about an integrated world of peace and progress where all nations of the world live in harmony.

THE BEGINNING OF CONSCIOUS MUSIC

If you are interested in music before the sixties, read my research on the pre-rock era. Although it doesn't dwell much on conscious music, it briefly outlines the evolution of the music industry, which matters since it is the vehicle that ushers in most of the music we hear. Most pre-rock hit music is rooted in pro-Victorian era establishment, but I do touch on how blues and jazz paved a new direction for American popular music as well as the first wave of popular rock and roll hit songs in the fifties.

Otherwise, I place the beginning of the timeline for conscious music in the early sixties. Even though there were several songs prior to the sixties that touched on enlightenment, social issues or innovative ideas, I think the key to what I'm talking about began with Bob Dylan. Of course, Dylan himself was influenced by earlier folk artists such as Woody Guthrie, but it was Dylan who really got people thinking about lyrics and expanded the subject matter to the point where it was okay to write about anything outside the pop norm, especially social issues.

FOLK TALKIN' BLUES

One of the first songs the masses heard from Bob Dylan was "Blowin' In The Wind." It's a simple thoughtful song that became a big hit for Peter, Paul & Mary and was covered by several other artists. Dylan released the song on his debut album The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan in 1963, prior to the JFK assassination or the escalation of the Vietnam conflict. America was not yet very educated about the military industrial complex, as President Eisenhower had called it a few years earlier. The anti-war sentiment was still underneath the radar. Dylan songs such as "Masters Of War," turned out to be slightly ahead of their time.

A QUEST FOR NATURE

The 1960's marked a quest for deeper understanding of the nature of things. People began to seek explanations that were not pre-packaged or drilled into their minds at an early age. The social standards set by Britain's Queen Victoria in the 1800's were finally being overrun and revised in the 1960's. Hedonism was in, old fashion values were out. With the arrival of the birth control pill in the early sixties, sex was in, moral concerns were out. The adventures of the sixties, in a big way, broke down the family unit and created a more individualized society. But this also allowed people to develop more diversified perspectives of the world. Even though America was a diverse melting pot of world cultures even back then, the sixties marked a turning point where more and more people reached an understanding that despite ethnic differences, we are all part of the same human race.

SHADOWS OF CREEPY WITCH HUNTERS

But the sixties also had its creepy side that seemed to be a continuation of the cold war scare that started with the Joe McCarthy era of the early fifties, in which entertainers were blacklisted and accused of being Communist. But a lot of political spooks began to fall out of favor with the public during the rise of fifties rock and roll music, not that the two were directly related. But it was evident that rock and roll declared war on the establishment and that the establishment in turn, declared war on rock and roll. But in the process of the two sides moving apart, the old guard must have missed a lot of sexual inuendos in fifties rock, or perhaps they were hiding under a rock until 1963 when the government finally decided to crack down on suggestive song lyrics.

The FBI actually investigated the lyrics of "Louie Louie" by The Kingsmen, responding on a tip that it might contain profanity in its drunken slurred singing. The ultimate assessment was that the lyrics were too obscured for it to even matter. But as the sixties would unfold, and rock began to expand into a wider array of anti-social or explicit topics, more establishment paranoia, investigations and censorship would follow.

WAVES OF SURF AND ELECTRIC FOLK

As Dylan spearheaded the folk movement of the sixties, the Beach Boys were emerging with surf music. Even though their guitar riffs were somewhat of a fifties rock and roll revival, their lyrics opened the door to new subject matter in popular music. The songs were still about the high school experience, but they were different because of the setting. They took us to the ocean. There's something about the ocean that is overwhelmingly inspiring to the human mind - perhaps because it is a symbolic mirror of life, not to mention the origin of all life on this planet.

The Beach Boys were not really reaching for a deep focus, as most of their songs had a dance party flavor. Their impact had more to do with painting a musical picture of Southern California. It was because of them along with Jan & Dean and The Ventures that people still associate surf music with the sixties. Surf music was more of a transitional trend between early rock and experimental music. The liberation of drums as a foreground solo instrument in rock surfaced with "Wipe Out" by The Surfaris in 1963. Heavy sound effects came out in "Walk, Don't Run 1964" by The Ventures. Jan & Dean became one of the most haunting stories in pop history as their song "Deadman's Curve" foretold an actual accident that ended the duo's career.

THE BEATLES LEAD THE BRITISH INVASION

The surf craze lasted a few years and inevitably gave way to the several new strands of conscious music such as the British Invasion, Motown, folk/rock and jazz/rock. The Beatles led all the movements in popularity. Initially in the 1962-1965 period they were widely thought of as a band appealing to teens. Beginning with the Rubber Soul album in 1965, however, the band began to write songs dealing with more mature themes. This was no accident. The album was the first glimpse of a new direction for the band after John Lennon had met with Bob Dylan, who talked about the importance of meaningful lyrics while Lennon convinced Dylan that his melodies could be more adventurous.

The results of this influence came out on Rubber Soul in which the overall sound of the album sounded like the merging of folk and rock in songs like "I've Just Seen A Face," "I'm Looking Through You," and "If I Needed Someone." The album also featured unique ballads such as "In My Life," which reflected on a lifetime of friends and lovers. Another ballad was "Michelle," which had an acoustic guitar line that spanned most of the fretboard, which was rare for guitar pop in those days. One of the most innovative tracks was "Norwegian Wood," in which George Harrison played the sitar.

THE INFLUENCE OF BOB DYLAN

A big part of the experimentation of the era was the merging of different musical styles. The mix of electric guitar rock with folk became the new mind-blowing music with Bob Dylan's "Like A Rolling Stone" in 1965. The song's complex rambling melody was built on long wordy phrases that described a person moving down the economic pyramid to discover street life. This new electric folk seemed to be a response to Lennon's challenge for Dylan. Then came The Byrds covering Dylan with "Mr. Tambourine Man," which seemed to be a call to sink deeper into the layers of fantasy evoked by music. The song essentially marked the beginning of the "trip" that became the snapshot of the sixties. The character the song portrayed was like a pied piper leading the children somewhere else. The Byrds did another Dylan tune down the road called "My Back Pages," which had an interesting twist that one can grow younger with age. The Animals burst on the scene with an electric rendition of the traditional folk song "House Of The Rising Sun." Barry McGuire's "Eve Of Destruction" was a Dylaneque anti-war protest song.

FOLK HARMONIES HEADING WEST

The Mamas & The Papas injected interesting harmonies in "California Dreamin.'" The dreamy song talked about a transient wanderer stumbling into a church and pretending to pray just to have a place to stay for the night. Then they commented on the history of themselves growing out of the folk scene in "Creeque Alley," which must have startled some people with the ironic line "no one's getting fat except Mama Cass." They seemed to get more sonic yet more pop in "I Saw Her Again." Then again, the song wasn't so candy-coated as it confessed to lying about telling someone "I love you" just to get sex. They showcased their unique blend of happy music with downbeat lyrics in "Monday Monday."

Mamas & Papas Songwriter John Phillips wrote a folk/rock hit for his friend Scott McKenzie called "San Francisco," which was about the epicenter of the peace movement. The Grateful Dead mixed nearly every style imaginable, especially folk, in their music. One of their early hits "The Golden Road" offered a spirited roadmap to deeper awareness and featured a driving rock beat with lush folk harmonies, having the same silky quality as The Byrds.

DOORWAY TO EXPERIMENTAL SONGWRITING

In 1965 The Byrds song "Eight Miles High" featured the group's trademark harmonies set over a hypnotic electric guitar sound but was a little too avantgarde at the time to be considered folk anymore. The band had been experimenting in the studio and stumbled onto an even newer form of music that would eventually become known as "psychedelic rock." It's important to remember that their main influence was The Beatles, who had already begun incorporating sound effects in their music a year earlier with the first use of feedback in the recording of "I Feel Fine."

The link between folk/rock and psychedelia continued to permeate throughout the sixties. Peter, Paul & Mary even got a little psychedelic on "I Dig Rock And Roll Music," which made a strong statement about how radio censorship of song lyrics was encouraging secret codes and metaphors with hidden meaning for taboo topics in pop songs. Dylan continued a string of electric folk rock hits which included "Rainy Day Women #12 & 35," "Positively 4th Street," "All Along The Watchtower" and perhaps his most rambling stream of consciousness song "Subterranean Homesick Blues." By the end of the sixties pure acoustic folk still commanded huge followings with songs like "Blackbird" by The Beatles and "Both Sides Now" by Joni Mitchell.

KALEIDOSCOPIC STORYTELLING

Simon & Garfunkel seemed to take folk songwriting to a new level, by making it more kaleidoscopic. In 1965 their song "The Sound Of Silence" became "Sounds Of Silence" when they decided to add an eerie electric guitar line to the folk tune. It was an ethereal passage pointing to alienation in a world of glittering mythology. The song opened with the line "hello darkness, my old friend, I've come to talk with you again" and proceeded to explore loneliness and emptiness in a crowded world. The beautifully ambiguous lyrics allowed the listeners to paint their own colorful interpretations, but it clearly captured the spirit of the times with its curious intellect. That same year they rolled up the charts with a song about living on the road in "Homeward Bound."

The duo's focus on alienation became more obvious in "I Am A Rock," which talked about escaping friendships that cause pain. Another celebrated tune by the duo was "Mrs. Robinson," which was obviously written for the movie The Graduate. The song tapped into the movie plot, which dealt with moral questions about married professor/college student relationships. Simon & Garfunkel's most astonishing masterpiece, though, was "Bridge Over Troubled Water" in 1970, which was a long orchestral ballad in which the storyteller played the role of a hero offering to comfort a fallen lonely person.

BATTLE OF NEW IDEAS

As it turned out, The Beatles metamorphosis album Rubber Soul in 1965 had made an enormous impression on Brian Wilson that it inspired him to do a very conceptual album for The Beach Boys called Pet Sounds. The album was more innovative in its recording and arranging techniques than in songwriting. "Sloop John B" was a rendition of a traditional song. The atmospheric album was full of ballads and sound effects. The Beatles, in turn were impressed with Pet Sounds so much that they came up with an even more experimental album called Revolver, which was a monumental introduction into stream of consciousness musical production.

"Tomorrow Never Knows" still stands up as one of the most innovative recordings ever made with its backward tape loops and swirling sound effects on a journey through the inner mind. The answer from The Beach Boys was more atmosheric experimentation with the first big multi-track hit "Good Vibrations." This recording would heavily influence the recording techniques of The Carpenters, who would define a new era of multi-layered stereo production sound from the early seventies onward (although they would be snubbed by almost the entire rock scene as too clean cut).

DEEPER INTO STREAM OF CONSCIOUSNESS MUSIC

The creative competition between The Beatles and The Beach Boys reached a climax in 1967 with Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, in which The Beatles clarified that they were not bound by any music industry rules. The album featured no singles, which was considered odd for the single-driven period. All of the songs ran into each other as there was no silence between tracks. In the middle of this experience was a George Harrison track called "Within You, Without You," which was by far the band's most articulate statement about the mysteries of the universe. The hypnotic "A Day In The Life" was another landmark song in the shift toward music commenting on various states of mind, specifically how someone reacts when they hear about someone who dies.

The overall concept of the album may have been too multi-layered to generalize but some of the social themes addressed were going to shows (title track, "Being For The Benefit Of Mr. Kite"), partying ("With a Little Help From My Friends"), psychedelia ("Lucy In The Sky With Diamonds"), running away from home ("She's Leaving Home"), personal recovery ("Getting Better," "Fixing A Hole" and "Good Morning, Good Morning"), sex ("Lovely Rita"), soul searching ("Within You, Without You"), aging ("When I'm Sixty-Four") and death ("A Day In The Life"). They would release more psychedelia later in the year with Magical Mystery Tour, which dove deeper into the levels of the subliminal world with "I Am The Walrus," which showcased the poetry of non-meaning but was perceived as having multi-layered meaning.

PAINTING DARK PICTURES

During the entire Beatles-Beach Boys battle of the minds, an even bigger rivalry was going on between The Beatles and The Rolling Stones. The first Stones hit "I Wanna Be Your Man" was actually a Beatles cover. But songs like "Satisfaction" and "Get Off Of My Coud" showed that Mick Jagger had a loud voice in rock and roll as he echoed the themes of rebellious youth. The Stones evovled with The Beatles and by 1966 were wandering into unchartered territory with "Paint It, Black." Then the following year, as The Beatles experimented with Sgt. Pepper, The Stones put out their own surreal album Their Satanic Magesties Request. It featured one of the most spacey sci-fi songs of all time called "2,000 Light Years From Home." They followed the material on later albums with several mind-blowing tracks such as "Gimme Shelter," "Sympathy For The Devil" and "You Can't Always Get What You Want." Each of those songs combined haunting cultural imagery with descriptive storytelling.

The year 1967 marked the arrival of a new sound and a more literate and serious rock ethic. It also marked the rise of freeform radio on FM. The Monterey Pop Festival happened that year and marked the beginning of rock festivals. The Doors broke on through with their hit "Light My Fire," which had a seven minute album version that defined the early FM freeform radio sound and broke the unwritten but understood rule of AM pop radio's three minute time limit. Dylan had actually pre-dated the trend toward long songs with the five minute "Like A Rolling Stone" in 1965, but he was already an established artist at that point.

The Doors were new on the scene when they hit with "Light My Fire," a dreamy rocker with mixed images of love and death, which was actually nothing new to pop music. It's just that the Doors seemed a little more haunting and believable than previous melodramatic pop attempts. The Doors were literally offering a vision to break on through to the other side of consciousness deep into the cosmos. This song reflects where the sixties began to wander off on a quest for anything but the here and now. Clarity was beginning to be overshadowed by curiosity. The song "Ride My See Saw" by The Moody Blues talks about this shifting phase.

ESCAPE TO OTHER WORLDS

Throughout the entire sixties there were songs about escape. The decade started with JFK's vision of a man visiting the moon. The most popular television shows took place in the old west then later outer space shows became popular. By the middle of the decade, as a counter culture was blossoming, a lot of young people turned to escape through mind-altering drugs. This paralleled the rise of psychedelic music, which set out to explore music beyond traditional structure.

Psychedelia began to shift from underground to mainstream as early psychedelic pop hits included "Eight Miles High" by The Byrds in 1965 then "Psychotic Reaction" by The Count Five in 1966 and the ultimate escapist anthem "Strawberry Fields Forever" by The Beatles in 1967. Later in the decade psychedelia would become a recognizable parody of itself in pop hits like "Green Tambourine" by The Lemon Pipers and "Hair" by The Cowsills. But the psychedelia that tried to invent new music turned out to be timeless.

DISTORTED GUITARS

Jimi Hendrix is one of the most remembered pioneers for introducing a new sound in the sixties. His 1967 song "Purple Haze" in particular has become a time marker for the beginning of hard rock. Hendrix treated feedback and distortion as an important part of the art. Even his softer songs had timeless appeal such as "The Wind Cries Mary," "Bold As Love" and "Little Wing." He is also remembered for his lucid cover of the Dylan song "All Along The Watchtower." Other psychedelic pop acts had timeless appeal because of well-crafted hypnotic melodies as in "Time Of The Season" by The Zombies, "Along Comes Mary" by The Association, "Liar Liar" by The Castaways and "Incense And Peppermints" by Strawberry Alarm Clock.

The term psychedelic music implied music created and performed under the influence of mind-altering drugs. But certain artists such as Frank Zappa of Mothers Of Invention, claimed to not take drugs, yet were considered psychedelic because the music was so unconventional. Psychedelia reached its most avantgarde peak with "Revolution 9" by The Beatles from their White Album in 1968. The recording was not so much a song but a montage of experimental studio tricks using soundbites to create a very unusal sonic experience. This recording inspired several artists to begin incorporating sounds other than those originating from musical instruments in their recordings.

THE ISSUE OF DRUGS

The sixties today are perceived as associated with drug culture. But there were anti-drug songs as well, such as "The Pusher" by Steppenwolf and "Kicks" by Paul Revere & The Raiders. "Mother's Little Helper" by The Rolling Stones and "White Rabbit" by Jefferson Airplane were descriptive about drug use, but left judgment up to the listener. Most of the music that dealt with the topic used metaphors to mask to issue. As songs that seemed to celebrate drug use were being banned from pop radio, many people began to look for hidden references. Drug culture seemed to be divided into casual users, thrillseekers, addicts, prisoners and dead people. One of the persons who embodied this entire spectrum of drug culture was Jim Morrison, whose lyrics for The Doors seemed to become more abstract the deeper he dove into LSD and alcohol. At his most delusional peak, he created some masterpieces such as "Riders On The Storm" and "L.A. Woman." But the popularization of drug culture took its toll in the late sixties and early seventies as a series of drug overdose deaths wiped out some of the top artists of the rock scene including Morrison, Jimi Hendrix and Janis Joplin.

JUST A LITTLE FURTHER OUT THERE

Experimental music was big in the sixties as it could be heard on pop radio or underground FM stations. The most wacked out of bounds song of the entire decade was perhaps "They're Coming To Take Me Away, Ha Ha" by Napoleon XIV, a record that quickly shot up the charts, only to be quickly dropped by radio programmers concerned about the psychiatric health of their listeners. The song was done in a rhythmic spoken word style, almost like an early rap record, over a heavy drum beat. The vocalist ranted about being driven crazy by an ex-lover as he was about to be escorted away to the funny farm.

Another experimental song that became huge and set off alarms was "In The Year 2525" by Zager & Evans, which looked at humanity in the distant future. The grim forecast saw humans merging with machines and replacing food with pills. The undertone of the story was that man's lust for greed and power leads to destruction. There simply were no creative boundaries at that time. Another song that deliberately tried to be weird and haunting yet somewhat humorous was "Fire" by The Crazy World Of Arthur Brown.

THE BLENDING OF STYLES

The original ingredients of rock had been country mixed with rhythm & blues. Both country and r&b audiences had been steadily developing into mass subcultures since the forties. But as the sixties unfolded, it turned out r&b would have the bigger influence on rock. The screaming sounds of soul could be heard in the rock of The Rolling Stones, The Who, The Yardbirds, Mitch Ryder & The Detroit Wheels, Creedence Clearwater Revival and many others. Many of these bands acclerated their careers with electric renditions of classic blues covers, such as the Edwin Hawkins song "Suzy Q" covered by CCR or the early Led Zeppelin song "I Can't Quit You Baby," which was originally done by Willie Dixon or "Smokestack Lightning" by The Yardbyrds, originally done by Howlin' Wolf.

The Rolling Stones started out doing covers by blues greats like Muddy Waters. The concept of what would later be called "Americana music" would greatly be shaped by Creedence Clearwater Revival, who became one of the most popular and influential American bands of the sixties, alongside The Beach Boys and The Doors. While CCR's biggest hits were fun dance tunes like "Proud Mary" and "Green River," they also tapped into angry sounding anti-war issues in "Fortunate Son" and their early seventies hit "Run Through The Jungle."

Meanwhile, the folk movement seemed to be intertwined with country influences as in Bob Dylan's "Lay Lady Lay." Pure country music was in the process of being stereotyped as formulaic and simple-minded yet some of the biggest country hits of the era were completely off the wall. Johnny Cash gained notoriety with the funny hit "A Boy Named Sue" and an upbeat love song about going down in flames called "Ring Of Fire." Jeannie C. Riley sung about a parent who was criticized by conservative school personnel because of her desire to wear short shirts in "Harper Valley PTA." Bobbie Gentry raised a lot of questions in the press with her elaborate story of something being thrown off of a bridge in "Ode To Billy Joe." Why didn't the song explain in all of its long-winded detail exactly what that something was? The mystery turned into controversy.

THE MIX OF COUNTRY AND ROCK

Most of Elvis Presley's hits also passed as country including "In The Ghetto," a somber and articulate self-explanatory song written by future country storyteller Mac Davis. Small-mindedness was countered in the uplifting Glen Campbell song "Try A Little Kindness." Even The Beatles covered a country song in 1965 with "Act Naturally," which made light of a sad and lonely person's natural qualifications for playing such movie roles.

But the first rock band to actually completely switch to country was the same band who ushered in psychedelic pop and that was The Byrds. They weren't as successful doing country but "Ballad Of Easy Rider" was one of their most introspective recordings that focused on environmental imagery and a back to nature attitude about following where the river flows. Then in 1969 another psychedelic band, Kenny Rogers & The First Edition crossed over to country with a song about a soldier crippled from the Vietnam War in "Ruby, Don't Take Your Love To Town." The Band, who backed Bob Dylan, was one of the initial catalysts of the Southern rock genre in the late sixties. They paid tribute to the the old South in "The Night They Drove Ole Dixie Down." Perhaps the band that became the most defining creative force on the new Southern rock sound from the late sixties on was the Allman Brothers Band.

CLASSICAL MERGES WITH ROCK

Artists were mixing folk, rock and soul with jazz, country and even classical. One of the bands that successfully mixed classical and pop/rock was The Moody Blues. Their albums featured long songs with orchestral arrangements. One of their most artistic songs was "Nights In White Satin," which even included a spoken word piece that called for sorting out reality from illusion. The song was originally released in 1969 but didn't become a huge hit until three years later. Another brilliant dreamy song was "Tuesday Afternoon." But they even had driving rock songs with compelling lyrics such as "Ride My See Saw," "I'm Just A Singer In A Rock And Roll Band" and "Question." Other emerging classical-inspired rock artists included Yes, Emerson, Lake & Palmer and It's A Beautiful Day, who offered one of the most tranquil musical experiences of the period with "White Bird."

Mason Williams gave rock a spiritually uplifting classical treatment in "Classical Gas," which was one of those powerful instrumentals that painted pictures in the mind without words. An actual R. Strauss classical piece, "Also Sprach Zarathustra," became popular as the theme from the 1968 film 2001: A Space Odyssey, and became a huge hit five years later by Deodato, who offered a jazz/rock version of the piece. "Love Is Blue" by the Paul Mauriat Orchestra was another classical-inspired instrumental pop hit in 1968. Classical influence in pop music would resurface in the disco hit "A Fifth Of Beethoven" by Walter Murphy in 1976.

JAZZ/ROCK FUSION

The fusion of jazz and rock in the late sixties created an interesting new sound that helped elevate rock's image as serious music. Earlier in the decade Dave Brubeck had a minor but artistically influential hit with "Take 5." It marked a growing interest in offbeat jazz with its 5/4 time signature, an absolute rarity in mainstream music. It was a kind of music in which its artists were perceived as intellectual because of its innovative nature. The beatniks who defined themselves as part of "the beat generation" embraced progressive jazz, and by the late sixties progressive jazz shaped much of the basis of the early freeform radio sound.

The pioneers of jazz/rock included Santana, Blood, Sweat & Tears, Tower Of Power and Chicago. Early Chicago recordings were very political and improvisational-sounding epic songs such as "Beginnings" and "Dialogue." Eventually after a string of hit ballads, however, they would fall more into the adult contemporary category. Several jazz/rock artists fell through the cracks in the sixties and seventies but made their mark influencing other musicians. One such band was Electric Flag, whose eight minute jam "Another Country" is a landmark recording that captured the spirit of advanced jazz/rock innovation as well as any other such recording of the era.

TURMOIL, FREEDOM AND ADVENTURE

By the end of the sixties America had become divided over the Vietnam War. As popularity for the war kept sinking, songs about peace became anthems. Some of the protest and peace songs of the era included "Revolution" by The Beatles, "San Francisco" by Scott McKenzie, "Fortunate Son" by Creedence Clearwater Revival and "For What It's Worth" by Buffalo Springfield. By the early seventies, the anti-war crowd was becoming the majority, as the call for peace was echoed in songs like "War" by Edwin Starr and "What's Goin' On" by Marvin Gaye.

In 1971 The Who had one of their biggest album rock hits with "Won't Get Fooled Again," which celebrated revolution only to feel deceived by a new regime that was no different than the regime it conquered. Perhaps the most intriguing song that became an anthem of the peace movement was John Lennon's "Imagine" in 1971. This stunning ballad said more in three minutes than what most artists have said throughout their entire careers. "Imagine" painted a peaceful, sharing world without boundaries.

SOCIAL COMMENTARY SOUL

The music released by Motown Records in the sixties is usually thought of as great dance music. But many of the songs were very inventive songs that commented on society. "Love Child" by Diana Ross & The Supremes was about growing up in a slum and the music stands out as one of the most unique pieces of the entire decade with its wandering melody. Marvin Gaye's hit "I Heard It Through The Grapevine" captured the growing feeling of paranoia in society and relationships. "Ball Of Confusion" by The Temptations dealt with the pessimistic state of the world at that time.

SPY IN THE HOUSE OF SUSPENSE

Adventurous people certainly include the sixties as one of the most adventurous decades ever. It was a great time for spy movies and themes. Popular television series like Mission: Impossible had mind-tickling suspense music for the opening theme song. Even the theme to Batman by Neil Hefti had the same adventurous feel. Another great action series theme was "Hawaii Five-O" by The Ventures. The spy series Get Smart also had a theme that mixed entertainment with underworld paranoia. Co-star Barbara Feldon sung a funny song about her character called "99."

A great theme that laid out a movie-like spy scenario was "Secret Agent Man" by Johnny Rivers, in which the plot culminates with the spy letting the robber get away because he was too busy kissing a mistress, who may have been a decoy. Sometimes, though, if a spy theme were strange enough, it wouldn't need lyrics as in "The Pink Panther Theme" by Henry Mancini. This was the era that introduced James Bond movies and produced some of the best spy themes ever, such as "The James Bond Theme" by The John Barry Orchestra and "Goldfinger" by Shirley Bassey. The spy themes would continue in the seventies with "Live And Let Die" by Paul McCartney & Wings and "Nobody Does It Better" by Carly Simon to name a few. One of the best rock and roll dance songs ever, but not from a movie, was a spy anthem by The Hollies called "Long Cool Woman (In A Black Dress)" in 1972.

HEARTBREAK OF THE LOVE GENERATION

But the sixties overall, despite its adventurous endeavors, seemed to be a decade of heartbreak. The decade started with Elvis singing "Are You Lonesome Tonight" and ended with him singing "Suspicious Minds." A lot of early Beatles and Rolling Stones songs dealt with loneliness and rejection. Then Bob Dylan dove deeper into the feelings of emptiness on a wider scope than just relationships. Dion, who is more associated with the pre-rock era, surprised people with his warm tribute to some of America's most legendary leaders whose lives were taken by assassins in "Abraham, Martin & John."

America had finally landed on the moon but tragically lost some astronauts on one of the subsequent Apollo missions. Black America finally championed civil rights legislation only to see more poverty, race riots and political bigotry to follow. Marriages and relationships began to fall apart as the sexual revolution tempted even the most publicly-prudent people to have secret affairs and multiple relationships. The friction between generations over a growing open-minded discussion of politics and religion broke down family units. Those who rebelled against the establishment chose to live a dangerous life. Some of the best minds of the sixties would sadly die young.

DAWN OF MODERN ROCK

The seeds to what would later be called modern rock were planted in the sixties and early seventies. David Bowie put out a sci-fi thriller song called "Space Oddity" in 1969. T. Rex crafted a subdued Chuck Berry-like rhythmic pulse in "Bang A Gong (Get It On)" in 1971 and mixed it with lustful lyrics. Both Bowie and T. Rex would be credited as influences in the rise of glam rock then modern rock. Lou Reed dealt with hard street issues with The Velvet Underground in songs like "Sweet Jane" and "Waiting For The Man." Iggy Pop, Alice Cooper and MC5 sprung out of Detroit in the late sixties and were all cited as influences of early punk rock, which also drew from a reckless raw sound that appeared in sixties garage acts like The Thirteenth Floor Elevators from Texas. Bob Marley first made his mark in the sixties as the reggae scene was developing in Jamaica. The first reggae song to ever become popular in America was actually in 1968 with "The Israelites" by Desmond Dekker.

STORYTELLERS REACH BEYOND SELF-IMAGE

Storyteller music remained strong in the seventies. Many of these folks painted the individual in opposition to society in stories about struggle for survival. One of the most haunting storyteller songs of the decade was based on an actual event about a mysterious shipwreck called "Wreck Of The Edmund Fitzgerald" by Gordon Lightfoot. The long epic 1977 ballad was a sad tale about a lost passenger ship in the stormy Great Lakes that cost many lives. For people living in the region, the story would prove to be an everlasting unsolved mystery. Another Gordon Lightfoot song called "If You Could Read My Mind" in 1971 built up a hero fantasy and then shot it down with a call to "be real." Neil Diamond sold millions as a storyteller songwriter who dealt with the meaning of life in songs like "I Am...I Said." Narcissism and the challenge to see through narcissism would become big themes in the seventies.

People were heavily into the idea that great music should be theater of the mind. That's how a folk artist like Don McLean was able to break through with an eight minute song, which would normally not even be considered by pop radio. But with big hits from examples like Bob Dylan and The Beatles breaking the five minute time barrier (while the standard was three minutes), it was gradually becoming acceptable for pop radio to play long epic songs. McLean's eight minute hit "American Pie" in 1972 used metaphors to outline the history of rock and roll, with the curious judgment that the plane crash which killed Buddy Holly in the fifties was "the day the music died." The song was filled with religious imagery and grumpy conservatism, but became a campfire classic partly because of its clever rhyming scheme and picturesque storyline.

THE SOFTENING OF HARSH WORDS

Jim Croce, who was killed in a plane crash in 1973, put out a wealth of conceptual songs. "Bad Bad Leroy Brown" at the time was considered risque because it used the word "damn," which simply was not a word heard in pop music until then, although the freeform format didn't restrict such language as in "Bitch" by The Rolling Stones a few years earlier. But the point of the song wasn't the word "damn," it was the silly story about a guy having an affair with someone's wife. By contrast, most of Croce's other songs had a serious tone as in "I Got A Name," "Operator" and "I'll Have To Say I Love You In A Song." His most classic song was the dreamy waltz "Time In A Bottle," which became one of several songs of the decade to deal with the concept that time is both like a prison and the avenger in all human schemes. Another story song in 1973 that used the word "damn" and became a big hit was "Tie A Yellow Ribbon 'Round The Ole Oak Tree" by Tony Orlando & Dawn. But its rhythm and melody were so bouncy that the song inevitably bounced out of history and today finds itself even outside the oldies format. Bouncy pop sold quickly then faded quickly.

EXPLORING THE DARK SIDE

The antithesis of bright bouncy pop was Pink Floyd. Their 1973 album Dark Side Of The Moon remains a landmark today. The brilliance of the project lay in the arranging and production of the music. The result was a new, more spacial sonic experience as in the songs "Time" and "Brain Damage." The song "Money" used a strange time signature and sinister bass line to make a statement about greed. It was completely theater of the mind. The album lyrics pointed to a dark view of the world driven by money and an "us and them" mentality tempered by the passage of time. However deep the intentions were, the album became a conversation piece for university professors. It all came from the same studio where the Beatles unloaded their creativity, Abbey Road.

The influence of The Beatles, The Doors and other creative acts in the sixties inspired several new directions in music and one that captivated Pink Floyd was the development of art rock. Their next album Wish You Were Here continued to explore deep social messages, as the title track was a tribute to Syd Barrett, who had founded the band but lost himself mentally through drug abuse. "Have A Cigar" was an expose of the music industry whereas "Welcome To The Machine" dealt with the broader topic of corporate control taking over people's lives.

ROCK MOVES ON

Led Zeppelin were the most celebrated band of the electric blues rockers. They came up with a wide selection of new blues riff inventions. Their most celebrated song has been "Stairway To Heaven." When the album came out in 1971, no single was issued for "Stairway" but AM radio played it anyway. It was one of those rare instances when pop radio broke one of its most sacred rules. The song didn't fit the tightly-formatted top 40 radio of the day for several reasons, with the most obvious being that the song was over seven minutes long.

Another difference was that the song did not have a reoccuring chorus. It moved more like an epic story or even a classical piece, since it featured several distinct sections. It also had lengthy guitar solos, which were usually clipped out of pop radio. In other words, everything about "Stairway" fit the description of the final days of freeform as opposed to what was to follow. Yet, it was such a monumental recording that AM top 40 couldn't avoid it. Nevertheless, the image of the band steered more toward hard rock and so the band was stereotyped. Most of their music was actually either acoustic or very melodic and incorporated world sounds such as reggae in "D'Yer Mak'er" and Eastern sounds in "Kashmir."

One of the ironic turns of the seventies in music was the growing popular acceptance of the Southern political mindset. Canadian transplant to San Francisco Neil Young wrote about enlightenment in "Heart Of Gold" and then a slam on conservative politics in "Southern Man." The rebuttal came from Florida band Lynyrd Skynyrd in "Sweet Home Alabama," a song that directly criticized the Neil Young song. It also talked about not being bothered by Watergate, which implied that Nixon critics were just paranoid. Then again, it could also be taken that government corruption doesn't have to ruin one's day. It also praised the Alabama governor, who at the time was one time segregationist George Wallace. Back then such Southern Democrats sided with the conservatives against liberals and the counter-culture. The band made a progressive anti-gun statement, though, in "Saturday Night Special." Then, of course, they crafted the anthem of the free-spirited movement, "Free Bird." Overall, Southern rock seemed to be stereotyped as backwoods biker music.

THE MAINSTREAM BEGINS TO FRAGMENT

At one time the entire youth of America was wired into the same big pop scene and listened to the same top 40 music experience. That was how things were in the fifties and sixties. But starting in the late sixties and heavily impacting the seventies was the move for radio toward fragmentation of formats. In other words, the top 40 audience was growing up so the music industry had to create different formats for different age groups. Radio stations began doing research in the mid-seventies to find out what the most commercially viable music was. What they found out was that dance records appealing to females had the most immediate impact with record sales and radio ratings. That's why a lot of AM top 40 stations started leaning heavily toward dance music beginning with the 74-75 period.

By the time disco had taken over AM radio, rock fans were in the process of migrating to FM album rock stations in droves. Freeform stations of the sixties transformed into album rock or adult progressive stations of the seventies. Radio consultants became just as influential with FM rock stations in the seventies, as top 40 consultants had become in the sixties. In other words, the radio experience was becoming more researched and controlled with less room for spontaneity and experimentation, even on the FM dial. The rock format essentially split into adult rock and a more youthful rock. Fleetwood Mac led the adult scene while Led Zeppelin captured the harder rocking youth.

1974: END OF THE GOLDEN ERA

The year 1974 was an interesting period in pop music. It essentially marked the end of AM pop radio's golden age. Ratings began to slip everywhere as FM radio was steadily growing in popularity. It was an exciting year for music while the following year would reflect a shift in pop radio toward highly researched dance music, which became the bulk of the national top 40 from then on. In other words, the era of top 40 being the format for everyone was ending as pop was becoming a certain sound instead of the best of everything. So much variety and unusual songs were major hits in 1974. It was probably the last year in which every style imaginable surfaced in a pop hit. Even the sweet pop song "Seasons In The Sun" by Terry Jacks had an unusual twist with melancholy lyrics about dying sung over tranquil guitars, then blasting into the bright sing-song chorus.

Cher told a murder mystery in "Dark Lady" in which the female storyteller shot her lover. Carly Simon and James Taylor did an upbeat jazz/rock rendition of a nursery tune "Mockingbird." Carl Douglas helped elevate martial arts for the first time in pop music with "Kung Fu Fighting." The Guess Who's "Clap For The Wolfman" was a nutty song about how cool of a lady's man Wolfman Jack was. The hit featured clips from the famous national DJ of the fifties. But nuttier than that from a DJ perspective was the song "Life Is A Rock (But The Radio Rolled Me)" by Reunion, which featured a fast-talking DJ who ripped through a long list of prominent names in the music industry.

Ray Stevens had a half spoken word/half singing novelty hit with "The Streak," a song that joked about the sudden trend at the time of people running naked in public. Another more outrageous novelty hit was "Earache My Eye" by Cheech & Chong, in which the last part of the song was simply a spoken word skit with no music underneath. Jim Stafford mixed spoken word comedy with singing on several of his songs including the sexually confused "My Girl, Bill" and the drug innuendo song "Wildwood Weed." A more serious spoken word record that paid tribute to America from a Canadian politician's perspective was "The Americans" by Gordon Sinclair. Mocedadas out of Spain had a melodically rich smash with "Eres Tu," sung completely in Spanish, which was rare on the American pop scene. The last time an all Spanish song made the American top ten was "Guantanemera" by the Sandpipers in the mid-sixties.

Some of the biggest hits of 1974 had no words at all. For ragtime fans of the early 1900's, Marvin Hamlisch scored big with the Scott Joplin instrumental "The Entertainer" from the movie The Sting. The single's flipside was another piano instrumental called "Solace," which also became a favorite from the movie, although never officially a hit on the charts. There were several other fine instrumental hits that year, which would become uncommon in later years. MSFB's "TSOP (The Sound Of Philadelphia)," The Commodores' "Machine Gun," "Tubular Bells" (from The Exorcist) by Mike Oldfield and Love Unlimited Orchestra's "Love's Theme" were big instrumental hits that year.

As far as new studio tricks, "Tell Me Something Good" by Rufus was the first record to mix the human voice with electric guitar as a new sound, thanks to help from Stevie Wonder. That was the same year that Wonder vocalized his views on the ghetto in "Living For The City" as well as his criticsm of President Nixon in "You Haven't Done Nothin." The song actually became a hit shortly after Nixon resigned, an important time marker in history. Another song that spoke in historical terms was ABBA's "Waterloo," which celebrated the downfall of Napoleon, even though the song reminded us about history repeating itself.

All four Beatles became big hit solo artists of the seventies, but 1975 was the year the Beatles officially disbanded, despite not putting out new material in five years. It would also be the last year in which all four Beatles appeared on the charts with new material the same year. The period 1970-1975 was filled with a lot of ex-Beatle solo hits. George Harrison wrote "Photograph" for Ringo in 1973, which was a rather somber song about reflecting on a lost love. From then on, though, Ringo hung with more fun-spirited material. Ringo had a goofy hit written by Hoyt Axton called "No No Song" about giving up drugs in 1975. A year earlier "Band On The Run" by Paul McCartney & Wings was like a medley of three distinct tunes moving from ballad to an adventurous instrumental interlude to a feel good rock song about escape.

But the big story emerging from the U.K. at that time was Elton John, who briefly partnered with John Lennon on the carefree rocker "Whatever Gets You Thru The Night" and on Elton's remake of "Lucy In The Sky With Diamonds." For awhile, Elton ruled the airwaves with conscious music that challenged pop radio. Many of his songs were wordy orchestral ballads with rich wandering melodies such as the Marylin Monroe tribute "Candle In The Wind," "Goodbye Yellow Brick Road" and "Don't Let The Sun Go Down On Me." But the upbeat rocker "The Bitch Is Back" was a challenge to radio because the word "bitch" at the time was still considered profanity.

Meanwhile, The Rolling Stones were still cranking out solid party music about the rock and roll lifestyle in "It's Only Rock And Roll." Other British invaders of the past came back with unique hits as in Eric Clapton's cover of the Bob Marley reggae song "I Shot The Sheriff" and Jethro Tull's "Bungle In The Jungle." Part of the magic of 1974 was the challenge for each artist to sound unique. After 1974, unfortunately the challenge seemed to be just to fit in, as dictated by the music industry. Imagination was under attack. It was perhaps the last year in which the status quo of pop radio was shaped by Beatlemania. The ethic of The Beatles, which was embraced by the entire music industry up until then, was to make every song sound different. Essentially, it meant broad experimentation of musical ideas as opposed to a narrow writing to fit a specific genre.

A heavy emphasis was still placed on meaningful lyrics in the mid-seventies by songwriters. Again, 1974 was perhaps the last year to have a lot of storyteller songs. "Cat's In The Cradle" by Harry Chapin told the story of how a son came to neglect his father manifested from his father's neglect. "The Night Chicago Died" by Paper Lace told the Al Capone story. "Billy Don't Be A Hero" by Bo Donaldson & The Heywoods was about a soldier who upset his wife by trying to be a war hero, only to die in battle. "One Tin Soldier" by Coven from the movie Billy Jack told the story of how a peaceful mountain kingdom (from long ago) was wiped out by greed-stricken warriors who wanted the kingdom's treasure which turned out to be a stone that read "peace on earth."

An uncharacteristically trippy song for Helen Reddy was "Angie Baby," which told a haunting fantasy about a girl who lives her life "inside the radio" and rages a psychic war with an unsuspecting interested male. "Rock And Roll Heaven" by The Righteous Brothers was a look back at rock stars who had died young in rock's short history. Even the most mundane rock songs of the time like "Rock On" by David Essex seemed to be saying something about the entire culture asking which direction rock and rollers should move.

More evidence that 1974 marked the end of an era was the debut of the popular television series Happy Days. The show reached back in time to the fifties with the rise of rock and roll. It educated a whole new generation about Elvis, Chuck Berry and the other pioneers of rock. They say in Cultural Anthropology courses that when a culture becomes infatuated with looking back at itself, it indicates a lack of new ideas and a sense that the culture is dying on the vine. Was that the case of Happy Days? What actually seemed to be happening was the birth of nostalgia as a marketable product treated as if it were a new product.

Back in those days people would say "wow" when they heard a familiar song for the first time in a long time. But with the popularity of nostalgia, oldies became a viable radio format. The only problem was that these oldies stations would play the same short list of biggest hits in a regular rotation, which reduced the "wow factor." In that sense, Happy Days and all of its influences marked the end of an era of unpredictable nostalgia. The show was so popular that its theme song "Rock Around The Clock" by Bill Haley & The Comets made a comeback on the charts in 1974.

THE MUSIC RESEARCH BEGINS

As it turned out the period 1974-1975 marked the beginning of the end of the golden age of AM pop radio. The radio industry was moving toward consultants and research, taking a lot of musical decision-making out of the hands of disc jockeys. In the fifties disc jockeys at many stations decided their own playlist, but from the early sixties on, Program Directors began wrestling away that power following a congressional investigation into radio payola. Research turned out to be one of the final nails in the DJ coffin, as research found that a majority of listeners don't like DJ babble or too much unfamiliar music. Because America was experiencing an energy crisis, the petroleum-based vinyl record also suffered in the 74-75 era. Record company gatekeepers had to deal with rising oil prices so they began to trim their rosters and focus signings on proven marketable acts.

NEW SOUNDS AND IMAGES ARISE

Even with a more watered down pop era on the horizon, the 1975-1977 era wasn't necessarily bad music. In fact, some of the records were ahead of their time. "#9 Dream" by John Lennon was a dreamy meditative tune but it was "Dream Weaver" by Gary Wright a year later that took pop culture on their first musical astral adventure. Then the topic of what to expect when you die came up in Blue Oyster Cult's "Don't Fear The Reaper." They moved more toward theater of the mind with "Godzilla." Even more picturesque was Kiss, who posed in make-up as super heroes and even inspired a comic book. Meanwhile, Alice Cooper, who had also worn make-up and did wild stunts onstage, shocked everyone with his sympathetic ballad for women called "Only Women (Bleed)."

The first all-electronic record to chart in America was "Autobahn" by Kraftwerk in 1975, which was mainly an instrumental with occasional German lyrics. The influence of the synthesizer in pop music grew from that point on. In a sense, disco and techno developed on the same timeline and crossed paths several times. Then in another ironic twist, the merging of techno and punk created the basis for new wave music and the early modern rock format.

THE MELLOW JOURNEY

The seventies may be remembered as a reaction to the sixties whereas the eighties clearly marked a new era. A shift from the industrial era to the technological era had been going on gradually throughout the century until escalating rapidly in the 1980s. The transition between these two eras seemed to coincide with disco music, which marked a shift from acoustic and electric instruments to electronic instruments. For many people, the acceleration of the technological revolution created what writer Alvin Toffler called "Future Shock," which was the title of his best selling book in the early seventies. He talked about how this acceleration was forcing people to face the future at a much more rapid pace than people could handle. Perhaps this may explain why so many ballads, instead of rock and roll, hit the top of the charts in the seventies. On top of workers beginning to be replaced by computers, people needed to cool off from the anxiety and paranoia from the turbulence of the war, the corruption of Watergate and a period of inflated prices and a sagging economy. Then the bright happy sound of disco, not rock and roll, became the new mainstream.

The beautiful lush pop ballads of the seventies were highlighted by string sections and classical-based arrangements. Some of the most emotionally moving ballads of the decade included "The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face" and "Killing Me Softly with His Song" by Roberta Flack, "Touch Me In the Morning" and "Do You Know Where You're Going To" by Diana Ross, "The Way We Were" and "Evergreen" by Barbara Streisand, "Behind Closed Doors" and "The Most Beautiful Girl" by Charlie Rich, and "Let's Stay Together" by Al Green.

The idea of rock and rollers doing soft ballads had been around since Elvis, but seventies rock artists were starting to give a more serious tone to ballads that went beyond romance such as the self-conscious about aging song "Dream On" by Aerosmith. The band Chicago had a lot of big hit ballads and were more serious in the romantic vein, although they diverted in 1975 with a song called "Harry Truman," a tribute to the 33rd President. Overall, their catalogue had contained a wealth of forward-thinking songs such as "Feelin' Stronger Every Day" and "Make Me Smile." They began to shift to softer slickly produced commercial pop ballads in 1973 with "Colour My World" and then "Just You N' Me" and "I've Been Searching So Long" the following year. Their atmospheric classic "Wishing You Were Here" in 1975, which featured ocean sound effects and The Beach Boys on background vocals seemed to be a forerunner of new age music, although they were never given credit in that genre. Their number one hit "If You Leave Me Now" is one of the benchmarks of the decade for pop as polished art. Other bands that scored big with mellow hits included The Eagles, Fleetwood Mac and James Taylor.

STILL SEARCHING FOR OTHER WORLDS

One of the most creative songs of 1976 but didn't become a hit was "Calling Occupants Of Interplanetary Craft" by Klaatu, which was a song about welcoming aliens from outer space to Earth. A few years later The Carpenters covered the song and it still wasn't a hit, but it somehow holds a place in music history. In 1977 George Lucas would revitalize the concept of space travel and futuristic alien societies with the movie Star Wars, in which the main title became a huge hit. The movie would inspire countless new outer space adventure films that highlighted modern special effects, not to mention politicians on how to figure out a defense system that could end the threat of nuclear war. As futuristic as the theme of the movie implied, it was actually nostalgia in many ways, as Star Wars and its imitators drew more from classic storylines and ideas introduced in sixties television shows and films about other planets.

REFLECTIONS OF THE ROCK MOVEMENT

As rock radio became more about a homogenized sound than a poetic ethic, more and more bands started to sound alike. The idea that rock had a message was beginning to get drowned out by a sea of corporate images. Rock music itself was being downplayed by its own masters. David Bowie teamed up with John Lennon in 1975 to give us "Fame," which commented on the downside madness that comes with fame. Sonically, the record used a lot of effects to pull off a convincingly dark dance sound. The Eagles and their epic song "Hotel California" marked a turning point in the history of conscious music. The song was very metaphorical and seemed to examine the nature of self-indulgence. Ultimately, it was about being trapped in one's own delusions. The song was like an epilogue to the sixties party scene, which implied that those indulgences culminated in a nightmare. A harder rocking song on the Hotel California album that actually celebrated the party lifestyle was "Life In The Fast Lane." The band's guitarist Joe Walsh had a humorous solo hit a few years later that brushed off wild life consequences in "Life's Been Good."

Two of the best storyteller artists of the decade, who seemed to follow the direction of Dylan while maintaining their own identities were Bruce Springsteen and Bob Seger. Springsteen's hit "Born To Run" had elements of freedom, recklessness and alienation mixed together. The song that broke his career wide open was "Blinded By The Light," which was covered by Manfred Mann in 1977 and hit number one in America with its playful wordiness full of metaphors and inside jokes about who knows what, but it still somehow painted pictures in the mind. His most monumental tunes, though, would come in the following decade.

Bob Seger & The Silver Bullet Band would also be big in both decades with the seventies being their stronger period. "Night Moves" described a diary-like life story that focused on the transition from adolescence to adulthood. "Still The Same" was another human drama, except it talked about someone else's story, which centered around a life of getting away with taking chances. While Springsteen and Seger were given a lot of credit in the period for their human condition songs, they never quite tapped into the depth that was revealed in the 1978 Kansas song "Dust In The Wind." Unlike a lot of artistic rock songs, this one was straight to the point. The song was like a reality check for those who take life for granted and painted humans as specks of dust instead of grandiose icons. But as compelling as the song was, it would actually turn out to be one of the last big hits of the twentieth century to look at life under a microscope.

BIRTH OF A DISCO NATION

The sound that began transforming America into a 24/7 dance party was disco. It had roots in Latin music and was ushered into American consciousness via R&B artist Barry White with his solo efforts as well as orchestral work with Love Unlimited Orchestra. From early 1974 on the emphasis on pop records began to shift more and more from lyrics and melody to repetitious dance beats. By 1976 the disco sound, which was built on quarter note drum beats could be heard on most pop records. Disco also brought back traditional ballroom dance patterns borrowed from dances like the fox trot, cha-cha and mambo. Disco was heavily driven by beat and not necessarily lyrics or inventive melody. Some disco songs, however, were inventive like the wordy "Stayin' Alive" by The Bee Gees, or the storyline in Barry Manilow's "Copacabana." Another decent storyteller who went disco was Rod Stewart in "Da Ya Think I'm Sexy."

One of the most unique disco hits at the time was the humorous "Rapper's Delight" by Sugar Hill Gang, which turned out to be the first rap record to make the top 40 in 1980. The women's movement got a boost from Gloria Gaynor's "I Will Survive," which happily declared independence from a relationship. Disco seemed to have a more interesting sound when it fused with new wave in Blondie's "Heart of Glass" and some one hit wonders like "Pop Muzik" by M and "Funky Town" by LippsInc, which all sounded strange at the time. Meanwhile the development of funk was producing some exceptionally innovative dance records as in "Love Rollercoaster" by Ohio Players, "Superstition" by Stevie Wonder, "Brick House" by The Commodores, "Got To Give It Up" by Marvin Gaye, "Shining Star" by Earth, Wind & Fire and "Tear The Roof Off The Sucker" by Parliament. A very interesting softer funk but incredibly surreal record was "Strawberry Letter #23" by Brothers Johnson.

SIMPLE BLANKET BUZZ WORDS

Historians like to paint decades with broad strokes. They like to sum it up in a few words. They wrote about the sixties to be "turbulent" and associated it with civil rights, Vietnam, protest, counter-culture and the love generation. For awhile they tried to sum up the seventies as the "me decade" but this simplistic synopsis didn't stick, even though it accurately pointed to the narcissism of disco and the arrogance of hard rock. But the seventies took many unpredictable turns. On one hand, it seemed to be a mellow decade with the rise of adult rock stations and artists like The Eagles and Fleetwood Mac. On the other hand it is remembered as a fairly wild decade with fast disco music and energetic rock bands like Aerosmith and Van Halen.

But to sum up the entire senventies as self-indulgent would be ignorant when you consider there were plenty of examples of songs that called for social unity as in "Listen To The Music" by The Doobie Brothers, "Joy To The World," by Three Dog Night and "Love Train" by The O'Jays. A lot of the pop music of the first half of the decade showcased words and melody while the latter half highlighted rhythm, arranging and performance. It actually shaped up to be a montage of all previous decades combined with more advanced and elaborate recording production. A big difference from previous decades was an angrier, more aggressive rock that emerged in two strands: metal and punk.

ROCK GETS HARDER

Prior to Black Sabbath, some of the hardest rocking bands in show biz had been The Yardbirds, Jimi Hendrix Experience, Steppenwolf, Iron Butterfly and garage bands like DC5 and The Stooges. Black Sabbath were pioneers of early metal and their song "Paranoid" summed up the angry metal disposition. Punk culture revolved around dissatisfied youth about the system. It was never meant to be a conformist trend but that's what it turned out to be once it was packaged by independent marketers who labeled it "generation x" and attempted to lump everyone born after the mid-sixties into one category of angry vampires with spiked hair and black attire on the verge of revolt.

Even Johnny Rotten of The Sex Pistols said in his writing that the point to punk was about individuality, but was widely misunderstood. The angst in songs like "Anarchy In The U.K." and "God Save The Queen" were not taken so much as political songs, but simply as energetic angry attitude songs. And so style, instead of content, went on to shape the foundation of later punk, new wave and modern rock. Another early punk artist, Richard Hell & The Voidoids, tried to apathetically define the new movement as "The Blank Generation." Many from this new wave of artists strove to alter the definition of cool credibility to someone who experieced mindlessness, recklessness, carelessness, disillusion, alienation, decadence and depression. Yet, there was a strand of new wave artists who treated the music as a reference point from where the sixties left off. Many sixties hits ended up being covered by modern rock artists for years to come. In America The Ramones were considered punk pioneers with songs like "Sheena Is A Punk Rocker."

NEW DIRECTIONS WITH NEW WAVE

The 1978-1979 period, following the punk revolution that developed from 1974-1977, was interesting because several new wave artists began crossing over to the pop charts, in which disco threatened to overthrow the entire mainstream. Blondie was very successful at satisfying the disco crowd as well as the new wave scene with songs that mixed both styles such as "Heart Of Glass." Talking Heads also appealed to the mainstream even though their music was unconventional with songs like "Psycho Killer" and "Life During Wartime." Their cover of Al Green's "Take Me To The River" set the tone for eerie keyboard effects and sinister bass lines that would become common in new wave music. Elvis Costello came on the scene as the literate spokesman of the new movement with songs like "Oliver's Army," "Alison" and "What's So Funny About Peace, Love And Understanding."

The Cars seemed to straddle the line between old world and new world rock but their debut album The Cars stands up as one of the most creative and cohesive works of the era. Their lyrics seemed like pieces of dreams mixed in a blender yet they also seemed to articulate clearly the rock and roll lifestyle and how love stories don't always have happy endings as in "My Best Friend's Girl" and "Bye Bye Love." A similar theme about getting burned by an obsession was "Is She Really Going Out With Him" by Joe Jackson. The Police shocked the establishment with their song about prostitution called "Roxanne." The most outrageous band to come on the scene with party music that had nothing to do with disco was The B-52's. Their song "Rock Lobster" sounded adlib like just ridiculous psycho babble over basic frat rock with a twist.

SHIFTING BACK TO BASIC GROOVES

It's important to understand that a lot of art rock had become too serious for an audience who craved party music. Many art rock acts found themselves falling out of fashion by the end of the seventies as a new excitement was growing for back to basics rock. Even Queen, who had the unconventional rock opera hit "Bohemian Rhapsody" in 1975 moved back to basics four years later with "Crazy Little Thing Called Love," a brilliant fifties-sounding swing dance song that somehow sounded like no other particular song. Their hit "Another One Bites The Dust" in 1979 was based on a funky bass line similar to the one used by Chic in the disco hit "Good Times" a year earlier. Yet Queen's hit about a subway shootout sounded like no other disco or rock song.

Some of the more durable rock bands thoughout the seventies gained credibility simply by mixing basic Chuck Berry-inspired rock with forward-thinking lyrics. Steve Miller Band had great success with songs like "Rock N' Me" and "Jet Airliner" in this vein. A more inventive song from the band was "Fly Like An Eagle," which used swirling riffs that accompanied lyrics that told society to pull together as a team and help others. The seventies, though, would inevitably be summed up as the "me decade." Reflecting that particular state was the Miller classic "Take The Money And Run," which featured a theatrical Bonnie & Clyde-like storyline. The message of "Bohemian Rhapsody" may have been even more foreshadowing in the transition from social consciousness to who cares with its apathetic lyrics culminating with "nothing really matters to me."

FROM ACTIVISM TO APATHY

The idea that radio's role was to entertain and not to educate grew out of the audience research that began to dictate radio programming in the mid-seventies. As a result, the music scene was populated with less and less meaningful songs and more and more calculated formulas that appealed to the lowest common demoninator. One song that cut through the hype with a sharp message was "The Logical Song" by Supertramp in 1979. The song questioned one's identity and whether or not the things we learn in school are useful. A similar theme came out later that year in Pink Floyd's "Another Brick In The Wall." It came from their landmark double album soundtrack of the half-animated film The Wall, which dealt more with the state of war and propaganda. Neil Young brought back the idea that rock and roll music, when all is said and done, is a celebration of freedom in his rock radio hit "Rockin' In The Free World." Neil was able to cross barriers between hippies and punks by paying tribute to Johnny Rotten of The Sex Pistols in "Rust Never Sleeps."

A wedge seemed to be growing between the hippies and the punks, but the true rock fan didn't fall for the gen-x marketing scheme that attempted to create friction between generations just to corner the fashion market. It worked with the hippies versus their elders because of grass roots social changes. But after the sixties, the concept of generation gap was completely contrived by various corporate entities whose leaders misunderstood the counter-culture phenomenon. Consequently, many of the young people who conformed to the supposed non-conformist punk ethic, ended up supporting the exact same ideals of the hippy movement, yet found themselves in opposition of it due to corporate conditioning in music and other products that downplayed message and awareness and focused on mean attitude. Overall, less attention was being paid to lyrics having social relevance in popular music and more attention was being paid to imaging and marketing. The general population fell for it, eating up whatever fabricated trend the music industry offered.

ETHIC IN TRANSITION

An entertaining song called "The Devil Went Down To Georgia" by The Charlie Daniels Band told the story about a young fiddle player who challenged the devil to a musical duel. It was a funny way to close out the seventies, a decade that seemed to embrace a fear of the devil, which had been personified in the film The Exorcist earlier in the decade. And with Bob Dylan falling out of spokesmanship for his generation while trying to switch to gospel with "Gotta Serve Somebody" in which he painted a god versus devil dilemma, there seemed to be a push back to traditional religion even by rock icons. Christian imagery had actually appeared in rock since early seventies rock operas like Jesus Christ Superstar and Godspell. George Harrison's "My Sweet Lord," Norman Greenbaum's "Spirit In The Sky" and Bob Dylan's "Knockin' On Heaven's Door" in the early seventies were evidence that rock was trying to find religion. But by the late seventies rock critics were talking more about who the next Bob Dylan would be than about Bob Dylan.

DYLAN REVISITED

Many acts had incorporated the Dylanesque style in their music as Dylan's career was already being assessed by scholars. One of the big things Dylan proved was that one could gain an audience without showing off vocal talent. Dylan represented content over style, which energetic pop radio went along with because he was popular, but became resistant to once disco looked like the next phase. The Dylan style was less polished and sounded more conversational than theatrical. One of those artists who picked up on this down to earth delivery was Mark Knopfler. His band Dire Straits and their wordy jazz/rock song "Sultans Of Swing" challenged the rock world to get more creative on guitar. The song was so refreshing it kind of made the typical rock god lead guitarists look a little foolish. It was an amazing sound that mixed folk, rock, jazz, blues and a hint of country that followed no previous pattern and sounded exceptionally melodic for guitar rock. Even though the complex rock opera and classical/rock trends subsided, advanced musicians playing jazz/rock gained credibility.

JAZZ NEVER DIED

Average White Band kept the development of jazz/rock moving with the instrumental "Pick up the Pieces" in 1975. Steely Dan had a string of lyrical hits with lush elaborate arrangements. Their album Aja is one of the most critically acclaimed musical treasures of all time, in which all the songs are high quality such as the title track, "Peg," "Deacon Blue," "Josie" and "Black Cow." Pure jazz instrumentals even made lasting impressions such as "Feels So Good" by Chuck Mangione, "Breezin'" by George Benson, "Morning Dance" by Spyro Gyra and several television and movie themes. Horns and saxophones never really left the scene, but because of improved recording technology the sound became more polished than in previous decades, in which those instruments had a much rougher sound, especially in rock and roll. A similar process was happening with punk and new wave music. Punk started out as low budget guitar rock, yet its spin-off genre new wave had a much more glossy and expensive studio sound, on top of being keyboard-driven. Al Stewart was an under-rated pop artist who created a softer jazz/rock sound with songs that sounded like musical lectures for a history class as in "Year Of The Cat" and "On The Border." His 1979 hit "Time Passages" was a surreal and elaborate production with lyrics that created a sensation of time travel, only for the listener to realize that living in the past can be a lonesome experience.

NOSTALGIA BECOMES A PART OF CURRENT CONSCIOUSNESS

One of the tenets of the rock ethic was to create original material. But rock was meeting a great challenge with an overwhelming amount of nostalgic material. The roots of American popular music were folk, rock, country, soul, jazz and classical. The culture began to reflect on the fifties starting in 1972 with the hit "American Pie" paying tribute to Buddy Holly. Then in 1973 was the film American Graffiti, which inspired the television series Happy Days a year later. The fifties made an even bigger comeback with the death of Elvis Presley in 1977. After John Lennon was murdered in 1980 the media and critics began to reflect on The Beatles' influence since the sixties.

In the summer of 1981 a novelty record called "Medley" by Stars On 45 paid tribute to the Beatles with a collage of mostly Beatle songs. The record topped the charts. It was a strange record because even though there had been medleys in the past, even by the Beatles themselves, there hadn't been a medley before that featured so many songs on one hit record. It inevitably inspired other medleys such as "The Beach Boys Medley," which featured actual Beach Boys recordings. A similar treatment surfaced in "The Beatles Movie Medley." Meco did a medley of movie themes with "Pop Goes The Movies." Other medley tributes were paid to the sixties, Motown, Stevie Wonder, The Rolling Stones.

RETURN OF THE OLD WORLD

Through the medley trend pop culture even reached back as far as the forties in Larry Elgart's "Hooked On Swing." Even classical pieces made a comeback with "Hooked On Classics" by The Royal Philharmonic Orchestra. The swing toward pre-rock revival seemed counter to the rock ethic, as it had appeared throughout the sixties that rock had become the new American sound that outdated previous styles. But now rock itself seemed in danger of being overshadowed by multiple genres. The big band sound was supposedly a dinosaur that represented the establishment of the old guard. Rock was supposed to be the vanguard of a new generation. But the injection of the ballroom sound gradually put swing music back on the map with young people as the music eventually proved to be timeless.

It all kind of started in 1973 when Bette Midler covered the Andrews Sisters World War II hit "Boogie Woogie Bugle Boy." Then a few years later the disco group The Ritchie Family covered the Latin instrumental "Brasil," which was originally a monster Latin hit by Xavier Cugar in the thirties. Then in 1977 Dr. Buzzard's Original Savannah Band actually kicked off the medley craze, but with just three ballroom standards: "Whispering/Cherchez La Femme/Se Si Son." That same year Meco's cover of the Star Wars theme also contained a section called "Cantina Band," which immitated the big band sound.

Lounge music also made a huge mark in 1977 by artists Al Martino, Englebert Humperdinck, Tom Jones and Paul Anka. Even Elvis, the king of rock and roll had turned to the lounge classic "My Way" as one of his final recordings. The ballroom sound continued in 1978 with Barry Manilow's mambo hit "Copacabana." Little River Band mentioned The Glenn Miller Band in their loungy hit "Reminiscing." Stevie Wonder had paid tribute to Duke Ellington in his 1977 hit "Sir Duke." Then in 1980 the biggest legend of the entire lounge scene, Frank Sinatra, returned with his version of "Theme From New York, New York," making him the first and only artist to have hits in every decade from the forties through the eighties. His success would continue in the nineties with two albums consisting of duets with contemporary pop stars.

The traditional ballroom sound continued in the eighties, but usually with a modern twist as in "Puttin' On The Ritz" by Taco, "Just A Gigolo/I Ain't Got Nobody" by David Lee Roth, "Peter Gunn" by Art Of Noise and "Route 66" by Depeche Mode. The ballroom sound even continued in the nineties with "Swing The Mood" by Jive Bunny, a medley of swing tunes that drew from big band as well as early rock and roll. The fifties swing sound had been carried on by the Los Lobos cover of "La Bamba" and The Stray Cats in the eighties. But in the nineties former Stray Cats singer Brian Setzer shifted his focus on a forties swing sound. Madonna also drew from the same era with her 1990 submissive swing hit "Hanky Panky."

Later in the nineties forties-sounding swing revival was successfully issued by Harry Connick Jr., Cherry Poppin Daddies, Lou Bega, Squirrel Nut Zippers and Big Bad Voodoo Daddy. The past met the present when Natalie Cole sung with her long dead father Nat on "Unforgettable." All throughout this revival, Glenn Miller's original version of "In The Mood" remained a huge dance floor favorite, especially after the more vibrant and cleaner-sounding digital remastered version came out in the nineties. Despite an earlier rock rumour that swing was dead, the more restrained and structured music of the prim and proper Victorian era was back, apparently here to stay. What makes ballroom dancing seem old fashioned, unlike rock or disco, is that the male always leads the female. He decides when she spins and it is her duty to follow. But what ballroom music really proved was the same thing that rock and roll and disco proved: it was fun party music that didn't involve or even require any deep analysis. It was all about having fun. Music doesn't have to be serious. Sometimes you gotta just let it all go.

THE SHAPING OF DANCE CLUB CULTURE

It's funny that rock and roll started out as dance music, but by the time radio consultants sliced and diced its definition in the seventies, it became the antithesis of dance music. Rock and roll would have never come into being if it weren't for the dance floor. It was cultural celebration music, which is what dance music has always been. Early rock and roll was essentially fast swing music, borrowing from aspects of rhythm & blues on one hand and country on the other. Even in the sixties when rock went psychedelic, it was still dance music at parties. Although it had been the advent of folk/rock that redefined rock as a more mature listening experience, even folk hits like "Me And Bobby McGee" recorded by Janis Joplin still found their way on the dance floor. Rock was party crowd music and it powerfully brought people together.

The underlying spirit of rock from the beginning was a sense of liberation from the old rules. Even rock started out as swing dance music that involved traditional structure and dance steps. But by the sixties part of the rock ethic was to tear down traditional structure. Rock then became not only a celebration of freedom, but a style that had no rules. That's why we see from the footage of Woodstock in 1969 so many people dancing mindlessly without regard to dance steps.

But disco music brought back traditional dance steps and a more uniform structure to pop music, which made disco look like the enemy of the rock ethic. While rock had evolved into serious message-oriented music that dwelled on frustrations in relationships and society, disco was more about leaving seriousness behind. Rock had been the celebration of individuals uniting over big picture ideas, but disco was simply about the limits of the dance floor and gyrating body parts to stimulate sexual fantasies and behavior.

The most interesting paradox about disco was that while its lure was rooted in mirrors and narcissistic expression, it was certainly not about being an individual. It was about conforming to materialistic fashion and traditional dance steps. Disco turned out to be the band aid that pasted the establishment and the counter-culture back together, marrying the dance steps and materialism of the establishment with the party sensations and sexual revolution of the counter-culture. In the process, liberal rock artists were angered by the disco invasion, and tried to tear disco down for being repetitious dance music. They saw it taking over so they began lashing out.

Eventually the music industry decided that disco was dance music and rock was not dance music. While this was going on rocker Bob Seger had a huge dance/rock hit in 1979 called "Old Time Rock And Roll" which paid tribute to the original spirit of rock and roll dance music and criticized disco. Another anti-disco song was "Do You Think I'm Disco" by Steve Dahl, which was a parody of the Rod Stewart hit. Other songs that took jabs at disco included "Heat Of The Moment" by Asia, "Rock This Town" by Stray Cats and "Sausalito Summernight" by Deisel.

But despite this false optimism that disco was dead and that real music was back, the off-shoot of disco ended up ruling the decade on the charts. This off-shoot was never called disco, because disco simply became a negative word in the eighties, due to backlash from over-exposure. The new pop came to be known simply as "dance music" or "crossover music," which fused pop and soul.

It was music that had nothing to do with rock and roll rebellion or shaking up the status quo so that it would blend in and not stand out as background music or innocent dance music. It would be slower tempo but the idea of repetitious drum patterns with heavily pronounced beats, shallow lyrics and slick production would inevitably be the sound that reeled in the mainstream. One of the first records to adopt this highly refined industry sound as far as production technique was "Bette Davis Eyes" by Kim Carnes in 1981, although the lyrics and melody were somewhat creative, despite being a throwback tribute to a pre-rock legend.

KICKING OFF THE 80s WITH COUNTRY TRADITION

Country music had dipped out of the pop scene in the disco overthrow of the late seventies with exceptions from Dolly Parton, Crystal Gayle and Kenny Rogers. But country came back strong in 1980 with the movie Urban Cowboy, which spawned hits from Johnny Lee, Anne Murray and Mickey Gilley. Then Dolly Parton co-starred in the movie 9 To 5, which elevated the title track. It was a very poetic and articulate upbeat tune that spoke of job depression, kind of like the 1978 Johnny Paycheck country classic "Take This Job And Shove It." Dolly hit even bigger a few years later with "Islands In The Stream," a duet with Kenny Rogers, who had a string of storyteller songs. A particular standout song of his was "The Gambler," which told the tale of a gambler who died in his sleep after he enlightened folks about the volatile nature of gambling.

Eddie Rabbit had a string of hits highlighted by the escape song "Drivin' My Life Away." In 1980 Willie Nelson crossed over with "On The Road Again," which was about the life of a musician moving from town to town, showing an appeciation for a mass audience. Other country hits crossed over to pop by Oak Ridge Boys, Juice Newton, Don Williams, Ronnie Milsap and others. As the eighties progressed, country split away from the mainstream but grew bigger in popularity as its own genre. Country music in general harped back on the same traditional family values that were associated with ballroom music and the Victorian era.

ELECTRONIC STORYTELLER MUSIC

But the eighties ultimately became a mix of traditional and innovative music. Even though it is sometimes snubbed as a shallow decade, it was more of a wide variety and certainly an expansion of the music industry into multiple genres and subgenres. One of the most innovative pop records ever made was "Don't You Want Me" by Human League in 1982. The song was very odd because it featured a dialogue between a male and female singer, each giving their side of the story about a fallen relationship. On the surface it sounded like a typical argument between ex-lovers about who looked cooler after the split. But on a deeper unnoticed level it was a song that exposed one of the biggest weaknesses of youth culture: egocentric thinking.

"Don't You Want Me" was about how selfishness creates barriers between people. Both the guy and the girl were unable to see the other's viewpoint because they were stuck on their own self defenses in order to appear more in control of the situation. Another innovative aspect of the hit was that it was the first all electronic recording to make number one in America. The group, though, made statements in the press that the guitar was dead and that electronic music was the future. At the time, it looked like maybe they were on to something, but predicting the future is always dangerous. The guitar had been around for centuries and was not about to be forced out of consciousness by industry perceptions or directions.

VIDEO VERSUS IMAGINATION

MTV changed the music world when it launched in 1981 with the Buggles' "Video Killed The Radio Star." A whole new era was born that outdated song and artist mystique. People didn't have to think about lyrics anymore now that the video told the story. Image of the artist became more important as looks and acting ability (or inability) began to overshadow musical and lyrical content. The opportunity was wide open for an artist to still be the next Bob Dylan, or the spokesman of their generation in the eighties. But only a handful stepped forward to even try. Those artists were U2, R.E.M., Sting, Bruce Springsteen, Don Henley, John Mellencamp among a shrinking list of others. Many of the bands, however, were vocal on issues in songs here and there, but the overall message of the eighties from a cultural standpoint was shut up and dance!

BLURRING THE IDENTITY OF ROCK

While the message of the rock gods was blurred by glitter, the message of the new rock was multi-dimensional and intriguing. Yet, modern rock still fit in with traditional rock and it wasn't that much radically different musically. Billy Joel exposed the parallels of new wave and traditional rock in the song "It's Still Rock And Roll To Me" in 1981. Joel at that time was still clinging to a thread of rock credibility on the strength of outspoken songs like "Movin' Out," "Only The Good Die Young" and "My Life," but was quickly falling into the broader adult contemporary category as the artists were shuffled in the transition from one big mainstream to multiple formats. Joel straddled the line for awhile, insisting he was a lunatic in "You May Be Right," but he eventually gave in to his love for nostalgic formulas.

MESSAGES FROM THE ARENA

Even though power chord stadium rock was being challenged by a group of musicians who attempted to be innovative with rock basics, some of the arena rockers stood out as more intelligent than others. Rush, for example, seemed a little more literate than the average arena rock band that was simply flaunting its celebrity status. Their song "Spirit Of Radio" uncovered the story behind how a song becomes a hit on the radio. The song reveals how payola compromises the sound of radio. About a year later the band had a huge radio hit with "Tom Sawyer," which was one of their most celebrated "people versus government" songs. The band issued several songs that made reference to greed and war as in "The Big Money" and "Manhattan Project." Many of their songs dealt with the advancement of civilization and modern themes as in "New World Man."

The icons and the consciousness of the sixties and seventies weren't quite over-with yet, as it turned out. Don Henley had written compelling songs for The Eagles and continued to have a string of message songs in the eighties. "Dirty Laundry" was a metaphor for bad news and provided a rip on television news anchors and their upbeat delivery of tragic events. "All She Wants To Do Is Dance" referred to how people were turning off their minds to what was going on in international affairs. "Boys Of Summer" talked about seeing "a Deadhead sticker on a Cadillac," which was clearly a statement that the cosmic-driven hippies had turned into money-driven yuppies. The song reflected on the love generation and questioned its relevance after a few decades of penetrating the cultural landscape.

Henley grew even more political on the song "End Of The Innocence," which made references to the Reagan Administration and the idea that a materialistic-based society meant a drifting away from the spirit of human nature. Some of the other Eagles released a few conscious songs here and there. Joe Walsh put out a humorous commentary on how the youth of America had become addicted to video games in "Space Age Whiz Kids." He actually had a history of storyteller songs that included "Life's Been Good," a humorous look at the lifestyle of a reckless rock star. Glenn Frey did an entertaining underworld theme for the television series Miami Vice called "Smuggler's Blues."

Tom Petty & The Heartbreakers were also coming on as a stadium band, yet they stayed true to the rock ethic of meaningful lyrics, which they continued to crank out for many years to come. Petty appeared in several interviews knocking disco music and videos as he tried to keep the conscious rock ethic alive. His song "I Won't Back Down" became an anthem for forward moving organizations. For awhile it looked like Styx would be the band that would take conceptual music to the next level. They had done political songs in the seventies and put out Kilroy in 1983, which featured "Mr. Roboto," a rather ridiculous but creative sci-fi view of a robot-driven futuristic society. Alice Cooper also put out a unique sci-fi song in 1980 called "Clones." Alan Parsons Project balanced between pop and experimental, which gave them kind of a sci-fi sound as well as in "Eye In The Sky," in which painted the storyteller as omnipresent. An art rock supergroup appeared in the early eighties called Asia, who kept the Yes tradition of surreal album covers and melodic visionary songs such as "Sole Survivor."

Crosby, Stills & Nash squeezed out a few more conscious songs with "Wasted On The Way" being the standout that reflected on a maturing love generation. The Grateful Dead made an impressive comeback with state of awareness songs "Touch Of Grey," "Hell In A Bucket" and "Throwing Stones." Steve Winwood also pounded out a string of forward-thinking jazzy pop songs like "While You See A Chance," "Higher Love" and "Roll With It." Pink Floyd continued their hypnotic sound without Roger Waters on A Momentary Lapse Of Reason featuring "On The Turning Away." The Moody Blues had trance-like songs like "The Voice" on their 1981 album Long Distance Voyager then they shifted to a more pop flavored but still dreamy sound in later releases such as "Your Wildest Dreams."

Another art rock band, Yes, had a big hit with "Owner Of A Lonely Heart," which touched on the quest for enlightenment. Neil Young shook up MTV with his anti-video song "This Note's For You." The ghost of the 60s/70s culture returned through all these artists, but none sounded quite as mean and raw as CCR's John Fogerty in "Old Man Down The Road." This was surprising because many of the nostalgic artists came back softer, although some of it was refreshing such as the Beach Boys taking our minds away on a tropical adventure in "Kokomo."

CELEBRATION OF THE UNDERDOG

One of the most revealing movies of eighties culture was Revenge Of The Nerds. From the Elvis era up through the eighties there was a status barrier between "cool people" and "nerds." So there was huge pressure on youth to learn how to be cool and part of that education dealt with the rock and roll lifestyle of concerts, record buying and partying. The music scene clearly influenced the thinking of young people. But the cool/nerd high school paradigm began to crumble with the development of punk and new wave, which pulled for the underdog.

Huey Lewis noticed the levelling of the playing field with "Hip To Be Square," which was a follow-up to the pro-cool Sports album that celebrated the rock and roll lifestyle in "Heart Of Rock And Roll" and "I Want A New Drug." The band later addressed the love gone yuppie generation with a song about how love is better than money in "The Power Of Love" and a song that touched on world integration called "Perfect World." They seemed kind of nostalgic for the time, but their attempt to bring back the message of the sixties (characterized by the Beatles hit "All You Need Is Love") inevitably was overshadowed in the eighties by messages in songs like "Material Girl" by Madonna.

A CALL FOR SUBSTANCE OVER STYLE

Sting, influenced by jazz, ska and reggae, had been very vocal on issues raised in Police songs. "De Do Do Do, De Da Da Da" explained how words can lose their meanings and manipulate minds at the same time. "Spirits In The Material World" tied such rhetoric to failure. Many of The Police's songs were critical of politicians and the military industrial complex as in "Bombs Away" and "Invisible Sun." The band's message was more favorable to an integrated world as articulated in "One World." Sting then went on to put out solo work that continued this theme in "Russians" and "History Will Teach Us Nothing." Sting also appeared on the 1985 Dire Straits hit "Money For Nothing," which made fun of MTV's focus on style over substance. Dire Straits had several other great world-conscious songs on the album Brothers In Arms such as the title track and "One World."

TOWARD A PEACEFUL REVOLUTION

One of the characteristics of modern rock in the eighties was that it had an expanded, more international sound. Reggae music had been developing in Jamaica and other tropical places since the fifties. The artist who made the biggest mark in this genre was Bob Marley. Many of his songs called for peace as in "Redemption Song" while he also did songs about revolution such as "Get Up, Stand Up." Marley first put records out in the sixties and issued a rich catalogue of concept reggae throughout the seventies and early eighties. He popularized the genre in America. Marley inspired a whole new generation to embrace reggae and one of the new leaders in the genre became Marley's son Ziggy, who had a very moving melodic hit about moving toward a more caring society called "Tomorrow People."

BIGGER THAN THE EGO

Many of the mid-eighties pop hits tried to have a hint of enlightenment. The movie The Breakfast Club uncovered a lot of high school hang-ups and its theme "Don't You Forget About Me" by Simple Minds was a timeless classic about self-consciousness and the fear of being forgotten. More importantly, it was about confrontation. While most love songs deal with existing relationships, this song seemed to be about trying to force an imaginary relationship to become real. The view of the storyteller was incredibly self-centered, but the beauty of it was in its innocence of reaching out gambling with trust. The song also had a hypnotic, wandering melody.

But the decade would actually feature several songs that went beyond personal scenarios and commented on a bigger community. The Pretenders had a few politically-minded hits such as "Middle Of The Road" and "My City Was Gone." "Everybody Wants To Rule The World" by Tears For Fears took on a more subtle understated tone about power-crazed political leaders, equating them with madness. Their song "Shout" was probably more direct about resistance to fascism. They had a Beatles-sounding hit that resembled "I Am The Walrus" called "Sowing The Seeds Of Love" which was one of the most stream of consciousness songs of the decade.

Another surreal record that sounded Beatle-inspired was "Let's Go All The Way" by Sly Fox, which featured metaphors that called for world peace. The Crowded House hit "Don't Dream It's Over" touched on building self confidence and keeping the dream of world peace alive, despite a violent world. Depeche Mode had a string of dark electronic hits that addressed conscious themes such as the anti-hate song "People Are People." They also had one of the most haunting and mind opening songs ever called "Blashphemous Rumours," which spoke of a god laughing at the world. XTC had an even more counter-religious song called "Dear God," which accused the deity of allowing disease and war.

ANGELS AND DEVILS

One of the biggest rock bands of the decade would be U2, who were at first said to be a Christian band. Songs on The Joshua Tree seemed to move with this image such as "In God's Country" and "I Still Haven't Found What I'm Looking For," which talked about having experience with angels and devils. As it turned out, they weren't really fundamentalists and were closer to the spirituality of rock and roll than any organized religion. In the sixties and seventies it seemed that rock and roll had its own spirituality.

A lot of MTV artists began wearing crosses around their necks to reveal their allegiance. It was unclear where religious beliefs were going but it seemed like there was a growing fear that "judgment day" might be coming in "1999" as described by Prince. An actual Catholic hymn topped the charts in 1986 with Mister Mister's "Kyrie." But most of the pop music that touched on religion did so in a very shallow way and had little to say about spirituality or the universe, as in "Heaven Is A Place On Earth" by Belinda Carlisle. A more curious song about the concept of eternity was "Forever Young" by Alphaville. While the sixties and seventies raised questions, eighties pop culture began to move more in a direction of simple answers.

U2 became the most popular leaders in message music throughout the eighties. Whatever their take on religion was, their songs were more about spirituality and the human condition and not about a specific denomination. Despite the mad rush for bands to start focusing on videos while the song became almost secondary, U2 kept the Bob Dylan spirit alive in music with a lot of social commentary songs album after album. "Pride (In The Name Of Love)" became a peace anthem that saluted Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. The Joshua Tree album became the modern rock genre's most monumental album of its time and was full of songs that spoke of life's journey in a chaotic world. "Bullet The Blue Sky" looked down at the relationship between greed and war.

In 1988 U2 offered a movie called Rattle And Hum, which documented their concert adventures and finally showed the band's humorous side. The film featured the song "Desire" which lyrically was a montage of cultural images and talked about "the year of election." Many of the other songs on the album had been recorded before by U2. One of those songs was the very outspkoken "God Part 2," which clarified the band's position on a lot of issues - that what they really stood for was the same thing The Beatles kept singing about - which was a love for humanity.

LOST MESSAGES

Bruce Springsteen had a string of social-minded hits that put him in the category once owned by Dylan. The album Born In The U.S.A. was particularly interesting not just because it was a huge seller generated by a lot of radio tracks, but because of how it was misunderstood. Apparently President Reagan thought it was a tribute to patriotic conservatives, which turned out to be counter to reality. The statements throughout the album tended to show a cynical view of parties who benefit from war. But the album was too broad and multi-dimensional to be summed up with one theme. "Dancing In The Dark" fell back on romance, but it was still one of the most well-crafted pop songs of its time. The lyrics even rambled self-consciously a little bit. In 1985 Springsteen did a cover of the Edwin Starr hit "War" and clarified his position.

The protest movement of the sixties had not completely died in the eighties because there were constant Vietnam reminder songs such as "Born In The U.S.A." by Springsteen, "Still In Saigon" by Charlie Daniels Band, "Walking On A Thin Line" by Huey Lewis & The News and the hypnotic techno hit "19" by Paul Hardcastle. The song talked about how "the average age of the combat soldier" is 19. The recording sounded like a news program with war sound effects and soundbites from witnesses to battle. The song resolved by stating that many veterans suffer from post-traumatic stress syndrome and continued to be haunted by war in their dark jungle memories. It was pretty heavy for pop radio.

WAR OF THE SENSES

Movies such as Apocalypse Now, Good Morning, Vietnam, Full Metal Jacket and Platoon painted an even uglier picture of the war. If "liberal" Hollywood's intent was to make people hate war, the vibe didn't catch on as the public seemed to have a growing appetite for destruction special effects. At the same time there were several movies like Top Gun that glorified war.

Many songs took on an end of the world complex as in "99 Red Balloons" by Nena, "It's The End Of The World As We Know It And I Feel Fine" by R.E.M. and "It's A Mistake" by Men At Work, which was a message to "Ronnie" to avoid nuclear war. A more comical song about pessimism was "The Future's So Bright I Gotta Wear Shades" by Timbuk 3. Anti-war songs were still embraced by youth throughout the eighties, as many people saw the Cold War as either a threat to destroy civilization or just overblown hype. The theme of love versus war found its way in several pop songs as an undercurrent such as "A Little Respect" by Erasure. Some artists began mixing the imageries of love and war, as in "Love Is A Battlefield" by Pat Benatar. Her most outspoken song, though, seemed to mark the beginning of her career decline in popularity. It was called "Sex As A Weapon" in 1985, which was a hardcore slam on the guerilla marketing of sexuality in mass media.

THE STATUS OF WOMEN

The feminist movement seemed to hit a downturn in the eighties, even though media research pointed to a heavier emphasis on targeting women. In the sixties Aretha Franklin's "Respect" was an anthem for women, as was the Helen Reddy song "I Am Woman" in the seventies. But with the failure of the Equal Rights Amendment in the early eighties, it just seemed that the movement began losing popular influence as its idealism was overshadowed by the Reagan Administration's focus on traditional male-driven conservative values. Women were simply proclaiming that there should not be double standards for men and women. But this stance greatly upset the "good old boys" who were raised on the belief that men should be the ultimate decision-makers. Throughout the history of civilization women were cast into roles inferior to men but the feminist movement threatened to reshape the definition of gender roles.

More and more people began to shift back to the cultural mythology that shaped generations of social mindset. Traditionally, women were thought of by male power figures as beautiful creatures designed to please men. And that view, became the stereotype of the eighties. The view became evident through fashion. Madonna's "Material Girl," whether serious or cynical, was a song that signaled a turning away of pop culture from the quest for spirituality that marked the sixties and seventies. Radio also played a big role in breaking down gender understanding by targeting either male or female audiences. As a result, rock radio became centered on the male perspective with a growing trend toward macho cockiness whereas in pop radio women controlled the tone, but instead of equality-minded feminists they posed more and more as sex objects that command male behavior.

IMBEDDED DANCE MESSAGES

The sound of the protest artist engaging in honest expression was still prevalent in the eighties, despite an overall shift in the mainstream to highly produced dance or background music. Conceptual music was certainly no longer the foreground of popular music, as it had been in the sixties and seventies. The leading stars of the eighties were Michael Jackson, Madonna and Prince. The mainstream was dominated by dance music. Rock artists who had something to say in their music were pushed out of the spotlight by music that wasn't meant to be dissected intellectually at all. Even so, "Billie Jean" told a compelling story of a mysterious pregnancy.

Madonna tried to be controversial in many of her songs and videos, but the material generally relied on a repetitious dance beat and the lyrics never took issues head on. Prince tried to sprinkle in end of the world themes in songs like "1999" and "Let's Go Crazy." His song "Erotic City" was banned on a lot of pop stations for allegedly using the "f word" even though Prince claimed the word was actually "funk." Toward the end of the decade 2LiveCrew would find themselves in jail for using explicit language in songs like "Me So Horny" in shows and recordings. Congress eventually ruled that music with explicit language must be packaged with a warning sticker.

Rhythm & Blues continued to gain ground on the pop landscape throughout the eighties. By the end of the decade the pop charts had become dominated by either R&B or R&B-influenced music with a few hair bands thrown in. R&B legends Marvin Gaye, James Brown, Smokey Robinson and Aretha Franklin all re-emerged in the eighties with well-crafted pop records that further elevated their places in history.

Meanwhile, the new R&B sound grew out of the roots of hip hop. Rap music developed in African-American communities in the seventies and broke onto the pop charts at the end of the decade with Curtis Blow and Sugar Hill Gang. Rap began taking on conscious themes with artists like Grand Master Flash, Public Enemy, NWA, Ice Cube and Ice-T. At first there was paranoia that rap was strictly black music and rock was strictly white music. But with the union of Run DMC and Aerosmith in 1986 came the birth of the rap/rock sound that directly influenced the Beastie Boys and all of the other rap/rock acts to follow.

The most controversial rap would be gangsta rap and/or rap with explicit lyrics such as Body Count's 1992 song "Cop Killer." Ice T was pressured by his label as well as top government officials to pull the song from his rap/metal album with Body Count. He replaced the song with "Freedom Of Speech," as part of rap culture became dealing with the issue of censorship. 2 Live Crew released "Banned In The USA," a parody of the Bruce Springsteen song in 1990 in response to getting arrested for performing explicit songs in the deep south. They had taken rap to a new level of sexual raunchiness in their 1989 hit "Me So Horny." Ice T, though, never got into sleaziness in his rap, as he usually tried to communicate a positive moral that you shouldn't join a gang, as in songs like "Colors," "I'm Your Pusher" and "High Rollers."

SEX AND OTHER TOPICS

Much of the lyrical content of the eighties dealt with either sex or a relationship built on sex. But the sexual revolution was at its peak as multiple partnerships and divorce were still fashionable. The song that captured the essence of the sexually-charged era was "What's Love Got To Do With It" recorded by Tina Turner. The song took the once immoral but now accepted position that sex doesn't have to be based on love. This concept was pushed heavily in movies and television until the AIDS epidemic gradually began to scare people out of having so much casual sex. A creepy techno/spoken word record in the early nineties called "People Are Still Having Sex" by LaTour alleged a paranoid conspiracy theory that "this AIDS thing isn't working."

The Divinyls turned to masturbation in "I Touch Myself" in 1991, although the topic had been dealt with in eighties songs such as "She Bop" by Cyndi Lauper. Beginning in the late eighties the term "safe sex" entered social consciousness. The 1988 George Michael hit "I Want Your Sex" was a celebration of sex, but also a promotion of monogomy. In many ways, the sexual revolution that started in the sixties was winding down. At one point the term "orgy" was a buzz word for party-driven hipsters, but with the onslaught of HIV deaths, the term fell out of popularity and became more associated with stupidity than coolness. With the death of singer Freddie Mercury of Queen in 1991 as rock's first major HIV casualty, even with young people the cultural attitude toward sexuality began to shift from carefree to careful.

SMALL TOWN MESSAGES

On the serious side was John Cougar Mellencamp. His album Scarecrow was the soundtrack of the American heartland. The song "Rain On The Scarecrow" dealt with the rapid disappearance of farms in America. Actually, other artists were commenting on that same topic in songs such as "My City Was Gone" by The Pretenders and "Farm On The Freeway" by Jethro Tull. Mellencamp's "Small Town" was the ironic rural tribute in a m