Classic Rock
ROCK FRAME
06/01/202
by Paolo Busellato
The term Classic Rock refers to style and technique and not to the historical period.
This means that if an artists plays exactly as someone of the past he'll be inserted also in a genre given for extinct.
For this reason the Genre "Contemporary Pop Rock" or"Contemporary Folk Rock" do not contain all the most notable pop rocker because some of them who are commonly defined in this way have the features of another Genre.
Sometimes this differences are not so evident.
The most notable proofs of this rule are Greeta VanFlyck in Hard Rock, Shakin Stevens in Rock and Roll , Hootie & The Blowfish in Roots Rock, almost all the contemporary country singer (we didn't even create a Contemporary Country set) or many artists in Folk Rock.
I have underlined this rule such in this article because the world Classic could carry to a misunderstood, and because in the other Cluster this happen less frequently.
I suppose, for the particular evolution of the instruments.
Image by Hansuan Fabregas (Pixabay.com)
I had not so many doubt about who and why I should have listed in this Cluster.
This is certainly in the top-ten of all the set that are defined in this classification.
This is the utter-reality of the rock lovers.
Most of the features that these artists share within this group are probably the the same that you can find in all these Frame.
All the musicians listed here are artists inside the society of their time.
They talk as people to people. For the lyrics they adopted the same language that we can listen every day, when human trouble, feeling, emotions came out of the blue.
But a member of this family rarely go too deep. Their mission is not eradicate the evil or suggest its abundance on earth. They generally avoid abstract contents.
This does not mean that the works of a Classic Rocker are less strong or relevant.
But had and still have to deal with the censorship of many distribution channels.
Radio first.
They must be able to enter the homes of the working class family without bearing an axe and neither showing some stupid flower.
They used to deliver laments, prayers, images of solitude or strong passions to their audience with rough, whiny, sincere and often suffocating sounds as only blues or hard rock can carry out.
Bob Dylan, Joni Mitchell, Jonny Cash or Tom Waits and many other classified in Folk Rock do not talk about themselves.
They write story and define a classy and dramatic way of celebrate every single word and note, putting themselves apart. But not their art. The expression is is a frontal and delicate punch at the service of mankind, without any discounts.
These artists follow the tradition of African and European folk music traditions of the unsaid , symbolic harmonies strong but controlled rhythms session. Sometimes they are explicit , but they never jump in to the land of oblivion.
The tracks are as long as in the standard rule. A little more for the composition with long guitar reef and shorter in case of lyrics directed tracks sounds.
In most of the cases originated or inspired by traditional structure of blues, country, jazz, R&B, gospel, boogie-woogie.
Tom Waits in an early publicity photo for Asylum Records, 1973
Photographer uncredited and unknown. - Scan via Heritage Auction
A matter of waves
Except for Rock and Roll, that has been created as a direct melt of this sound, the other genres, as Blues Rock, Folk Rock, Hard Rock, Roots Rock have been searched at the end of 60s and in the beginning of 70s by that artists who needed to come back to their roots.
After the psychedelic and acid rock shock, they were bored, unsatisfied and needing of new expressions that they could manage as their natural languages.
So, many come back to the country, many to the blues, some other take new and more sophisticated trip in progressive , glam, art, fusion rock, and others take advantage of the new electric sound.
Excepted for the psychedelic wave, the 60s have been the decade of
surf style: The Beach Boys, Dan and Dean,
folk songwriters : Bob Dylan, The Byrds, Jonni Mitchell, Neil Young;
country giant as George Straits, Hank Williams, Ray Price, Everly Brothers,
the first girls rock and pop star: Dusty Springfield, Carole King, Carly Simon,
the Muddy Waters exploit after the 1960 Newport Jazz Festival,
the last glorious rock and roll stars as Jerry Lee Lewis, Hank Ballard, Chubby Checker
the soft rocker : Frankie Valli or Dion.
the first British Invasion : UK artists that were so highly influenced by the US blues or psychedelic language that landed in US found an huge and unexpected success, and, often they overwhelmed the US artists in the official charts.
Animals, Yardbirds, Kinks, The Who and Led Zeppelin .Later, but most of all The Beatles, which paired and went over the success of Beach Boys. In the 1966 had been released The Beach Boys' "Pet Sound" and The Beatles' "Rubber Soul" LP.
Both erupted as watersheds in the modern music history but also signed in somehow the slow falling of the magical alchemy that keep them together. In the following year the psychedelic wave began to raise up until 1969 when Woodstock represented the point of no return.
The Beatles reacted to this raise with their extraordinary British point of view, creating Sgt Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, which have been transmitted by US radios as a mantra for a long time and that have been described as a major turning point not only in the music but also in the story of Western Civilization.[4]"Sgt Pepper saw The Beatles pushing boundaries within the studio,creating sounds which had never before been heard. They made extensive use of orchestras and other hired musicians, and combined a variety of musical styles including rock, music hall, psychedelia, traditional Indian and Western classical." [5]The formula has been re-inventing the way of play and sing a clusters of existing sounds and genre, creating had an itself genre inside The Beatles' style. The heavy of this happy revolution is in the way the audience perceive, today still, the psychedelic world in a clean, polite Brit way.
This clearness and moderate power was not only universally acceptable by the audience, of all country and cultural level, but had in its kindness the key that opened hearts and mind of the world and lead The Beatles higher of what they already were.This is the proof of what has been said at the beginning of this article about "the way they (the Classic Rock artists) deal with the subject must be accepted by censorship and must be able to enter the homes of the working class family".
https://pixabay.com/illustrations/guitar-music-guitarist-girl-8681725/
About the importance of cold experience , the opposite of the Jimi Hendrix' once, is underlined in Mac Luhan's word:
"The intensity and any other intense experience in order to be learned must be cooled, forgotten, censored reduced very cold... the Freudian censor is not only a moral condition but also an essential condition for learning."
Creedence Clearwater Revival in 1968. From left to right: Tom Fogerty, Doug Clifford, Stu Cook and John Fogerty (Wikipedia-Public domain)
The 70s mainstream scenario have been dominated by the two nostalgic form of being innovative; Blues Rock and Hard Rock.The third way has been often very success:
Creedence Clearwater Revival, Lynyrd Skynyrd, The Allman Brothers Band, Eagles melted and kept them together, and added country and the rough Sound of the South.
Creedence and Don Henley's "Eagles" has been at the top of charts for most of 70s
While country and a new form of pop rock were great part of the early Eagles's works, the Creedence's success is, for a great part, consequence of their Southern sound that push totally the audience in the direction of the hard rock.
Both represented the soul of the middle class of the Americans but was admired from anyone who loved rock.
Folk and Country Rock followed the tradition and remain a separated block.
The other highest selling musicians of 60s and 70s has been:
Dusty Springfield , Carole King and Billy Joel (soft and classy)
Chicago, Foreigner, Todd Rundgren, Meat Loaf (arena rocker),
UK artists as Rod Steward, the soloist careers of George Harrison, Paul McCartney, John Lennon, , the Dire Straits, Cat Stevens .
It has always been said that the styles contained in Classic Rock were aimed at a medium or medium-low cultural level, but this was not a rule in the past, and it is not now.
Maybe it was true at the beginning, in the 50s or 60s, when the working class considered themselves as the object of the lyrics of most artists. Intellectual often snubbed that works that today are considered masterpieces. If we only think about works of The Buffalo Springfield, The Byrds, George Strait, Simon & Garfunkel or Creedence Clearwater Revival as low culture we have not understand that they have been painting in a not cerebral way the social and human dynamics of the time, directly and without filter, as the Impressionist painter did.
The US Hard Rock raise is complex and full of different personal live stories.
Blue Öyster Cult, Boston, Heart, Ted Nugent , The Runaways, Zz Top were all major bands, but one have been the quintessence of the genre for the US audience : Grand Funk Railroad.
All these musicians kept alive and melt the two main sounds of the 70s: Roots and Blues Rock . This was their greatest value and the reason why they had not been understood and sold overseas.
In the Classic Rock list can be included contemporary artists who have a style substancially similar to the 60's, 70s or 80s artists as: Shakin Steven in Country Rock , James Blunt, Tracy Chapman, Wilbuyrys for Folk Rock , Hootie & The Blowfish for Roots Rock.
The European synthesis
The Yardbirds in 1966. (left to right) Dreja, Beck, McCarty,
and Relf (Page is absent from this image) -Public Domain
KRLA Beat/Beat Publications, Inc. - KRLA Beat page 19
European hear was already full of the new sound of that band who had the idea to break with the past, and introduced Space Rock, that became a major mainstream genre (here it's classified in Space Rock Cluster)
Vanilla Fudge ad Iron Butterfly , both US psychedelic and hard rock bands, introduced a synthesis of what has been the abstract and the material .
Both had been major inspiring of the so-called "New Yardbirds".
The first UK hard rocker of the Canterbury scene ( which will be treated in Space Rock page) together with the experience of colonizer during his Yardbirds experience, convinced Jimmy Page (ex Yardbirds' guitarist) to search for a singer for his new band.
Plant brought along John Bonham as drummer and Page did the same with John Paul Jones .
Then, the lucky day came up.