Rock Of Ages
Posted: March 14, 2005 10:47 am
http://www.newsobserver.com/lifestyles/ ... 0037c.html
As teens adopt their parents' music, a classic repertoire gels
By DAVID MENCONI, Staff Writer
In a cramped lesson room at Harry's Guitar Shop, teacher and student sit face to face with acoustic guitars to pick a little history. "You have a good week?" asks the teacher, Scott Miller, 40, sitting under an AC/DC poster. "How'd it go with the Zeppelin?"
"Pretty good," answers Chip Carey, 17, from his seat beneath the poster from the Beatles' "White Album." "But I didn't get through the whole thing."
"Yeah, it's tricky," says Miller, reaching over to his compact disc player to cue up 1968's "Babe I'm Gonna Leave You" -- a Led Zeppelin song that's 20 years older than the teenager about to play it. Both listen intently, studying Zeppelin guitarist Jimmy Page's strum.
"See, it's got that A note here on the seventh fret," Miller says. Then he demonstrates the song's changes and concludes, "Just lay your finger over and get that A-minor 'Stairway to Heaven' chord."
This is the music Chip loves -- the music of his parents' generation. Thirty years ago, it wouldn't have occurred to most teenagers to listen to Bing Crosby records from the '40s, unless they did it as a goof. That was their parents' music, and besides, they had Pink Floyd's "The Dark Side of the Moon" to delve into. But nowadays, those circa-'75 Pink Floyd fans have children of their own, kids who are raiding their record collections for decades-old music.
Often, the kids like what they find there. Or they p**** up their ears at the vintage Yardbirds, Who and Led Zeppelin songs that turn up in commercials and movies. The music still pushes the same buttons it did in its prime.
Gena Wall of Apex remembers the day her 9-year-old son Kieran discovered "Layla" by Eric Clapton's Derek and the Dominos. He just had to share the discovery. He led his parents over to the stereo, sat them down, played "Layla" for them (the whole thing, extended piano outro and all) and solemnly declared that it "has to be the best song ever written."
"A lot of the newer music just sounds crazy," says Kieran, whose all-time top-10, aside from Green Day's "American Idiot," is '70s-vintage songs by the Eagles, Clapton, James Taylor and Lynyrd Skynyrd. "Those old songs just sound ... better. These new songs are just crazy, and you can't understand a single word they're saying. The classic rock I usually listen to, you can understand what they're saying. So I can memorize it and sing it in my head all day."
From the golden age
Jon Heames, 40, has been teaching at Harry's since 1990. He says most of the students who come through the door want to learn the classics. Just this year, he compiled a 17-track CD of most-requested songs for the Harry's teaching staff. Almost everything on it dates from 1965 to '75: "Smoke on the Water," "Walk This Way," "Purple Haze," "Black Dog" (see accompanying list).
The Limp Bizkits and Linkin Parks may come and go, but Zeppelin is forever.
With classic rock's golden age now 30 years in the rearview mirror, people may wonder why it continues to linger. One reason is that baby boomers still control a lot of society's cultural programming, which ensures that the music they grew up with is still available. But part of it is that the music still resonates when young people hear it.
"In 2005, the majority of teenagers I see are back to classic rock," says Heames. "You get some who want to learn Franz Ferdinand or Good Charlotte, others that want to learn the emo-type bands like Thursday. But then most of them finally figure out that the new stuff sucks -- and that's a quote from the kids, not me. You know, you really can't go wrong learning Beatles songs."
Or the Who, which Heames is teaching to 16-year-old Hart Uhl. The music came out two decades before Hart was born, but "Pinball Wizard" has plenty of life as he blazes through the jangly introduction on an electric guitar. Then he starts riffing on The Who's version of "Summertime Blues."
"Which DVD is that from?" Heames asks.
" 'Isle of Wight,' " Hart says. He mentions some vintage performance footage he recently discovered on Pete Townshend's Web site, then continues: "It's, like, cool to listen to The Who now. Which frustrates me. All these people just started listening last week, and I've been listening all along. But it's trendy these days. Everyone claims to know and like Led Zeppelin, while it's this cliquey thing to play 'Pinball Wizard' in the car."
He dismisses contemporary buzz bands -- the Hives, Vines, Strokes, Franz Ferdinand.
"Some of my friends do have weird tastes," he says. "But most of them are into the old Pink Floyd, Jethro Tull, Who, stuff like that. It's just the best."
While most of the evidence of adolescent interest in vintage rock is anecdotal, some statistics are available. Nearly one-third of the 9 million people who bought 2000's "Beatles 1" hits compilation were under age 24, according to EMI/Capitol Records. And Coleman Research, a Triangle-based radio and music consulting firm, has unearthed a few surprising facts in surveys.
"We see things in studies that defy logic," says Jon Coleman, the firm's president. "When you look at the composition of classic-rock fans, it's more popular among 18-to-24-year-olds than among 25-to-34s. Whenever I show that to people, they scratch their heads and ask why. But I overheard a couple of twentysomething baristas in Chapel Hill recently arguing over who was the greatest band of all time -- the Beatles or U2. They didn't even mention anyone contemporary, which I thought spoke to the fact that contemporary rock is in the doldrums. Nothing is emerging to light the fires of young people.
"So those who have not embraced hip-hop almost have no choice but to go back and embrace classic rock," Coleman says. "And they do."
Before they were born
John Covach has taught rock-history classes at UNC-Chapel Hill for a decade. Classic rock's 1967-75 heyday remains a consistent favorite era of his students. This semester, he's teaching a class called "The Concept Album in Rock Music From the Beatles to Pink Floyd." The end point comes with "The Wall," Pink Floyd's 1979 opus -- released years before most of the 28 students in the class were born.
A recent afternoon finds Covach's students dissecting Jethro Tull's 1971 rock opera "Thick As a Brick," analyzing everything from the album's faux-newspaper packaging to the arc of its storyline. Sophomore Mary Beth Kaneklides, 20, notes that the album has 13 musical sections that flow into each other, with repeating themes.
"And the newspaper images, they seem to represent a sort of provincial way of thinking," she says. "The general idea goes back to that line at the beginning: 'My words but a whisper, your deafness a shout.' Is silence louder than saying anything at all?"
People had similar conversations about "Thick as a Brick" when it was brand new 33 years ago, which might seem peculiar. But that reaction has less to do with the artistic worthiness of Jethro Tull than with the seemingly contradictory nature of classic rock itself. The music came from an era when the present was all-important, and little thought was given to its longevity. Yet this supposedly disposable artifact has lingered long enough for multiple generations to discover and stake their own claims to it.
"This is only odd because we don't expect it," says Robert Thompson, professor of popular culture at Syracuse University. "You wouldn't find it strange to hear someone going on about Hemingway in an English class or Mozart at a conservatory. Not all rock 'n' roll will have this kind of status, obviously. The word 'classic' gets thrown around a lot, when most of it is just nostalgia created by the time-machine qualities of old stuff. But we're entering a period where we can see if postwar mass culture will have that status in a meaningful way. And the kids will point the way to what stands up, because they can still respond in a way that has nothing to do with nostalgia. Who knows? Maybe 'Layla' will qualify for the classical stations someday."
Even if kids today have no firsthand knowledge of the classic-rock era, they still find that time period fascinating. They view the music as reflecting a time that seems more sincere and less calculated than Ashlee Simpson, "American Idol" and the other pop stars they see and hear today.
"One reason our generation clings to the music of our parents' time is that it encompassed a lot of social change," says Kaneklides. "Between the war, the feminist revolution and desegregation, there was a lot going on. People were very passionate, and a lot of the older music seems more artistic, more authentic. So much popular music now is all based on sales and merchandising, sex and hype. It doesn't seem like it has as much substance anymore. The whole Britney Spears image, that disturbs me if it's where we're going with music."
Heames echoes this, contrasting our current age of celebrity hypermedia with the lowered media intensity of the classic-rock period.
"Teenagers are cynical now," he says. "They know when something is overhyped. When the Strokes were first emerging, all my students liked them. Then five months later, they were on the cover of every damn magazine in the world, and nobody wanted anything to do with them anymore. Kids can smell the hype. Led Zeppelin never wanted to do interviews, so all you saw in magazines were live shots of the band. There was a mystique. Now, we know whether or not [White Stripes drummer] Meg White has a tattoo on her butt because we've read about it in Spin. We don't care, but we know."
What about the future?
There is, however, a downside to all this energy going toward rock's past: It comes at the expense of the present, and possibly the future.
Tighter radio formats have forced the best new rock bands to the margins, where they might prosper at the level of cult favorite -- but without the mass audience needed to create future historical relevancy. At the same time, demographic changes and audience fragmentation have shrunk rock's percentage of the music mainstream. Aside from the occasional Green Day, rock has largely ceded the mainstream to hip-hop, lightweight pop and country.
As a result, rock is not nearly as important a generational marker as it once was. If a teenager doesn't like his parents' Who albums and wants music to antagonize them, he'll probably listen to hip-hop since today's current rock favorites -- Green Day, White Stripes, Kings of Leon, Drive-By Truckers -- are too steeped in the past to get the job done. Or he'll play computer games to push his parents' buttons. "Grand Theft Auto" is as off-putting to a parent today as AC/DC's "Highway to Hell" was 25 years ago.
UNC's Covach has seen this day coming. In his reading, contemporary fascination with the past is a cause as well as a symptom of rock's downfall.
"In the 1960s, the idea that there was a history of rock would have been dismissed as spurious," Covach says. "It wouldn't be a history of a style progressing, just changing -- like Hula Hoops to Slinkys to mood rings. But sometime in the '70s, rock became aware of its history. Then professionalism came to be regarded as inauthentic with punk and new wave, which were more direct and less tutored. A whole generation grew up believing it didn't take much to be in a rock band beyond the ability to play a few chords and write songs. But how long can something be innovative when musicianship is not prized as a commodity? Songwriting alone can't sustain it.
"So maybe the seeds of stagnation were sown then," he says. "It's a testament to inertia that it's still rolling along. MTV gave rock a shot in the arm, and CDs allowed record companies to sell back catalog. Then MTV got slick, and there was another back-to-basics movement with Nirvana. How many more times can we do this? Forever, I hope. But something tells me it won't happen that way."
Music teacher Jon Heames has compiled a CD of the most requested songs for lessons at Harry's Guitar Shop in Raleigh:
1. Led Zeppelin, "Rock and Roll" (1971).
2. Cream, "Sunshine of Your Love" (1967).
3. The Beatles, "Day Tripper" (1965).
4. Jimi Hendrix, "Purple Haze" (1967).
5. Aerosmith, "Sweet Emotion" (1975).
6. The Who, "I Can't Explain" (1965).
7. Lynyrd Skynyrd, "Saturday Night Special" (1975).
8. Guns N' Roses, "Sweet Child o' Mine" (1987).
9. Led Zeppelin, "Black Dog" (1971).
10. Cream, "White Room" (1968).
11. The Beatles, "Come Together" (1969).
12. Jimi Hendrix, "Fire" (1967).
13. Aerosmith, "Walk This Way" (1975).
14. The Who, "Substitute" (1970).
15. Lynyrd Skynyrd, "Sweet Home Alabama" (1974).
16. AC/DC, "Back in Black" (1980).
17. Deep Purple, "Smoke on the Water" (1972).
As teens adopt their parents' music, a classic repertoire gels
By DAVID MENCONI, Staff Writer
In a cramped lesson room at Harry's Guitar Shop, teacher and student sit face to face with acoustic guitars to pick a little history. "You have a good week?" asks the teacher, Scott Miller, 40, sitting under an AC/DC poster. "How'd it go with the Zeppelin?"
"Pretty good," answers Chip Carey, 17, from his seat beneath the poster from the Beatles' "White Album." "But I didn't get through the whole thing."
"Yeah, it's tricky," says Miller, reaching over to his compact disc player to cue up 1968's "Babe I'm Gonna Leave You" -- a Led Zeppelin song that's 20 years older than the teenager about to play it. Both listen intently, studying Zeppelin guitarist Jimmy Page's strum.
"See, it's got that A note here on the seventh fret," Miller says. Then he demonstrates the song's changes and concludes, "Just lay your finger over and get that A-minor 'Stairway to Heaven' chord."
This is the music Chip loves -- the music of his parents' generation. Thirty years ago, it wouldn't have occurred to most teenagers to listen to Bing Crosby records from the '40s, unless they did it as a goof. That was their parents' music, and besides, they had Pink Floyd's "The Dark Side of the Moon" to delve into. But nowadays, those circa-'75 Pink Floyd fans have children of their own, kids who are raiding their record collections for decades-old music.
Often, the kids like what they find there. Or they p**** up their ears at the vintage Yardbirds, Who and Led Zeppelin songs that turn up in commercials and movies. The music still pushes the same buttons it did in its prime.
Gena Wall of Apex remembers the day her 9-year-old son Kieran discovered "Layla" by Eric Clapton's Derek and the Dominos. He just had to share the discovery. He led his parents over to the stereo, sat them down, played "Layla" for them (the whole thing, extended piano outro and all) and solemnly declared that it "has to be the best song ever written."
"A lot of the newer music just sounds crazy," says Kieran, whose all-time top-10, aside from Green Day's "American Idiot," is '70s-vintage songs by the Eagles, Clapton, James Taylor and Lynyrd Skynyrd. "Those old songs just sound ... better. These new songs are just crazy, and you can't understand a single word they're saying. The classic rock I usually listen to, you can understand what they're saying. So I can memorize it and sing it in my head all day."
From the golden age
Jon Heames, 40, has been teaching at Harry's since 1990. He says most of the students who come through the door want to learn the classics. Just this year, he compiled a 17-track CD of most-requested songs for the Harry's teaching staff. Almost everything on it dates from 1965 to '75: "Smoke on the Water," "Walk This Way," "Purple Haze," "Black Dog" (see accompanying list).
The Limp Bizkits and Linkin Parks may come and go, but Zeppelin is forever.
With classic rock's golden age now 30 years in the rearview mirror, people may wonder why it continues to linger. One reason is that baby boomers still control a lot of society's cultural programming, which ensures that the music they grew up with is still available. But part of it is that the music still resonates when young people hear it.
"In 2005, the majority of teenagers I see are back to classic rock," says Heames. "You get some who want to learn Franz Ferdinand or Good Charlotte, others that want to learn the emo-type bands like Thursday. But then most of them finally figure out that the new stuff sucks -- and that's a quote from the kids, not me. You know, you really can't go wrong learning Beatles songs."
Or the Who, which Heames is teaching to 16-year-old Hart Uhl. The music came out two decades before Hart was born, but "Pinball Wizard" has plenty of life as he blazes through the jangly introduction on an electric guitar. Then he starts riffing on The Who's version of "Summertime Blues."
"Which DVD is that from?" Heames asks.
" 'Isle of Wight,' " Hart says. He mentions some vintage performance footage he recently discovered on Pete Townshend's Web site, then continues: "It's, like, cool to listen to The Who now. Which frustrates me. All these people just started listening last week, and I've been listening all along. But it's trendy these days. Everyone claims to know and like Led Zeppelin, while it's this cliquey thing to play 'Pinball Wizard' in the car."
He dismisses contemporary buzz bands -- the Hives, Vines, Strokes, Franz Ferdinand.
"Some of my friends do have weird tastes," he says. "But most of them are into the old Pink Floyd, Jethro Tull, Who, stuff like that. It's just the best."
While most of the evidence of adolescent interest in vintage rock is anecdotal, some statistics are available. Nearly one-third of the 9 million people who bought 2000's "Beatles 1" hits compilation were under age 24, according to EMI/Capitol Records. And Coleman Research, a Triangle-based radio and music consulting firm, has unearthed a few surprising facts in surveys.
"We see things in studies that defy logic," says Jon Coleman, the firm's president. "When you look at the composition of classic-rock fans, it's more popular among 18-to-24-year-olds than among 25-to-34s. Whenever I show that to people, they scratch their heads and ask why. But I overheard a couple of twentysomething baristas in Chapel Hill recently arguing over who was the greatest band of all time -- the Beatles or U2. They didn't even mention anyone contemporary, which I thought spoke to the fact that contemporary rock is in the doldrums. Nothing is emerging to light the fires of young people.
"So those who have not embraced hip-hop almost have no choice but to go back and embrace classic rock," Coleman says. "And they do."
Before they were born
John Covach has taught rock-history classes at UNC-Chapel Hill for a decade. Classic rock's 1967-75 heyday remains a consistent favorite era of his students. This semester, he's teaching a class called "The Concept Album in Rock Music From the Beatles to Pink Floyd." The end point comes with "The Wall," Pink Floyd's 1979 opus -- released years before most of the 28 students in the class were born.
A recent afternoon finds Covach's students dissecting Jethro Tull's 1971 rock opera "Thick As a Brick," analyzing everything from the album's faux-newspaper packaging to the arc of its storyline. Sophomore Mary Beth Kaneklides, 20, notes that the album has 13 musical sections that flow into each other, with repeating themes.
"And the newspaper images, they seem to represent a sort of provincial way of thinking," she says. "The general idea goes back to that line at the beginning: 'My words but a whisper, your deafness a shout.' Is silence louder than saying anything at all?"
People had similar conversations about "Thick as a Brick" when it was brand new 33 years ago, which might seem peculiar. But that reaction has less to do with the artistic worthiness of Jethro Tull than with the seemingly contradictory nature of classic rock itself. The music came from an era when the present was all-important, and little thought was given to its longevity. Yet this supposedly disposable artifact has lingered long enough for multiple generations to discover and stake their own claims to it.
"This is only odd because we don't expect it," says Robert Thompson, professor of popular culture at Syracuse University. "You wouldn't find it strange to hear someone going on about Hemingway in an English class or Mozart at a conservatory. Not all rock 'n' roll will have this kind of status, obviously. The word 'classic' gets thrown around a lot, when most of it is just nostalgia created by the time-machine qualities of old stuff. But we're entering a period where we can see if postwar mass culture will have that status in a meaningful way. And the kids will point the way to what stands up, because they can still respond in a way that has nothing to do with nostalgia. Who knows? Maybe 'Layla' will qualify for the classical stations someday."
Even if kids today have no firsthand knowledge of the classic-rock era, they still find that time period fascinating. They view the music as reflecting a time that seems more sincere and less calculated than Ashlee Simpson, "American Idol" and the other pop stars they see and hear today.
"One reason our generation clings to the music of our parents' time is that it encompassed a lot of social change," says Kaneklides. "Between the war, the feminist revolution and desegregation, there was a lot going on. People were very passionate, and a lot of the older music seems more artistic, more authentic. So much popular music now is all based on sales and merchandising, sex and hype. It doesn't seem like it has as much substance anymore. The whole Britney Spears image, that disturbs me if it's where we're going with music."
Heames echoes this, contrasting our current age of celebrity hypermedia with the lowered media intensity of the classic-rock period.
"Teenagers are cynical now," he says. "They know when something is overhyped. When the Strokes were first emerging, all my students liked them. Then five months later, they were on the cover of every damn magazine in the world, and nobody wanted anything to do with them anymore. Kids can smell the hype. Led Zeppelin never wanted to do interviews, so all you saw in magazines were live shots of the band. There was a mystique. Now, we know whether or not [White Stripes drummer] Meg White has a tattoo on her butt because we've read about it in Spin. We don't care, but we know."
What about the future?
There is, however, a downside to all this energy going toward rock's past: It comes at the expense of the present, and possibly the future.
Tighter radio formats have forced the best new rock bands to the margins, where they might prosper at the level of cult favorite -- but without the mass audience needed to create future historical relevancy. At the same time, demographic changes and audience fragmentation have shrunk rock's percentage of the music mainstream. Aside from the occasional Green Day, rock has largely ceded the mainstream to hip-hop, lightweight pop and country.
As a result, rock is not nearly as important a generational marker as it once was. If a teenager doesn't like his parents' Who albums and wants music to antagonize them, he'll probably listen to hip-hop since today's current rock favorites -- Green Day, White Stripes, Kings of Leon, Drive-By Truckers -- are too steeped in the past to get the job done. Or he'll play computer games to push his parents' buttons. "Grand Theft Auto" is as off-putting to a parent today as AC/DC's "Highway to Hell" was 25 years ago.
UNC's Covach has seen this day coming. In his reading, contemporary fascination with the past is a cause as well as a symptom of rock's downfall.
"In the 1960s, the idea that there was a history of rock would have been dismissed as spurious," Covach says. "It wouldn't be a history of a style progressing, just changing -- like Hula Hoops to Slinkys to mood rings. But sometime in the '70s, rock became aware of its history. Then professionalism came to be regarded as inauthentic with punk and new wave, which were more direct and less tutored. A whole generation grew up believing it didn't take much to be in a rock band beyond the ability to play a few chords and write songs. But how long can something be innovative when musicianship is not prized as a commodity? Songwriting alone can't sustain it.
"So maybe the seeds of stagnation were sown then," he says. "It's a testament to inertia that it's still rolling along. MTV gave rock a shot in the arm, and CDs allowed record companies to sell back catalog. Then MTV got slick, and there was another back-to-basics movement with Nirvana. How many more times can we do this? Forever, I hope. But something tells me it won't happen that way."
Music teacher Jon Heames has compiled a CD of the most requested songs for lessons at Harry's Guitar Shop in Raleigh:
1. Led Zeppelin, "Rock and Roll" (1971).
2. Cream, "Sunshine of Your Love" (1967).
3. The Beatles, "Day Tripper" (1965).
4. Jimi Hendrix, "Purple Haze" (1967).
5. Aerosmith, "Sweet Emotion" (1975).
6. The Who, "I Can't Explain" (1965).
7. Lynyrd Skynyrd, "Saturday Night Special" (1975).
8. Guns N' Roses, "Sweet Child o' Mine" (1987).
9. Led Zeppelin, "Black Dog" (1971).
10. Cream, "White Room" (1968).
11. The Beatles, "Come Together" (1969).
12. Jimi Hendrix, "Fire" (1967).
13. Aerosmith, "Walk This Way" (1975).
14. The Who, "Substitute" (1970).
15. Lynyrd Skynyrd, "Sweet Home Alabama" (1974).
16. AC/DC, "Back in Black" (1980).
17. Deep Purple, "Smoke on the Water" (1972).
I know what cd I'll pop in for the ride home now!