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Loving classic rock has always been an act of faith: albums as sacred texts, live concerts as quasireligious rituals, and rock mythology as a means of self-discovery.
As for the people who were born into the streaming age, they don’t know what they have. The miraculous is now mundane. “Everything” has always been possible, so it sort of feels like nothing.
classic rock seemed like an entrenched concept that had been passed down organically from up on high. But that wasn’t really the case: radio had codified a generation of bands—the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, Led Zeppelin, Pink Floyd, the Eagles, the Doors, Fleetwood Mac—as “classic” because it was convenient marketing.
With grunge bands, there was always a sense of perpetuation—they didn’t seek to kill classic rock, as the punks supposedly set out to do.
Grunge bands wanted to carry the torch, and in the process integrate themselves into a larger, ongoing story.
Campbell believed myths serve a universal purpose, acting as a through-line in the history of humankind from the earliest societies right up to the present day.
Often, this need for fulfillment is served by hero worship,
Stephen Davis’s scandalous 1985 biography, Hammer of the Gods.
the drugging and whoring lifestyle that Zeppelin epitomized is emblematic of the questionable white-male fantasies that have long animated interest in classic rock while also stultifying its ability to evolve with the rest of the culture.
Pink Floyd deployed outer space as a metaphor for the vastness of inner space. And inner space is where teenagers spend the majority of their time.
The Dark Side of the Moon operated on the body clock of a teenager with mononucleosis.
Led Zeppelin represented an ideal of what I wished I could be, but Pink Floyd depicted what I actually was—gloomy.
At the core of Pink Floyd’s mythology is the band’s original front man, Syd Barrett, a handsome, charismatic singer-songwriter whose mental health rapidly deteriorated right as the Floyd released its 1967 debut, The Piper at the Gates of Dawn.
He is the defining example of one of the more enduring rock myths, the Romantically Damaged Loner Genius Recluse.
Like all myths, the Loner Genius Recluse narrative requires the audience to do most of the work via their imaginations. It’s what the genius didn’t do that will forever seem most enticing.
the separation of rock from pop was driven by record companies that wanted to establish legacy artists who could sell albums,
glorifying the people who made the music, sowing a cult of personality around rock stars that subsumed the music. “Real” fans were encouraged to buy every album by their favorite artists, because each new release was the latest episode in an ongoing narrative. These were the seeds of classic-rock mythology.
Over time, the audiences for rock shows identified themselves as a countercultural tribe—as
hippies grew crazy facial hair and wore fringe jackets and clunky necklaces to differentiate themselves from the Man,
Sgt. Pepper separated classic rock from oldies radio and created a line of demarcation that never really went away.
Two things happened at the end of the nineties that changed rock music forever. Number one, Napster demystified albums, by breaking them down into individual tracks and making those tracks extremely easy to steal.
Number two, the space that music created for young people to gather and pool their energy was no longer required, because now people could assemble in the Internet’s virtual sphere.
Classic-rock bands sell millions of records, play huge concerts, and have four to six songs that everybody knows. The last decade to produce bands like that is the nineties, which is why Pearl Jam, Nirvana, and Smashing Pumpkins tracks now get played on classic-rock stations along with Zeppelin and Pink Floyd.
Reznor made The Fragile an immersive 105-minute experience that demanded the full attention of anyone who hoped to understand it. It was classic rock through and through.
If The Fragile wasn’t received on Reznor’s own uncompromising terms, it would seem boring and formless. Unfortunately for Reznor, “boring and formless” was precisely how The Fragile was perceived when it came out in the fall of 1999.
He had taken so long making an album that conformed to a faded era’s idea of art that he aged himself out of his window as a commercial pop act. After The Fragile, there would be plenty of classic rock records. But classic rock records were now extinct.
Of all the classic-rock documentaries that have been produced in the past decade, History of the Eagles is rivaled only by Rush: Beyond the Lighted Stage as the best of the bunch.
the album has been reduced to just another item on the menu. It is an artistic and economic construct that many listeners have outgrown.
Listening to music now is like going to the beach—you build a playlist out of songs stored in the celestial jukebox, like a child making a castle out of sand. But once you leave, the sand stays at the beach. You don’t own the sand, you borrow it.
Just because we’ve stopped buying albums doesn’t mean we’ve gotten over using albums as cultural benchmarks.
The rise of the album coincided with the culmination of classic rock’s artistic and cultural influence in the late sixties,
But as music culture became less rock-focused in the twenty-first century, the significance of the album also decreased.
Artists are now rewarded for putting out collections of songs that are far larger than traditional albums, because more songs equals more streams, which increases revenue and market penetration.
Rock magazines fetishized the back stories of how albums were made,
Over time, these stories became legends that listeners passed down to the next generation.
I revere concept albums, the most pretentious LP subgenre, which never make a lick of sense from a storytelling perspective but nonetheless leave me invigorated with their misguided ambition.
Classic-rock radio disseminated the music, but what rock critics instilled was a philosophical framework that brought order and meaning to the music.
This is what albums seemed to offer—a skeleton key for understanding your own heart.
In light of the Rolling Stone list, greatest-hits albums now seemed fraudulent. If you wanted to know what a band was really up to, you had to do the work and dig into the original albums. For a classic-rock acolyte, putting all of the best songs on the same tape was tantamount to cheating.
While the unthinking, visceral response to music derives from a sense of comfort, the intellectualized response requires that music be challenging and experimental. This is where Sgt. Pepper lives.
The implication is that the Beatles were great not simply because they wrote amazing songs, but also because those songs grew appreciably more sophisticated and high-minded over time.
The impact of the Beatles’ fame amplified the impact of Sgt. Pepper. For the Beatles, being the best band ever was always intertwined with being the most famous band ever.
Nobody seems capable of judging music purely on its own merits—accumulated historical resentments always get in the way.
What we’re talking about here isn’t music but mystique. And mystique isn’t organic, it’s invented—by music critics, older brothers, and rock documentaries. It comes from someone telling you that something is great and describing it in a way that convinces you that it’s great before you even hear it.
Our current world is a place where algorithms help us find an approximation of what we think we want. But the best albums deliver something you never knew you wanted. And it might take years of listening to the same record—over and over, because it hasn’t yet quite connected—before you finally get it.
The Weberman approach of “solving” Dylan songs is a pointless exercise. Dylan songs are never about the destination. If you love Bob Dylan, you come to wish that the journey would never end, for this is what keeps his music fresh over so many listens.
Dylan passed that feeling of immortality along to me and countless other people by plugging his songs into the same continuum of music that had transformed him.
Pamela Des Barres, a legendary figure in classic-rock lore, who had relationships with Jimmy Page, Keith Moon, Jim Morrison, and Gram Parsons in the late sixties and early seventies.
The eighties college-rock band Camper Van Beethoven summed up the conventional wisdom on live records with the title of its own concert LP: Greatest Hits Played Faster.
Live recordings were an invaluable resource for me in my pre-concertgoing days. I treasured them for the documentary aspect as much as the music. I still appreciate live albums as historical snapshots for all of the classic-rock bands that I was never able to see in their primes.
