Tom,

Thanks for sending. It *is* thought-provoking, though like you I would have
said around 2000 the well was already dry. In response, though, I would say
that you can sidestep the arena experience altogether by checking out bands
that never made it to that level. A fair number of those groups have done so
by choice and still put on a mighty good show. Playing arena shows is not a
pre-requisite to artistic success in rock music, and the very idea that this
is so is one of the many elements that helped to doom the form at the top
level. However, the band traveling in a car, playing for $100 guarantees and
a portion of the door remains a sustainable business model. Groups willing
to put up with such discomfort are doing so because they want to have an
audience for their work, and sometimes this means better music, though it is
not neccessarily an attraction for those who feel they've had their needs
met, somewhere along the way, by the 50-plus-year heritage of rock music.

One thing he didn't address was that in the 1980s there was a shift between
supply and demand; in the 1960s, demand was high and supply was such that
just about anyone claiming to be a pop musician could make records and even
get signed to at least middle-level recording deals; certainly not all were,
but the possibility was there. While front office types have always had a
hand in cultivating to some extent what gets recorded, the grass roots
artist pool still enjoyed a lot of freedom and were, for the most part, left
alone to create what they wanted. This became somewhat jaundiced in the
1970s, with artists doing double-live LPs no one wanted and utilizing other
strategies to get out of their record contracts, not to mention throwing
huge parties in order to celebrate the release of albums that ultimately
wound up in the cutout bins. These excesses delivered huge losses to the pop
music industry and even brought down a major player, ABC, in 1978. The
record companies became far more careful afterward.

The majors, at least, were not successful in dealing
with emerging grass roots trends around 1980 and decided instead to
cultivate their own pop artists, with MTV taking a major role in getting
this out to the masses, a calculated plan to divest the business of radio
and to control trends in pop music. Then you had artists at the grass roots
cultivating their own plans to create something that would appeal to the
suits at the record companies. That the form got diluted, and stale, was
inevitable. The re-emergence of the grass roots style of 1980 that came
along in 1991 or so only helped to temporarily stave off rock's eventual
bust. Add to that the killing off of the common single -- a format in which
people could enjoy a hit in a manner convenient and inexpensive to them --
and you have the golden goose with its entrails hanging out of it. As Carl
Sandburg once put it, "The lawyers, Bob, they know too much..."

David "Uncle Dave" Lewis
Lebanon, OH




On Tue, Jan 4, 2011 at 6:48 AM, Tom Fine <[log in to unmask]>wrote:

> http://www.jazzwax.com/2011/01/rock-and-roll-1949-2011.html
>
> even if you don't agree with all of this essay, it's thought-provoking. I
> would have written an obit for anything new and original called rock music
> 10 years ago, but Meyers makes a good point that the Geriatric Stadium Tours
> (some actually sponsored by Viagara) kept filling the coffers and thus kept
> rock in a living-dead zombie state for an extra decade. Personally, I find
> 60+ rockers spilling out of their spandex and limping around a stadium with
> tickets costing over $100 more pathetic than all the poseurs and copy-cats
> making up the "new" performers in the genre. At least a few of the "new"
> performers are good musicians, worth listening to on that point alone. Rock
> is definitely a young man's game, but two generations of young men (and
> women) have dropped the ball and just fed off the old carcass. My theory --
> rock got suburbanized and where is there any drama or struggle in a suburban
> experience, so therefore no cause for new and rebelious musical directions.
>
> Those of us who love rock and jazz, and for that matter blues, and lament
> the death of anything new and original in any of those genres can at least
> revel in the fact that all three styles lived all or most of their lives in
> the era of recordings and almost every "for the ages" song was captured on a
> musically-satisfying recording at some point. I have enough CDs, LPs and
> downloads to keep me rocking for the rest of my days, even if I'm keeping
> beat from a wheelchair.
>
> -- Tom Fine
>