Welcome to the History of Rock Music Part 2. I'm happy to welcome those of you who were not part of Part 1, but are starting with us here in Part 2. And welcome back those of you who have been with us for seven weeks of History of Rock Part 1. We're going to pick up where we left off in that first class, though I'll make an attempt to double back for those of. Where in the first class, with us to kind of fill in a little bit of context of what we covered at the end of, of the History of Rock Part 1. We were talking about the late 60s. Because in many ways, the late 60s and the first half of the 1970s really in a lot of ways. The entire 1970 are pretty much a continuous piece, at least that, that's what I'm going to argue. So most historians will often make a break at the end of the, the, of 1969, Woodstock, Altamont, in 1969. And say, really, that's sort of the end of the psychedelic era, and something new happens with the 70s. Well, I'm going to argue that it's much more continuous. Then all that, all kind of fill in and some of that kind of detail as we go along here. Let's take just a minute to talk about what the 70s, what we're going to say about the 70s this week and in the two following weeks of course. One of the important things that we need to understand about the 70s is that it really is the rise of what we might think of, musically ambitious groups. That is, most groups playing music in the 70s are, even those who are doing music that's more of a kind of blues rock kind of orientation. That you would think would not be so concerned with the professionalism of their playing or their technical apparatus. You know, in terms of their technique and stuff, who might be more sort of visceral rather than cerebral type players. Even those musicians are concerned with being taken seriously as professionals and having a certain sort of standard of professional ability. Now, punk music going to come along in the second, at the end of the decade, at the second half of the decade. And really begin to challenge that aesthetic at the end of that decade. We're also going to have disco music come in and challenge that. But a lot of the story we're going to talk about this week is how these groups arose out of the late 1960s, and continued a lot of things that were going on in the 60s. The thing that's different, though, in the 70s is that well, a lot of different kinds of styles were blended together inside psychedelia at the end of the 60s. In the 70s, these really start to get divided out into specific, specialized kinds of styles. So, while it was possible to blend in classical music and jazz, and world music and all kinds of country music and all kinds of other things. The psychedelia, and nobody really thought about those as being specialized styles. Now, we get into the 70s, we're going to talk about styles like country rock and progressive rock and jazz rock. And these styles that will become much more specialized. So, the way I often talk about it when I teach my classes here at the University of Rochester as I think of it like the the the cover of that Pink Floyd album. We're going to talk about that today the Dark Side of the Moon. You know, on The Dark Side of the Moon, there's the, there's the prism there, and coming in through one side of the prism is white light. And then, coming in through the other side of the prism is, there's the light broken off into all of the colors of the spectrum that they come out of. And that's a little bit the way I see 1970 as that pyramid. Psychedelia comes in containing all kinds of, of different kinds of stylistic elements. And then on the way out, what you get is a breakdown into all of these different kind of specialized kinds of styles. One of the other issues that we want to talk about in the 70s is the fact that black pop in the 70s, at least for the first half of the decade. Was relatively segregated from white rock, there wasn't a lot. There weren't a lot of people listening to radio or listening to rock radio or buying rock records who knew an awful lot about black music in the 70s. And this lead to really a kind of cultural misunderstanding at the end of the decade with the rise of disco. And we'll get to that. So, as we talk about the 70s, we'll talk about the rise of these ambitious bands at the very beginning of the decade. And then, we'll talk about the punk reaction to that, the disco phenomenon, and the parallel track of black pop during the 1970s. another thing we have to keep in mind is that, the rock business now is becoming a bigger and bigger and bigger kind of business. So, you're starting to find things like bands selling a lot more records, especially in the second half of the 70s where we talk about corporate rock. We talk about the mega albums, those kinds of things you start, people start selling records in quantities that nobody in the music business thought it was going to be possible to sell. And that brought a lot of multinational corporations into the business. A lot of people would say that it meant that they played a safer game, and so the music was a lot less ambitious. it was a little bit more homogenized, the rough edges were sort of sanded off and the music was made a little bit more listener friendly. And maybe was a little bit more cynically constructed, well, well we'll get to that. But whenever you end up thinking about the music at the end of the, the end of the decade, it's very clear that the mid, the rock music business grows incredibly over the course of the 70s. Concert attendance, record sales radio formatting, this kind of thing. So, we'll keep our eye on that this week, and in the next couple of weeks. Now, getting back to this idea as we set up our discussion for this week of, of the, of the continuity from the end of the 1960s into the early 1970s. there are a couple things that we have to keep in mind that we talked about in History of Rock Part 1 at the very end in the psychedelic era. The first one is that albums and singles become separate markets. Clearly, they're separate markets by the early 1970s. This is already happening in 1967, 1968, where album oriented music is the stuff that goes to the FM radio band. Singles as, which had been the sort of commodity of, that, that, that was sold all through most of the Beatles career, say the Rolling Stones, Elvis, people like that. Singles became something that was relegated mostly to the AM band. So, in this country, the United States that is you've got AM, which is sort of hit. Wait hit, hit song radio, you know, single. People who are, who are mostly sort of selling singles. And FM radio becomes bands that are mostly selling albums. And, you know, back in the day, back in the early 1970s, at least in this country, if you really cared about a band you bought the album. Anybody who bought the little 45s was really thought of as really either kind of a superficial music listener. Or somebody who hadn't matured to the level that they were buying albums. And so, AM was frequently dismissed as being kind of sell out commercial teeny bopper, that kind of thing, and FM was where the real action was. Well, whatever your opinions are about those different kinds of music that would fit on FM and AM. Our story of the history of rock usually follows what happens on the FM band. So just be, be aware that there are going to be a lot of acts that are left out because they don't fit the sort of, the, the, the rock story. and, and are part of, of AM music during this period. the stylistic range, as I said, of this music expanded considerably. and we have this continued exploration of jazz, folk world music, mostly Indian, India Indian music, classical music and avant garde music. But most importantly, we have a continuing development of something that I brought up in the History of Rock Part 1. Just the idea of the hippie aesthetic. The hippie aesthetics is the idea that rock musician would think of him or herself as an artist. Who has a responsibility to create to create sophisticated music. That is, that if you are a rock musician you're not just somebody who's sort of a pro player who'll play anything that they're asked to do. Or somebody who is cynically constructing songs for a team market or for a hip market. You're an artist, writing songs that, you know, with, writing and performing your own music. And trying to perform that music at the highest level of technical perfection that you can, maybe not always sort of, in a virtuosic display. But still, you know, being proud of your musicianship and everything you're able to put into the music. using, you know, the best technology in terms of recording studios to create the cleanest possible recording. Everything was about this, this, this idea that you have a responsibility as a rock musician to create an artistic product. And what you don't want to be seen as is somebody who continues doing the same thing over, and over, and over again. You always want to strike out into new material in, in, into new territory. You want your new material to, to, to really go places that you, that they haven't gone before. That element of the, of what we talked about in the 60s. The development of the Beatles and the Beach Boys, and a lot of, and Dillon and a lot of those groups sort of pushing this idea of the, the rock musician artist. This continues, and gets and becomes sort of the standard model for rock music in the 70s. To a certain degree, this is going to be the friction with disco, and to a certain degree, it's going to be the friction with punk at the end of the decade. So this continuation of, of the hippie aesthetic is something we're going to keep our eye on all through this week along with the roots of all this music in the 1960s. There's virtually not a style that we're going to talk about that doesn't have its roots in 1960s music and continue as a kind of expansion of things that were already happening in the 60s. So, let's move onto the first audit will talk about, the first different color that comes out of that dark side of the moon prism, and that's going to be blues rock.
