Dinosaur Rock

August 8 - 15, 1 9 9 6 [Rock Dinosaurs]

Keeping the power on

Why in the '90s we're still listening to the '70s
by Brett Milano

Kiss -- the real alternative

A week ago Wednesday, the New Orleans band Cowboy Mouth were playing at Mama Kin. Drummer/frontman Fred LeBlanc usually welcomes any excuse to hop up the crowd, and this night he had a good one: "We got Kiss playing across town, and we're ready for some fun." The very presence of Kiss in the same city was enough to inspire Cowboy Mouth to play a hot set; I assume that playing a club co-owned by Aerosmith didn't hurt either. And if LeBlanc had walked upstairs to the Lansdowne Street Playhouse, he would have found a bunch of local rockers with indie cred re-creating the last '70s concept album, Pink Floyd's The Wall. The spirit of '70s rock was looking down on Lansdowne Street and smiling.
It wasn't supposed to be this way. Punk rock promised a lot of things, not the least of which was that the old rock-and-roll order would be dead and buried. "No Elvis, Beatles or the Rolling Stones in 1977," sang Joe Strummer in one of that year's landmark singles, the Clash's "1977." He didn't bother singing "No Kiss, Aerosmith or Cheap Trick"; he didn't have to. No one imagined those groups would last -- they were irrelevant, hedonistic, throwaway bands.
Which may be the very reason they've survived. Nearly 20 years later, the Clash themselves are dead and buried, but Kiss, Aerosmith, and Cheap Trick (not to mention Elvis, the Beatles, and the Rolling Stones, in one form or another) are all still with us. Of course, the Clash had farther to fall. After promising a new level of political enlightenment in rock, they wound up providing the unofficial theme song ("Rock the Casbah") for the Gulf War. The promise to rock and roll all night and party every day is a lot easier to live up to. This year finds Kiss and the Sex Pistols -- who always had more in common than John Lydon would care to admit -- both doing oldies tours, and the Pistols are looking like sellouts while Kiss come out smelling like a rose.
It's hard to pinpoint the exact moment when punk rock and '70s arena rock kissed and made up, but it had a lot to do with two separate events in 1984. The first was the release of Black Flag's second album, My War (SST). Released after a three-year break caused by legal problems, My War -- especially its second side, with three songs totaling 20 minutes -- upended the idea of what punk rock, especially hardcore punk, was supposed to sound like. The songs weren't fast, fiery, or fist-waving; they were slow, sludgy, and self-hating. What it really sounded like was Black Sabbath, and frontman Henry Rollins had no qualms about admitting that.
But it took a movie, released a couple of months later, to remind everyone how much fun '70s rock could be. Yes, I'm talking about This Is Spinal Tap. True, it was a parody movie featuring a fictional band, but its similarities to the real thing were duly noted -- even today, nobody seems capable of writing about any heavy-metal group without using the phrase "amps turned up to 11." If you got off on "Sex Farm" and "Big Bottom," it was only a short step to digging up your big brother's Aerosmith and Van Halen albums to get the same kicks. If Spinal Tap's 1992 reunion album (the pretty darn brilliant Break like the Wind, on MCA) flopped, there was good reason: by then the Spinal Tap ethos had become so well absorbed into alternative metal that Tap themselves were redundant. Perhaps the greatest metal song of the '80s -- Motörhead's "Killed by Death"-- was released only a few months after the Tap film; it could have come straight from the movie.
A lot of the metal sound that defines current alternative rock can be traced back to these two events. My War cleared the way for a dark, overwhelming vision of metal that can now be heard in Soundgarden, Metallica, and the Jesus Lizard. And any outfit that revels in metal's goofiness probably got it from Spinal Tap. Once the way was cleared, every rocker with a secret '70s fetish came out of the closet. The Melvins (who are My War in sound and Spinal Tap in image) did solo albums with Kiss-inspired cover designs. R.E.M. did Aerosmith's "Toys in the Attic," Steve Albini's band Big Black did Cheap Trick's "He's a Whore." Nirvana had a song called "Aero Zeppelin" (on Incesticide) that was meant to be a funny/scathing look at a musical tradition they weren't sure whether they loved or hated; but the joke backfired: stylistically, it sounded like every other Nirvana song.
Other forms of '70s rock haven't done as well, at least in terms of hip cachet. It's a safe bet that you don't know anyone who admits to liking REO Speedwagon, Meat Loaf, or Styx. But somebody does, or else they wouldn't all be headlining Great Woods this summer, and Styx and REO wouldn't be turning a profit on the greatest-hits CDs they just put out. Bachman-Turner Overdrive drew a crowd at Government Center last weekend, and they didn't even have Randy Bachman (they had his brother, so the name was at least accurate). Virtually anybody who had a hit 20 years ago is visible in some form today.
One can ascribe the resilience of these bands to cultural longings for a more innocent time, or to their artistic integrity (granted, that last one's a stretch). But it's most likely that they're selling now for the same reason they sold in the '70s: because they're on the radio. It's a significant development over the past few years that radio is now formatted largely by decade, and nobody's screening the classics from the crap. Just as alternative (i.e., '90s) radio serves up Nirvana right next to Dishwalla, '70s radio will lump vintage Neil Young right in with the Doobie Brothers -- Steve Miller's "Jungle Love" probably gets more play now than it did when it was a hit. The situation is especially tight in Boston, where there's no adult-rock station playing strictly current music (WBOS, which is nominally an adult-rock format, is largely oldies-driven). If you're over 30, sick of the music you grew up with, and want a steady diet of something new and non-trendy -- imagine Sparklehorse, Vic Chesnutt, the Radiators, R.L. Burnside, Syd Straw, the Fugees, and the latest from Peter Wolf and Neil Young, all back to back -- you're pretty much out of luck.
One result is a free-ride situation for any veteran outfit that sticks around: '70s bands, especially those with big reputations, are no longer expected to prove their creative viability by writing or recording new material. The Eagles are making more money now than in their heyday; but their only post-reunion album was a listless unplugged set. Steely Dan -- who were primarily a studio band, remember? -- have toured for three years without a studio album. Pink Floyd's last tour was built around a re-creation of Dark Side of the Moon, though the guy who wrote most of it isn't in the band. Even the Rolling Stones, on last year's Stripped album, did only one song less than 20 years old.
When such bands do venture into the studio, the results are often negligible. Black Sabbath did a generation-bridging gesture by working with members of Ice-T's band Body Count on their last album, but it was still lousy and nobody bought it. Ditto Fleetwood Mac's stillborn Time album last year. And the world had enough fond memories of Meat Loaf to support one comeback album but not two (Bat Out of Hell II went platinum; the current Welcome to My Neighborhood barely went cardboard).
Of course, there are few outlets for the veterans who can still cut it, save for new songs sneaked between the old hits at concerts. What of Crosby, Stills & Nash, whose last album, After the Storm, was quite decent? Or the Allman Brothers Band, who are making better studio albums now than they did in the '70s? If you caught last weekend's Esplanade show by New Orleans soul master Allen Toussaint, you heard the song "Computer Lady" (from his new album, Connected on his own NYNO label) -- a funky, timely song that's one of the most obvious hits of his long career. Or would be, if there existed a radio format to play it.
The one '70s style that remains thoroughly unhip is progressive/art rock, despite the Yes/Tull/ELP tours that draw the same people every year-- and I should know, being one of them. I find myself enjoying prog rock for the same reason I always did: because it doesn't sound like whatever's in fashion (with the notable exception of Smashing Pumpkins' Mellon Collie & the Infinite Sadness, which is the closest thing the '90s have produced to a true prog-rock concept album).
For what it's worth, many of prog's dinosaur bands are in surprisingly good shape: Jethro Tull's last album, Roots to Branches, was their best in a decade; Yes recently re-formed their best line-up (hello, Steve Howe and Rick Wakeman, goodbye Trevor Rabin) and signed to their old label Atlantic. And the news that Phil Collins has left Genesis means that real music by that band is again a possibility. Then there's King Crimson, whose current line-up is potentially the strongest in its history, though their pattern in recent years has been spotty rather than sustained brilliance. But a generation of Blues Traveler fans will still have their minds severely messed with when Crimson play this summer's HORDE tour.
If there's one band ripe for a comeback, it's Cheap Trick. They had the Spinal Tap ethos down before Spinal Tap did, and before they went Vegas in the '80s they recorded a stack of seminal pop/metal albums. In terms of bar-band coverability, "He's a Whore" is almost up there with "Louie Louie" by now, and half the bands who claimed they learned about loud pop from cult faves Big Star really learned it from Cheap Trick.
The wheels were greased for a Cheap Trick revival two years ago, but the album they released on Warner Bros., Woke Up with a Monster, was so bad it disappeared. Still, with their original line-up, they're building a groundswell through relentless touring and through a forthcoming boxed set. And a music-biz friend recently told me that they're being courted by his label, who wants them to reunite with their old producer Tom Werman and make an album that sounds just like the old ones. So when Cheap Trick play Government Center for free this coming Monday, it might not be just an oldies show: it might be the shape of things to come.

Kiss -- the real alternative