Innovation and Nostalgia: The Passing of a Rock Generation

Rockers Eddie Money and Ric Ocasek died recently.  One was 70, the other 75.

It seems funny, rock musicians in their 70s.  But hold on to your hat.  “Just about every rock legend you can think of,” Damon Linker writes, “is going to die within the next decade or so.” Paul McCartney, Paul Simon, Art Garfunkel, Carol King, and Brian Wilson are 77.  Mike Jagger is 76.  Joni Mitchell, Ray Davies, Roger Waters, Keith Richards, and Jimmy Page are 75.  Peter Townshend, Rod Stewart, and Eric Clapton are 74, Van Morrison, Bryan Ferry, and David Gilmour are 73.  Elton John and Don Henley?  72.  And that leaves youngsters James Taylor, Jackson Browne, Billy Joel, and Bruce Springsteen all north of 70.

The fact that a list of living rock icons is this long is a testament to genetics, chemicals, or luck—since Vegas might not have given any of them favorable odds of reaching 35 when they were in their 20s.  The paragraph above is strewn with hard living and near-misses.  Some of the rockers listed may make it to 2030 or beyond--and I certainly hope they do—but don’t bet against the odds this time.

The Kings, Jaggers, and Stewarts of the world were born in the 1940s, developed their craft in the 1960s, and began to create music and innovate the sounds of our world in the early 1970s.  

It was a moment in time that reminds me of New Orleans in 1900 and the birth of jazz.  Detroit in 1920 and the auto industry.  Silicon Valley just after the Netscape IPO in 1995, when a collection of people gathered to do things that had never been done before, offering ideas now so pervasive that we take their innovations for granted. “I used to get up in the morning,” the recording engineer for Led Zeppelin said in 1971, "thinking, ‘Today I have another chance to do something that’s never been done before.’” 

In Never a Dull Moment, author Dave Hepworth has chosen 1971 as the year that rock exploded, the year when things were done that had never been done before.

Remember 1971?  Rock was just seventeen.  It competed with three channels of television, "The French Connection" and "Billy Jack" in theaters.  The microprocessor was new, handheld calculators almost cheap enough to afford.  Disney World opened.  The Pentagon Papers were published.  Federal Express, Kevlar, and NPR launched.  If you wanted to call overseas, speak with the operator.  Louis Armstrong and Jim Morrison died three days apart in 1971; Armstrong got the front page of The New York Times, Morrison an inside mention. 

Rolling Stone named Rod Stewart’s Every Picture Tells a Story the record of the year.  “Maggie May” was added at the last minute because the album needed some padding, but it wasn’t much liked by anyone.  Shortly thereafter, it would turn Stewart into a superstar.  Even then, nobody knew anything.

What could a new musical generation innovate in 1971?  Everything, and Hepworth does a brilliant job describing each new combination.

David Bowie and Cat Stevens became the “first generation of TV-savvy rock stars.” Don Cornelius used TV to take Soul Train national, kept the camera focused on the dancers, and made display a crucial part of rock.  Grand Funk taught the world that a band “almost entirely without merit musically” could command huge crowds.  The Concert for Bangladesh in August 1971 set the stage for every future effort to use music for social good.  

Gram Parsons sang something that would one day be called alt-country, Jonathan Richmond something that would one day be called punk rock.  Harry Nilsson sang Badfinger’s dreary “Without You” and invented the power ballad.  Sly Stone recorded There’s a Riot Goin’ On, an album that still resonates in urban music and hip-hop.

Carol King’s Tapestry became a hit so big and so resolute on the charts that it redefined success. 

 

Automobiles were being outfitted with auto-reverse cassette players and stereo speakers to become moving concert halls.  The first polyphonic synthesizer was available; Stevie Wonder discovered it and would go on to create songs such as “Superstition” and “Living for the City.”  His music, something called funk, “came out of a room full of wires and plugs, a room reeking of solder and overheating machines,” Hepworth writes, “the dawn of a new way of doing things.”  Meanwhile, The Who’s “Baba O’Riley” would become the first time a synthesizer was used to provide a rhythm track.  “In years to come,” Hepworth adds, “all records would be made like this.”

Music imitated business.  Berry Gordy modeled his Motown Records on the production-line methods of the nearby Detroit automakers, placing inspiration on an assembly line.  “Brown Sugar” was released by the Stones which, in 1971, stopped being a band and started morphing into one of rock's first brands.  Low margin 45s featuring a single hit song and targeted at kids were migrating into high margin LPs focused on bands targeted at adults. The music industry discovered that record shops were the new barber shops, the predecessor to Starbucks and the web; young people congregated because, they could sense, something important was happening.

From music to technology to markets, 1971 was a year of wild innovation and new, unthinkable combinations.

And, in the final month of the year, Don McLean released “American Pie,” later named one of the five iconic American songs of the twentieth century.  Audiences singing with McLean in 1971 about “the day the music died” began to sense, for the first time, that rock was finally old enough to be nostalgic.

Bob Dylan is 78 years old.  

Seventy-eight.

As Damon Linker warns, get ready for a decade full of feeling nostalgic.