Paranoid Android wrote on Jan 22
nd, 2016 at 5:21pm:
I totally get it...FM rock radio of the 70's and mid 80's totally had one playlist...its the read=son I cant stand 95% of "classic rock" today...The self indulgent 70's guitar solo is what made me turn to punk...and the reason I always thought Eddie Van Halen was a joke.
Never did like STH either...
Glad to know I'm not the only one who didn't like that song. It might've been okay if I hadn't heard it 250,000 times but after the first hundred any chance it had with me evaporated. Never got into Van Halen either. I don't hate them, mind you, I just never got into them much.
(Brace for long-winded rant)
I grew up on 70s rock but I find myself not liking it as much as I did back then, though for a different reason. Firstly, it's all too perfectly structured: intro, stanza, chorus, stanza, chorus, solo, stanza, chorus and fade out. That's pretty much every rock song cut in that decade. Compare that to 60s rock when the length and even the structure of a song might be different. They were experimenting. In the 70s they all followed the same structure. Were the bands terrified too terrified to try a different song structure or did the record execs forbid it? Maybe a mix of both.
The second reason I don't care for 70s rock as much as I did then is that's when they really started added that electronic polish in the studio. Now, don't get me wrong, some electronic effects can be good and I guess a little polish never hurt, but they overdid it with some bands... and no one seemed to notice. I didn't either. What did I know? I'd grown up listening to that stuff. It wasn't until ZZ Top's
Recycler that I ever gave it much thought. With
Recycler they went back to a more organic sound, eschewing electronic and synth-based effects. I liked that even better than their previous stuff, including the famous
Eliminator. Listening to
Recycler, I was suddenly struck with the realization that I didn't know what some of my fave 70s bands would sound like outside of a studio. I was right about how much of a difference that would make; I've listened to a few of them live since then and they sounded like a different band on stage.
(/long-winded rant)
As an amusing side note, listening to the radio only as a kid left me ignorant of a lot of things. The first time I ever learned much about the Stones was on MTV. I was startled to learn that they were a 60s band! No one had ever mentioned on the radio when I was listening. Turns out some of the Stones songs that I'd been hearing all my life were from before I was born. I hadn't known that.
Another funny note: I was listening to LRS when the Stones came to Louisville and the idiot DJ said that the station's call letters stood for "Louisville's Rolling Stones." I remember thinking, "What?! Yeah, suuuure."