Rock Hits the Hard Place

By JAY COCKS

The thrill is gone--is it bad business or middle age?

Is there hope? This week, the J. Geils Band has settled itself onto the sunny, snowy peak of the Billboard chart. Score one for the good guys. J. Geils has managed to nudge off Foreigner, which on and off occupied the top slot for eleven weeks. Score eleven for the bad guys. And these days, in rock and in the record business, the bad guys are winning.

Big bucks, much media attention and even some good reviews go to a 598-page biography of Elvis Presley that is like a game of mumblety-peg played on a corpse. REO Speedwagon has moved more than 6 million copies of its latest record, thereby making Hi InFidelity the second largest selling album in the history of CBS Records. Rolling Stone, a magazine that was once the most prominent and articulate forum for rock culture, divests itself of much of its music coverage and aims for a more general readership. Record companies have cut back on corporate extravagances and are making a little money, mostly by kicking up prices. Punk is dead, New Wave is over, disco moved out when your older sister left home. The Clash can't swing a major hit single, so its albums don't get high on the charts; and does anyone know there's a great new record by a great new group called the Blasters? Is anyone listening? Does anyone care?

Wrote a song for ev 'ryone, Wrote a song for truth. Wrote a song for ev'ryone And I couldn 't even talk to you.

--John Fogerty

Those days are over: days when a rocker had a right to expect that the music he made--like Fogerty and his peerless band, Creedence Clearwater Revival--could reach a large as well as a knowing audience; when the radio played a dazzling diversity of music, not a range as thin as the air between two stations. For the first time, under the regency of radio programmers and the tyranny of marketing studies and demographics, rock 'n' roll has been successfully factionalized and fractionalized, smashed into a mass of splinters with few sharp edges. A song for everyone? If it has no specific gravity to unite factions of the audience, then it has a shot.

Rolling Stone's two-stepping toward general interest is a tacit editorial admission that rock music is no longer taken as the unifying force of a generation. The eager reception of Albert Goldman's lowlife Presley biography (150,000 sold) is an indication that there is an audience that wants, even needs, to have the rock spirit despoiled. That spirit can find nothing new to focus on, never mind to rally around. Social issues have always been slightly suspect in rock. But the upheavals of the 1960s, like Viet Nam and civil rights, redirected and rejustified rock by setting it within a more urgent social context: suddenly there were new subjects to explore, fresh issues for the music to explain, ideas that the rock culture itself could symbolize. That sense of unlimited possibility died in the next decade. "There was brilliant music made in the 1970s," as Critic Greil Marcus has said, "but because it had no way of linking up to grand mythic dimensions, it lacked the charge much inferior music had some years earlier."

The places to start looking for rock's real trouble are the ones that used to be the sources of its renewal: radio and records. What sells is what the radio plays, but the radio plays only what sells and, often, what sells out. Styx, Foreigner, AC/DC, Journey, REO are variously typical of what Columbia Records Executive Peter Philbin calls a "Madison Avenue approach to rock 'n' roll," a cunningly anonymous cruise down the mainstream. Telling any of these groups apart is like passing the Pepsi challenge: Even if you see any difference between them, what possible difference does it make?

Bands like REO manage to outsell Springsteen, the Rolling Stones, the Who by swapping individuality for corporate style: heavy guitar chords and sappy strings, music by rote, lyrics by reflex. Says one major record executive: "In the 1960s, commercialism and the heart of rock were pretty much the same. In 1982 the commercial center and the soul of the music are different. It's no accident that these bland, faceless groups with no defined image, no personality, no boldness have the largest-selling albums. They're the easiest to sell."

Certainly they are the easiest to get on the radio--"AC" radio, that is, music biz vernacular for "adult contemporary" stations, whose regimented play lists have turned Fogerty's song for everyone into ditties for anyone. On the '60s Top 40 radio, it was possible to hear Sam and Dave, Otis Redding, the Beatles, the Four Tops and Bob Dylan all in the space of an hour. Nowadays, says Neil Bogart, president of Boardwalk Entertainment Co., "they play music for the 14-to-18 audience, the 30-to-35, the 50-to-60, or for white, black, chicano. And only two out of five stations are willing to play new records."

The results of radio stations' demographic polls can be racist, in fact if not in intent. With some crossover exceptions like Michael Jackson and the Commodores, the place to hear black music on American radio now is either soul or oldies stations. And they play even less white music on black radio. Says Jon Landau, the onetime rock critic who now manages Bruce Springsteen: "The cross-fertilization between black music and white music that created rock has greatly diminished." But, argues Atlantic Records Chairman Ahmet Ertegun, "radio doesn't play according to what its prejudices are. Radio plays according to results."

Jerry Wexler, Ertegun's former partner who helped produce some of the best soul sides ever cut, offers a more sweeping reason for the languishing rock culture. Contrary to the shared assumptions of the Woodstock generation, he insists, "rock isn't the best possible tool for insulting your parents or establishing the fact that you are a free person. Kids are too cool for that now." Certainly the music is cool, not in Wexler's hipster sense, but in mean degrees. A go-for-broke performer--someone who, like Springsteen or Pete Townshend, has the temerity to believe that rock not only matters, but matters deeply--is working out of a hot center that no longer exists. Such an attitude even a decade ago would have been a way to reach for the listeners. Now, if it does not turn them off, it certainly limits them.

Heat like that is just a hassle, as the punks learned very fast. Their music gave way to the more aloof sounds of the New Wave, which either dead-ended in private experimentation or smoothed itself out into elegant pop cadences. Says Chris Stein of Blondie: "There is so much money to be made that radio and record companies are just totally paranoid. They won't change, they won't experiment. If the Stones were an unknown group and they came out with Satisfaction today, it probably wouldn't get any air play."

Columbia Records signed some 25 new acts in 1979; last year they signed ten. Albums that sold 150,000 copies in the mid-'70s were considered promising; today that kind of promise is in short supply. A record has either a hefty success or no sales at all; the middle ground is no-man's land. On the balance sheet, the pickings still look rich. The size of the industry more than doubled in a decade, from $1.66 billion worth of sales in 1970 to $3.68 billion in 1980. But that growth was maintained at great cost. Panic set in back in 1979 when dollar volume for the business tumbled 11%. Now, after cutbacks and corporate scrambling, the major labels have regained some of their equilibrium.

Some. Gone are the days of limos rented on a lark and unlimited room service from the kitchen and the pharmacy. Gone is much of the personnel, borne off by cuts in all echelons--sparing, of course, the most exalted executive suites, where gloom and consternation flourish nonetheless. There is no smart little outfit that has tapped into a new style or audience. No big company has been totally successful at using their 20-megaton talent to fend off the incursions of recession. "Record sales are flat," says an industry executive. "Everybody is making a nickel or a dime, but nobody is making millions."

Bottom-line types beef about everything from home recording and sales of blank tape cassettes to the boom in home video games and the counterfeiting of albums. Jules Yarnell, special counsel for the Recording Industry Association of America, estimates that companies lose $800 million every year through counterfeiting, piracy and bootlegging. Walter Yetnikoff, president of CBS Records Group, figures the industry loses 20% of its revenue just from home taping. Jack Reinstein, treasurer of Electra/Asylum/ Nonesuch Records, calculates 400 million albums were taped off the air in 1980 alone, "without any compensation to the artist, the songwriters and publishers, the musicians, the record company." Huffs Kal Rudman, professional music biz pundit: "It's grand larceny! It's outrageous!"

It is also passing the buck, even if one credits the statistics. The matter may be a lot simpler, and more daunting, than anything on a balance sheet. With the record companies concerned mostly about making records that radio will play, and with the radio stations unable to play anything but what the record companies give them, the music may just have got lost in a lot of corporate second-guessing. It may just have slipped out of context.

The cultural fragmentation of rock is a melancholy sight for anyone who grew up with the magic waveband synthesis of Elvis Presley and Buddy Holly, Chuck Berry and Jackie Wilson, the Coasters and the Drifters, on through the Beatles and down to Creedence. The young people who turned out all over America for the recent Rolling Stones tour were checking out the myths firsthand, and maybe they will eventually reinvent them. But if those young people promise continuity, they also suggest the danger of imitation. Radio stations that play oldies flourish as never before. The kids who grew up in the rock generation found an identity, and a voice, in their music. Their kids have yet to find a sound of their own.

"Young rock 'n' roll is alive," maintains Wexler. "It's boiling, it's fermenting." Indeed, the success of a good-times group like the Go-Go's or, even more, the trip-hammer velocity of the Blasters may justify Wexler's optimism. It is a tough mark to make, though, tougher than ever before. The Blasters, with their raw excitement and down-the-middle exhilaration, have been held up to Creedence, and the comparison, which is flattering, is also fitting. Maybe they know the words of the song. It should have been written yesterday, about tomorrow.

Wrote a song for ev ev'ryone Wrote a song for truth. Wrote a song for ev 'ryone And I couldn 't even talk to you.

-- By Jay Cocks. Reported by Martha Smilgis/ Los Angeles andDenise Worrell/New York

With reporting by Martha Smilgis, Denise Worrell

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.