morriscroy

(I don't know if this would be considered "classic rock" by any standards).

- Avril Lavigne
- Taylor Swift
- Madonna

kd5

Blue Öyster Cult is one of the greatest rock bands that radio neutered with Don't Fear the Reaper and Burnin' For You. My god this band has 20+ albums out and these 2 songs are all they can find to play?????

Hokeyboy

Well there's always Godzilla...

Hazel Motes

Not being "classic rock" I can let slide. But I'm gonna have to stand firm on the "great" part.

mickey65

Janis Joplin - "Me and Bobbie McGee" - the ONE song of hers I can't stand and as far as classic rock radio is concerned as being her only "hit".

brainee

I've listened to classic rock stations doing "block parties". And when BOC is up, I'd wager my life on the same damn three songs every single time!

hdnmickey

Black Sabbath is no different. I'm listening to their new "The End" release right now and yet when I hear Ozzy era Sabbath on the radio I hear only Paranoid, Iron Man, and War Pigs. Over and over. It's worse for the Dio era where we only get one: The Mob Rules.

Hokeyboy

I've heard "Heaven & Hell" more often than "Mob Rules" when it comes to the Dio era... if the Dio era gets any play at all, of course.

I would wish that whomever is programming playlists would realize there is a metric ass-ton of kickass Kinks songs (including hit singles) that exist other than "Lola" and "You Really Got Me"... unless some movie celebrity dies, and then they pull "Celluloid Heroes" out of the basement.

hdnmickey

And Destroyer.

Dio era Sabbath got a lot of play around here back when solo Dio was very popular. And then again when Dehumanizer was a new release. But ever since then I have never heard any Dio beyond hearing The Mod Rules during a Sabbath or Dio "block party" along with Holy Diver and Man on the Silver Mountain.

The Infidel

I can't agree about Queen. The good thing about a band like Queen is they have so much great music from album to album, and all the radio stations play is their hits. I can listen to any of Queen's albums from start to finish and never tire of them. I haven't heard a single station that ever goes deep and plays something obscure that really defines what Queen was all about. I mean, seriously, what do they play? A small handful of songs that aren't even their best work: Bohemian Rhapsody, We Will Rock You/We Are The Champions, Another One Bites The Dust, Fat Bottomed Girls, Somebody To Love. That's classic rock radio's picture of Queen.

statcat

Cheap Trick, Thin Lizzy, T. Rex....same few songs on "classic rock" radio over and over.

Hiro11

This is funny, all three occurred instantly to me as well. I agree completely. All three wrote many, many great songs and had many great singles. All three get maybe one or two songs played over and over these days. Pathetic.

Others:

Joan Jett & The Blackhearts. If you step back and listen to "I Love Rock n' Roll" all the way through, that is one of the best rock revival albums of the early eighties. Now she's seen as a one hit wonder. Not fair at all. Her first four albums are all fantastic.

The Police: all of their albums are excellent and the same damned three songs by them are all that's ever played. Kids these days have no idea how great this band was.

Little Feat: one of the more innovative and unique rock bands of the 70s and "Willin'" is all that's ever played. I'd say at least three of their albums are all-time classics and that "Dixie Chicken" is on my personal top ten albums of the 70s list.

I'd mention Talking Heads as well, but they're not really in the "classic rock" wheelhouse.

Hokeyboy

Thin Lizzy is basically Boys Are Back In Town and *maybe* Jailbreak. Maybe... and that's another damn shame. "Vagabonds of the Western World" is one of those criminally underlooked classic rock albums.

hdnmickey

They are on the station here. Often get blocks of Burning Down the House, Once in a Lifetime, and Wild Wild Life.

Paff

It's annoying, but it must be what people want to hear. Other than us, that is. Our local classic rock station plays the "all-request Saturday night", and it doesn't sound any different than Sunday through Friday. "We just played Bohemian Rhapsody by request". Really? If I wanted to hear Bohemian Rhapsody, I'd just turn on the classic rock station and wait. It's bound to come up in an hour or so.

But it's the way people are wired. I was at a bar once that had a pretty good jukebox selection. One of those where it's not just albums, but extensive collections of artists' works. Their Clash selection was a good 25-30 songs at least. Someone goes over to the jukebox, and what did they play? London Calling and Should I Stay or Should I Go. I guess they ran out of money or they would have played Rock the Casbah too.

Supermallet

Paff, your post reminded me immediately of this:

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Jason

Even my go-to locally owned classic rock station suffers from this. They play Deep Purple's "Pictures of Home" with surprising regularity.

Alan Smithee

I used to call stations all the time requesting songs I KNEW they wouldn't play. When they do "all-request" shows they usually mean you can request the songs that they already play, just that you might not have to wait as long to hear them. One of my cardinal rules if I ever owned a radio station would be to never play the same song twice in the same WEEK. If you want to hear it more than that, buy the CD.

Hiro11

Just though of another example: Bob Marley. Here you have one of the greatest artists of the past fifty years. Out of his gigantic catalog, commercial radio might play "Jammin'" which is an incredibly stupid song and a cynical attempt by Marley to break into the American R&B charts. More rarely, radio will play "Three Little Birds" which is fine but one of Marley's more watered down happy-go-lucky pop ditties. These are two of Marley's lesser songs. Even worse, these two songs of Marley's often stand-in for the entire reggae genre.

Of course most of this endless replaying of the same three tracks by any artist is because most people simply don't care that much about music. For most listeners of commercial radio, it's something that's on during the day while they're working or driving. All most listeners want is something they're familiar with. I can't really blame commercial radio for giving the people what they want, especially as their audience shrinks and the stations lose ad dollars.

rw2516

I used to wonder if stations avoided unfamiliar songs because they didn't want to get flooded with calls from people asking what the song is, who does it, what album is it on.
Back in the day, one station had a yearly fundraiser where you pledged money to hear any song and they would play it. Once a local station got bought and they fired everybody. One DJ, knowing it was his last day played only really long songs, Mountain Jam, Thick as A Brick, etc.

The more I think about it the song selection on FM rock radio wasn't that great even in the heyday. What's changed is the sense of community. Everybody in town listened to the station. Everybody knew the DJs. They were celebrities who doubled as stage announcers at concerts. The stations were directly involved with the promotion of concerts. It's where concerts and ticket info was first announced. Stations got advance copies of albums and everybody heard the songs we're all sick first from the same source.

I do miss the alternative programming. King Biscuit Flower Hour, BBC Live, Reeling In The Years, Dr. Demento, and the live simulcast concerts.

Did anyone else listen to Beaker Street on KAAY Little Rock, Arkansas? Don't know how far the signal carried but from 11pm-2am Mon-Fri they cranked up the transmitter and offered deep album tracks. The DJ actually broadcast from the transmitter shack. Between songs, and while the DJ was talking, there was these trippy space sounds to cover the hum of the transmitter. I know it could be picked up across several states. IA, IL, TX, KS, LA, OK.

Paff

You just can't get people to open their minds and want to hear anything other than the hits. This thread reminded me of a few years ago when I went to see Bow Wow Wow (no, not exactly classic rock, but bear with me). It was a club, the bar was in the back away from the stage. While I was enjoying songs like Louis Quatorze, Jungle Boy, Baby Oh No, etc, I noticed a large amount of the clubgoers were back at the bar. OK. More room for me. But when the drum beat of I Want Candy began, there was this rush of 40something women, all with their phones in the air on record. As soon as the song ended, they were gone. $18 cover to hear the one song they knew. It boggles the mind. If you like that song (and sure, it's good, but overplayed as hell), then wouldn't you want to know if this band might have other songs that you like? Trust me, BWW has a shit-ton of good songs. But nope, people just want the familiar.

Rex Fenestrarum

Yep, and it's not new, either. I got a job at a warehouse when I got out of high school. We could listen to whatever we wanted, provided we used headphones (no blasting tunes in front of customers). But warehouse work is rough on small electronics - I'd never use an expensive (at the time) portable CD player 'cos you'd drop 'em on the concrete floor or smash it against a pallet or whatever. So I took to buying these cheap AM\FM radios we sold. They were only like, $3.99, and I'd just get a new one every 6 weeks when the previous one broke. FM radio was (and still is) a wasteland. Album 88 (Georgia State's radio station) and WREK (Georgia Tech's radio station) were great... if they weren't doing a 6-hour block of Trinidadian hip-hop. Commercial stations, though? Same shit over and over again. Didn't matter the genre. 99x (alternative) - same 20 songs every day. 96 Rock (classic rock) - same 20 songs every day. V103 (hip-hop and R&B) - same 20 songs every day. I got so fed up after a while I got in to talk radio... just because it was different stuff every day. After a time, I managed to find a classical AM station! So the story goes, a guy had purchased the station with the intention of holding it for a few years and selling it. But FCC rules require that a station actually play something, and classical was cheap - cheap licensing, long pieces requiring few voiceovers, etc. I think only 20 people in the entire Atlanta area listened to the station, 'cos I won no telling how many classical CDs, opera box sets, tickets to Atlanta Symphony concerts, movie screenings, etc. There were even times when you had to be (for example) caller #11, and I'd be callers 1-11:

"Hi Janet!"
"You're caller #1."


"Hi Janet!"
"You're caller #2."


"Hi Janet!"
"You're caller #3."


"Hi Janet!"
"You're caller #4."


"Hi Janet!"
"You're caller #5."


"Hi Janet!"
"You're caller #6."


"Hi Janet!"
"You're caller #7."


"Hi Janet!"
"You're caller #8."


"Hi Janet!"
"You're caller #9."


"Hi Janet!"
"You're caller #10."


"Hi Janet! Do I win?"
"Yep. Is this Rex?"

Alan Smithee

I can't stand the sound quality of AM radio, and I'm a person who loves obsolete technology! One of our talk stations started simulcasting on FM which sounds a lot better, but I still ended up tuning out because they play more COMMERCIALS than the music stations and they repeat THOSE ad nauseum!

I once called the Larry King show when he was still on and had a yearly show where he asked people to call in telling why they were listening. I said that he played better music than most of the other stations; he didn't get the joke.

"I Want Candy" is one of those songs I'm totally sick of- if Pandora plays it I usually give it the "I'm tired of this song" button.

Nick Danger

I not sure that Clear Channel even made the switch to CDs. I read a story in the paper around 1990. They had all the music for all the stations in town on a single server. The music was all programmed remotely. The on-air personality was not really a DJ.

This suggests to me that for the all-request hour they choose the requests for the songs they were going to play anyway. "Can you play Back in Black?" "You got it, Dave!"

Alan Smithee

First time I remember music being on a server rather than actual media was in late 1994- a roommate had worked at a station with a "smooth jazz" format and I got a 2-night-per-week gig there, basically DJ'ing without talking on the air. All the music was pre-listed and I just pulled the CDs and played them, and I have a legitimate reason to hate smooth jazz music as a result. Then they brought in something called the "Smartcaster", and me and a bunch of other people were no longer needed there. I thought there was no way a computer could play music with decent sound quality, and the thing did glitch a bit when they first installed it, prompting people to call in asking why the station was sounding like crap. About a year later the station got sold and changed formats anyways, and I didn't really miss working there afterwards- to this day I still can't stand that music. I remember what a relief it was to get in the car and hear GOOD music after a few hours of that!