Baby's Calling Me Home from Fillmore. And Sweet Release.
"93.3 The Bone" is really up there with terrible sounding classic rock radio stations, which is saying something. How many of their employees DON'T wear Tommy Bahama shirts and sexually harrass interns?
WHY was Steve Miller so popular amongst Gen X white kids in the late 80s-early 90s? I don't think anyone was a Steve Miller fan exactly but that greatest hits album was always kind of there. I don't even hate him but why him exactly.
And now I have "Jet Airliner" in my head, and while it's not great it's not the absolute worst.
I never was able to remember that Joe Walsh wasn't the coach of the 49ers.
Also not to be confused with Joe Walsh, deadbeat dad and tea partier.
I have heard of literally no-one mentioned in this thread.
Have you heard of streetlight people?
It does seem weird that the very concept of brass in rock music is limited to
- bands that sounded like Blood Sweat & Tears and Chicago circa 1973
- ska
Personally I'm always happy when a rock song has a trombone or trumpet.
Steve Miller is the generic classic rock sound and I actually like the generic classic rock sound.
I am a confirmed Steve Miller Band hater. The songs are so LAZY. "The Joker" fades out in the MIDDLE OF A VERSE.
If you don't hate the Steve Miller Band now, listen to some of the 80s hits like "Circle of Love" and "Bongo Bongo". Each is the worst example of that sort of song that could have been recorded at that time.
Oh, and "Cool Magic"! That is the worst of them all.
I like the Steve Miller hits mostly but the one I hate is Abracadabra.
15.1: You just don't get it. His apparent laziness is what makes him so cool.
I have to say that "Fly Like An Eagle" sounds like a completely different band. It sounds like Manfred Mann's Earth Band or something. Very creative stuff.
Maybe there's an entire universe of good Steve Miller Band songs but only the bad ones ever get on the radio.
12 The Butthole Surfers had a tuba.
The Steve Miller Band are just dad music, like Traffic and The Eagles. I don't even know if my dad likes them, but somebody's dad does, otherwise they wouldn't exist.
It's depressing to think how many better 70s pop-rock bands could easily have been the core generic classic rock sound in 1990. Like, for example, why not, say, Sweet? Imagine how much better things would have been if every play of "Jungle Love" or "Fly Like an Eagle" had been replaced with "Fox On The Run" and "Ballroom Blitz."
I think of Steve Miller as being the very first musician that I loathed after loving, in that special self-loathing "how could I have been so dumb" way. I was probably 14 or 15 when I realized I loathed him.
Hate is a strong word. I mean I completely lost interest in Bob Dylan 45 years ago, but I don't hate his later stuff, it just bores me. Likewise the Slick/Kantner show by whatever name. The guy I felt really let down by was the drummer Aynsley Dunbar, who played with John Mayall, then ran his own band, then played with Jeff Beck and on some seminal albums with Zappa and then, wait for it... joined Journey.
So sad.
23: Fuck that, what about The Stooges?
I mean I completely lost interest in Bob Dylan 45 years ago, but I don't hate his later stuff, it just bores me.
Bob Dylan is the "The Simpsons" of music.
25 - I mean sure but I was trying to think of something that was more pop-70ish and a plausible SMB stand-in. If it were up to me "Steve Miller Band Greatest Hits 1974-78" would have been replaced by the first four Sabbath albums as the go-to generic classic rock album in 1985-1995 but that doesn't seem like a fair game.
But instead of complaining about classic rock, let's find classic rock to celebrate.
I love this live performance by Heart from 1976. This was when I believe "Magic Man" was a hit in Canada but nobody had heard of them in the US outside the Seattle area.
I think this performance was for Washington State's closed-circuit TV station and the audience is just random people who showed up on a Friday night because it was free and they had nothing else to do. At some point they realize this band is much better than whatever they had expected. Finally, check out what the bass player is wearing.
I actually meant to call this post Steve Miller. Oops.
Cake incorporates horns into rock pretty smoothly, Beck too.
There is rock music in Latin America, instrumentation more creative than in the US-- Chico Trujillo for instance, some Control Machete songs.
Classic rock from the seventies has talented and creative musicians around its periphery, but basically rewarded mediocrity . Not worth attention.
Here's a playlist heavy on brass:
https://open.spotify.com/user/lw208xx/playlist/4O90tTLSJocxIQuuTBnncs?si=s-X__h4RQ9CnVhSN1SseSA
25 Hell yes! Also, contra 12, Fun House had some wild-ass saxophone tracks.
Pop music in general could be so much better if it incorporated more classical stuff. Like this from Hurts. The opera dude is hardly even there, just a refrain, but I want a whole album like that. (But I'm just bitching, I don't actually care.)
26. Dylan is all over the place, but is often quite good, and not just the old stuff. Time Out of Mind is a great late album.
33: Late? It's over 20 years old!
Late Dylan is his covers of American Standards.
I have no strong feelings of any kind about Steve Miller. Some o' them songs is catchy, i.e., what peep says. None are special.
I love brass in rock and other pop music forms. The first few Chicago albums before they got awful are just incredibly good and I always kind of wondered if we should blame Awful Chicago for driving the coolness out of rock brass.
Some of the un-famous tracks on Roberta Flack's Killing Me Softly album have this weird, intriguing, brass sound that I wish had caught on. On first pass it almost sounds like a synth or electric guitar with heavy filter effects or something, and very spare arrangement. Never heard horns quite like it anywhere else.
The best brass sections I hear now are in groups like The Daptones and St. Paul and the Broken Bones, i.e., white music school kids re-creating historical soul and R&B sounds, which I like, but is not the same as a mainstream popular idiom.
Namedropping some interesting contemporary jazz artists that have intersting brass instrumentation/performances:
Hypnotic Brass Ensemble, Ibrahim Maalouf, Sons of Kemet
27: Yeah I see what you're saying. What I want to know is this: we're old now, so why does the radio still suck? Why aren't they pandering to me with Jane's Addiction?
37. Radio sucks for the same reason broadcast TV does-- a large audience is the product, the clients for the medium are advertisers.
XM is a corner case-- the problem there I think is a bad interface and maybe an audience more intersted in backwards-looking homogeneity than hearing something new.
As I get older even though I still love the music that I have loved, I've become more and more of a musical nihilist.
The reason why the music on the radio always sucks is because you are snobs. When music becomes too popular you lose respect for it
39: Upon further thought I retract this comment. I'm just bored, tired, and cranky.
WRENCHED FROM MY PLAY BY ANACHRONISTIC HANDS!
38-39: I had a case a few years ago that involved learning a bunch about how radio stations think. It turns out that as their measurements have gotten more accurate they've led to one conclusion -- what people actually tune in listen to on the radio, regardless of what they say, is a small number of pop songs played over and over and over again. This is true regardless of market, age, etc, in any sense worth measuring. It's not particularly driven by advertiser demand. The most listened to stations on Sirius XM are the ones that play the same catchy pop songs over and over. The problem is people.
That's what they say about global warming, but I blame solar fluctuations.
I should saybthat different demographics prefer different catchy songs played over and over and over and over, but the dynamic is the same.
27: Yeah I see what you're saying. What I want to know is this: we're old now, so why does the radio still suck? Why aren't they pandering to me with Jane's Addiction?
The floodgates have opened in my area. Classic rock is now half Bon Jovi, Guns N' Roses and their ilk. Still some older stuff but Iron Butterfly and the Young Rascals have been tossed on the ash heap of history.
And one classic rock station became a "Classic Hits" station, aka music from the 80s.
43: Truthfully, that's more or less what I want from the radio. I only listen in my car and I typically only go on short drives and usually I just want to hear familiar songs that I like.
When I was at the stage of buying interesting-looking CDs from the bargain racks and trying to figure out my tastes I picked up Joe Walsh's Songs for a Dying Planet and I still feel fond of it.
It's not a great album, but it feels personal and genuinely odd (for example, "Fairbanks Alaska"). That's a successful bargain bin find.
Jet Airliner is a cover
original version:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cjr5U7g6aiA
I like Steve Miller.
39: A more charitable way of thinking about this is that a song that is played on the radio all the time is like a joke that you've heard a million times before. It may have been hilarious at one time.
There's also the great tradition of post-punk bands continuing with horns in the Fun House style. X-Ray Spex, Essential Logic, The Ex, Dog-Faced Hermans...
I've long been on the record that Steve Miller is my least favorite music ever. That superficial unobjectionability is exactly why it's anathema to rock.
I can't say I find the framing of the article all that interesting
It does have a "Ready Player One but for Boomer rock" quality that made me want to quit reading.
I've long been on the record that Steve Miller is my least favorite music ever. That superficial unobjectionability is exactly why it's anathema to rock.
Obligatory link to Mojo Nixon discussing "Don Henley Must Die."
superficial unobjectionability
Ha, I was just coming to say that Steve Miller was always just unobjectionable background music that I knew backwards and forwards from relentless radio repetition but never cared about one way or the other. As such, I group it with Tom Petty, the Eagles, and Fleetwood Mac. In retrospect, Jackson Browne would fit the mold, but for some reason I really, really hated Jackson Browne when I was a teenager.
the very first musician that I loathed after loving, in that special self-loathing "how could I have been so dumb" way.
Heebie, this really resonates. And yeah, I'm looking at you, Billy Joel.
The problem is people
New mouseover text?
Personally I'm always happy when a rock song has a trombone or trumpet.
to lure Stormcrow out of retirement
Or Knecht. Deep cut dude. The thread reminded me of that sentiment but I had no idea I had shared it here.
But I think I was slow one time ca. 2015 and heard 2.99 seconds, so no actual heat death of the universe, but rather the current hot mess.
Sorry about that.
I don't think classic rock is really a thing, in the UK, and to the extent that it is, it encompasses a load of 70s glam rock, and bits of post-punk, new wave, and some 80s music. In terms of 'somewhat musically conservative guitar-orientated rock/pop', at least.
The UK, though, is much more neophile in its musical outlook, I think. Although (just to my taste) the last 5 years have been a bit shite.
apo: wash your mouth about fleetwood mac they're genius.
knecht! come back to us!
On the topic of brass in rock, did "two-tone"- the Specials, Selecter, etc. never take off over there? Also, Dexys.
They're the best band named after an amphetamine.
68: There are/were a ton of ska-punk bands in the US, but it hit a little later here. You had bands like Operation Ivy and the Toasters in the '80s, and then moving into the '90s some of the poppiest/slickest bands even had commercial success (Mighty Mighty Bosstones, Reel Big Fish). Personally, my heart belongs to Less Than Jake.
I wasn't a huge fan of the Mighty, Mighty Bosstones, but it makes more sense than amphetamines. Even if they were healthy, why would I want to take a drug that makes me awake and alert?
re: 68
Not forgetting Madness, who I guess were by far the most successful, in the UK at least.
Nerd fact: The (lovely) bass on Robert Wyatt's "Shipbuilding" is Mark Bedford from Madness.
re: 70
I don't really think of them as the same kind of thing. Although they came out of the punk era, I don't actually hear much 'punk' in the sound of the late 70s/early 80s Two-Tone bands, and much more unashamed pop sophistication.
Fleetwood Mac went downhill all the way after Peter Green left. Arguably after Jeremy Spencer did.
I was kinda trolling for reaction about Fleetwood Mac because it always gets one, but it's true that I have never understood the big deal people make about them. Similarly, Joni Mitchell, Richard Thompson, and (god help me) Magnetic Fields. I realize I am branding myself as a philistine.
68 I was very much into The Specials, The Selecter*, and The English Beat back in the day along with a bunch of my friends.
*"Celebrate the Bullet" wasn't a great success but it's a seriously underrated album and a good candidate for a Ska concept album. I know but it works and it's damned good.
72 And Madness, of course. One Step Beyond still slaps, as the kids say these days and the video was awesome.
Nerd fact: The (lovely) bass on Robert Wyatt's "Shipbuilding" is Mark Bedford from Madness.
Huh. I didn't know that, and it's very neat.
Seconding affection for The (English) Beat.
When I was in college, the guys from English beat occasionally came by my coop. I was walking back to my room after a shower when a tall lanky guy followed me into my room. (He didn't seem threatening or anything.) I got to my room, and looked at him, waiting for him to go so I could get dressed and he said "I'm Ranking Roger, from Special Beat." and I said, "Hi. I'm Megan." Then we looked at each other awkwardly for a minute and then he left my room.
In retrospect, I think I missed my cue.
(It was a clothing optional co-op, so I was only wearing a towel as this all happened.)
In retrospect, I think I missed my cue.
"Great. You can introduce me to a famous musician."
"I've been think a lot about Nigel's future."
Hey, it's a good thing I didn't say that. It isn't by English Beat.
There's a fifty-fifty chance "Nigel" is what he calls his penis.
One time in high school me and my friends weaseled our way back stage at the old 9:30 Club and got high with The Toasters. Also too, the Skatallites.
We tried it with The Whalers, they just took our weed.
I don't really watch network TV much, so I'm occasionally surprised by things. Like today I just learned that Depends commercials show old man butt cheek.
Maybe it was Fox? Old white man + pee. It's the formula.
Subtle jab at some musical tastes there. I give it three points.
Fishbone were great. Great live band.
86 One of my high school friends was friends with Rob Hingley of the Toasters, and my best friend in high school, a jazz keyboardist oddly wound up playing keyboards with the Skatalites in the late 80- early 90s.
51 is correct. I love 3 of 4 of those bands. Also Delta 5. Although in all cases "brass" just means a saxophone, right?
I continue in my quest for a Pandora station that plays nothing but female - fronted rock bands with saxophone from 1975 to 1985. Two others are Romeo Void and Martha & The Muffins. I even like the extremely mainstream and formulaic Quarterflash.
72: Madness had one hit in the US. "Our House". I don't know why, it's not that good of a song, probably it had a good music video. Anyway they are in the "1 hit in the US, 100 hits in the UK" category with Status Quo.
93: The usual instrument for Dog Faced Hermans was trumpet; The Ex have incorporated all sorts of stuff, often through collaborations (https://theex.bandcamp.com/album/enormous-door). I'm liking the sound of this station!
The E Street Band has a saxophone, and often tours with a horns section. The Miami Horns.
Regarding Steve Miller, I had heard "Jet Airliner" probably a thousand times as background music, and I thought the lyrics were "We goin' down Carolina / Don't carry me too far away / We goin' down Carolina / 'Cause it's here that I've got to stay."
It wasn't until fairly recently, when I was playing in a band that covered the song, that I realized they were singing about a jet plane and not one of the Cackalackies.
re: 95
Madness had a run of really well put together bitter-sweet pop singles, after their initial ska driven couple of early hits. They are/were really good writers. I'd put their best stuff up with anyone else's singles from the same period. They are vastly superior to Status Quo.*
re: 92
Yeah. I saw them play a blazing show at the Glasgow Barrowlands (90-91, maybe?).
* which I know wasn't the point of your comparison, just the relative lack of US success, versus UK success.
re: 75.last
Christ yes, on the Magnetic Fields. Twice I've been bitten by them, where effusive critical praise led me to waste time on a shitty record. I assume he has compromising polaroids of various critics.
With Richard Thompson -- while I recognise his talent -- it's the whole folk/rock thing. I can't be doing with it. In fact, folk is like blues* for me. Lots of things I like came out of it, but most of the time, I've no interest in actually listening to it.
I quite like Joni Mitchell, though. Although I'm happy enough with just 2 or 3 of the mid to late 70s albums.
* slight over exaggeration, I do actually like some blues** stuff, but the reverence for baby boomers for blues music -- especially white people playing it -- and their lack of interest in the huge range of sophisticated black music that came out of it or shares origins with it-- jazz, soul, RnB, funk, etc -- always irritates me.
** there's a nice quote from Joe Gore that he loves basically all blues music from before 1970 and hates almost everything after.***
*** I think he means when it was still vibrant living music mostly made by black people (and the occasional obsessive white guy).
while I recognise his talent -- it's the whole folk/rock thing
Yeah, this. I don't have an actual aversion, but it just won't hold my interest for more than a song or two. With Joni Mitchell, similarly, the talent is obvious and I actually don't mind the albums after she moved down from the high soprano range.
I can't actually picture Joni Mitchell or a Joni Mitchell song, so I just figure that more or less Janis Joplin is the same but drunker.
Also, to save memory, I figure Morrissey, Jim Morrison, and Van Morrison are the same and that they all look like Elvis Costello.
I'm not a super music geek by any measure, but I think of myself as reasonably knowledgeable about pop music and sometimes work in an attenuated way with the pop music business. I had no idea until looking it up as part of this thread that Status Quo was anything other than the one hit wonder band who did the original version of Pictures of Matchstick Men. More charting singles on the UK charts than any other rock band?!??!? It's like learning that ? And the Mysterians has a 45 year career as the most successful rock band in Japan.
103 is hilarious. It got me thinking about all the girls that had Jim Morrison posters hanging in their dorm rooms. I'm worried now that they were violating the NMM rules. I'm retroactively appalled.
I figure a few decades of decay gets you to "Elvis Costello."
I think Hejira is one of my desert island discs, almost, though much of Joni Mitchell I can live without. And Richard Thompson live can be a wonderful experience. So I'll make grumpy old man noises about this. But ttaM is surely right that there haven't been many good blues records made after 1970. LIttle Feat "Apolitical Blues?"
That was a warning from The Deep State. There will not be another.
It's almost as if drinking and guns should be kept separate.
110: There's a brewery here that offers axe-throwing to its patrons. What could go wrong?
110: Not that I disagree, but if you can pull off those moves you should be sober enough to not pick up a gun by the trigger.
Or maybe he just needs to spend as much time drinking with firearms as he has drinking while dancing.
112: As I've mentioned before, a friend of mine was drinking and playing darts and hit another friend of mine in the thigh was a dart. She was mad. He went on to ride a green-dyed horse.
This is the worst earworm thread. Right now, thanks to 102, I'm hearing Counting Crows sing about a parking lot.
"Lord, won't you buy me a Mercedes Benz. My friends paved paradise, you must make amends."
Morrissey, Jim Morrison, and Van Morrison are the same
Like Tony! Toni! Toné!
OT: My phone died. How am I supposed to talk to people?
I think I need to buy a phone tomorrow.
I don't want to switch to Apple, but I'm not happy with Samsung. Is ZTE the one with the Chinese spies?
I think so. But mine has worked pretty well.
I'm thinking of switching to Verizon just because the AT&T website is so hard to compare phones on.
What do you need to know about phones? I just surveyed the market for my mom.
122: Huawei and Xiaomi, too. It's probably safe to assume that any large Chinese firm has a relationship with the government.
Koreans are safer, except I barely got three and a half years out of their phone.
millennials love are fleetwood mac
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zQndBhB3ULg
|| Air-raid drill! Life on the edge, yo! |>
130 First time or is this a regular thing?
103: I have long assumed that John Updike and Philip Roth were both the same person and when he wore a different suit he became Tom Wolfe. Recent events have confirmed this.
I just bought a xiaomi phone because it was less than £200, has two cameras and stock android, and "mid-priced" phones at £400 are not twice as good, nor is an Iphone X five times as good. If the spooks want you, they have you, whatever you buy.
I guess I don't want to sound too paranoid, but most Asian guys seem to be Team Mystic or Instinct. I don't want to give away too much information to the other side.
Some Asian people aren't Chinese. Even some Chinese people aren't Chinese. Racist.
Even some Chinese people aren't Chinese.
I don't think China is very happy about that.
Anyway, of all my problems, this is the only one I can solve today. Off to throw money at a giant, privacy-sucking, multinational.
125: I want a a new phone! All it has to do is support light browsing and an e-reader, and have one camera (not one that points at me). And update Android painlessly. And last for as long as possible.
You could buy a phone with two cameras and disable one. Gouge it out. Like happened to Belisarius.
I don't care if the phone conquers Italy or not, tbh.
144: if conquering Italy is optional, I do recommend mine . It's guaranteed Android updates for three years. Pain in the arse to root, probably, but for the moment my non-root adblocker is working OK.
If thine selfie camera offend thee, pluck it out.
Since this is the music thread, I'll go on record with the opinion that Hamilton was pretty good but massively overrated.
BTW, does anyone know why Thomas Jefferson was dressed up as Prince? I assume that was supposed to mean something, but whatever it was went over my head.
Vaguely TJ is one decade behind the times because he was in France while the revolution is happening, and this is reflected by his costuming and singing being one decade behind the corresponding hip-hop revolution. So I don't think it's supposed to be Prince specifically, but rather pre-hip-hop R&B.
140: The price point seems to be the Motorola Moto G6. It's about $USD 200-250, and has either just come out or is about to, depending on where you live.
You could buy a phone with two cameras and disable one. Gouge it out. Like happened to Belisarius. Then you'll be able to text in runes.
147, 148: Jefferson in the London cast owes more to Little Richard than to Prince.
SEK flagged Hamilton in September 2015 as "the epic hip-hop musical about Alexander Hamilton you didn't realize your life was incomplete without" and I think that's about right.
I'm happy with my Moto[rola] X4 as a cheap basic Android. (The piece of Motorola that makes phones is a Lenovo subsidiary.)
Stupid phones don't come preloaded with Pokemon Go.
Phones in Arrakis are very expensive. I recently had to have my Samsung A3 repaired when it stopped taking a charge. I may buy a new phone when I'm back in NY (June 8 - July 12, let's have a meet up you reprobates).
Absolutely there should be a meetup. My life is super entertaining these days.
Will I be entertained?
My brother and his kids are coming up from June 13 - 28 so I'll be busy (he just finished his chemo a few weeks ago) but before that or after would be great for me.
Similarly, Joni Mitchell, Richard Thompson, and (god help me) Magnetic Fields.
On Joni, I can only assume you're missing a gene or something. I mean, I don't think I love her as much as many people do, but I do love her.
Thompson, OTOH, I'm more with you. I like some of his stuff, but I keep waiting to understand why people use reverent tones about him (and yes, I've listened to "Shooting Out the Lights").
Magnetic Fields was fun when it was new, but zero staying power for me.
On the OP, I remember realizing (in college I guess?) that I was under no obligation to pretend to like SM. I'm not sure I ever really enjoyed any of it--a couple songs were OK, but that was about it--but at some point early in college I was like, "just because it's in the canon..."
At this point I'm indifferent towards much, if not most, of the classic rock canon, but SMB stands out for my Stormcrovian reaction.
Whoever said Traffic is bland dad rock is nuts.
157: I guarantee that anyone who shows up at this next meetup will hear at least one truly jaw-dropping story. Also, I've moved on from clam litigation to ivory litigation, so that's an upgrade. Still working on sewage too, though.
Be careful. It's probably a trick to throw used gum in your mouth while your jaw is dropped.
I suspect that if I knew what Bayesian priors were, 161 would be an opportunity to a make a joke about them.
I'm hopelessly burned out on electric blues, even the old, original stuff. I still like bits of the British blues-derived stuff like Cream, but the more closely it approximates Muddy Waters, the less I want to hear it. I was super-excited about the latest Hendrix release, most of which had either never been released or only on shitty posthumous "albums", but it turned out to be mostly blues explorations that didn't hold my interest.
A few months ago I came across an ad from a NYC radio station that was promoting a 5 hour Brit Rock broadcast in '73 or so, with a complete track listing. I made a playlist of it, and it's pretty interesting because it was early enough that the canon wasn't set, or perhaps that the canon had different emphasis: e.g., 3 Donovan tracks, but only one Tull, and a solid third of the songs by bands that didn't survive in memory.
Anyway, I was listening to it yesterday while doing house work (and therefore unable to check who anybody was if I didn't already know), and it struck me just how damn much of it was blues-based. That is, of the songs I didn't already know, practically all were fairly straightforward blues rock, whereas psychedelia, folk, and prog were almost entirely absent. I want to have a theory that the bands that survived were the ones that added the most to the old forms, but I doubt that really holds up.
Of 53 tracks (I think I was unable to find a handful), I've at least heard of almost everybody. Unknowns: Wynder K. Frog (WTF?), Duncan Browne, Sam Gopal*, Brian Auger, Peter Sarstedt, Edward's Hand, and Siren. I suppose the older Brits will remember some of those firsthand, but are those people remembered at all over there?
*the best thing I found, a Malaysian tabla player who took London by storm and made pretty good, rather dark psyche music
One other thing, to the OP:
Maybe one of you smarter people can speculate concerning why Sweet Release isn't more solidly in the Classic Rock canon.
AFAICT, the classic rock canon, when it was sort of being locked down in the '80s (with the advent of the term and radio stations playing it), is heavily biased against one-hit wonders. That doesn't exactly address Sweet Release, but I think that promoters wanted to tell a story about Important Bands that released multiple Classic Disks. Contrast this with the older Oldies format, where you had a handful of really major artists (probably about a dozen) and then many, many one-hit wonders. I think if you went back to a ca. 1990 playlist (before stuff like Bon Jovi got dragged into it) from a classic rock station, you'd find 90% of the songs coming from a couple dozen artists, with a handful of one-offs sprinkled in. But of course that's not what the radio was playing during the actual classic rock era, not on AM or FM.
Part of my theory is that, even when a relatively minor band (like the Animals, say) was mostly represented by a single song, they did have other songs played, and it was understood that they weren't one-hit wonders. IOW, it seemed important to draw a line. Or maybe that's just my weird perspective.
Having typed that, I realize that a huge part of it is the AOR format of the '70s, which by definition tended to exclude acts that really only had one worthwhile song. If those stations were focused on bands where you could play an albumside, then they were going to give short shrift to even very respectable bands that really had one crossover hit but were otherwise "out there".
So you had this winnowing that led to a calcified definition by the late '80s.
163. Wynder K. Frog, whose mother called him Mick Weaver, is an electric keyboard player who was good enough to be invited to fill in for Winwood in Traffic while Winwood was arsing around with Blind Faith. He was mainly a session guy and has played on records with anybody who was anybody since about 1970. I guarantee you've heard his work without knowing who was playing.
Brian Auger is another fine keyboard player who plays more jazz than rock, but had 15 minutes of fame in the late 60s, mainly with Julie Driscoll Tippetts, but also doing session work with the Yardbirds and Spencer Davis.
Peter Sarstedt was an eminently forgettable one hit wonder who left you wondering how he ever got a contract. The rest of them I've never heard of.
re: 163.last
There were a few really interesting London based fusion/world music crossovers in the 60s.
re: Sam Gopal, etc.
The great Joe Harriott (Jamaican sax player who predated Ornette Coleman with free jazz) had some stuff with John Mayer (not that one, he was an Indian violinist), that fused Indian music with jazz and was good.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joe_Harriott
Also, there's Amancio D'Silva, who was an Indian jazz guitarist:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amancio_D%27Silva
His stuff is really good. I only have his first album, but it's the sort of stuff that manages to have good tunes, is funky, and is sensitive in its use of Indian themes.
There was a whole scene with British, Jamaican, and Indian musicians all working together.
Harry Beckett, Don Rendell / Ian Carr, etc they all did cool stuff.
Joe Harriott (with John Mayer):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8_yXoUc_5dA
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9zFa6Rkw-JE
With his free jazz band:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kYmWqiYfsUc
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H3gZYual7vM
or just playing straight ahead jazz:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B4isVVwqAYk
Amancio D'Silva:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ubt2KsgVVCs
ttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AQ-P9qZVsjo
The two of them together:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=is_6d2OmfIE
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TXvfWnwfi20
OT: These people don't really even look like cops to my mind. I've never seen that kind of hair worn by a cop.
Just played "Baby's House" from "Your Saving Grace".
I met that Nicky Hopkins once.
Oh and on "My Dark Hour" from "Brave New World" Paul McCartney proved that Ringo *was* the best drummer in the Beatles. (Paul called the track "My Dog Howard")