Overall, I really hated the 80's musically.
There were some great exceptions like in every time period or decade in our lifetimes, but a lot of it was just torture.
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Cool rock n roll photos
- Thread starter Chad-Chicago
- Start date
There were some great exceptions like in every time period or decade in our lifetimes, but a lot of it was just torture.
Lowendtech
Happily trending in my own peculiar direction.
Yep,
Stevie Ray Vaughan got me through a good chunk of that decade. RIP.
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There are dozens of albums I could name that came out in the 80s that didn't get much radio play, or at least don't anymore, that are really good.
Same here, I did that in another thread a couple weeks ago.
...but overall the decade of the 80's leaned in a musical and production direction I did not care for.
Even bands that had previously made great records made awful ones by following popular trends, or by allowing producers, recording engineers and record execs to steer them into a ditch.
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If you would have dug deeper than the usual glossy MTV dreck, there was plenty of creative, forward looking music in the indie and import scene of that decade, stuff that even '120 Minutes' missed(or ignored). I enjoyed the 80's far more than the 70's, just boring(until about '77).
As I said , there were definitely exceptions, and I listed a bunch of them in another thread a couple weeks ago.
But to my ears production values in general were going in the wrong direction, so much music was loaded down with way too many layered tracks, many drum tracks didn't sound like drums anymore, electronic sounding keyboards/synths leaked into everything, too much chorus, too much compression, so much stuff was recorded with everybody isolated/separated into booths, and vocals started being processed to death.
I worked in the music business from age sixteen (in 1974) through my mid thirties, I was pretty aware of lots of music and many bands.
As a manufacturing company, we sold to music stores all over the USA, many of the recording studios, most of the large touring companies, and to large distributors in the rest of the world. Many people in the company were musicians and many were in bands, talk of music and bands was nonstop.
1977 was the beginning of the end to my ears, it took a decade for the pendulum to swing and I was grateful when it did.
I'm sixty one years old now, I got a lot of exposure to popular music from four of my older siblings all through the 60's and started collecting records around 1971.
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I'm actually older than you, and I'd have to say that much of the 70's drum sound was horrible...cardboard boxes being beat on in a closet. In spite of only four track being available in the 60's(for the most part), so many of those records were far more exciting sonically. All that layering started in the 70's, once 16 and then 24 track came in. Led Zeppelin and Queen live paled in comparison to their records because all those overdubs were missing. Listen to "Cry of Love"; Hendrix was already on the path toward the layered guitar orchestra.
Speaking of Hendrix, even though some sort of synthesis can be heard in 'popular' music all the way back to the early 60's(if not before that in 50's movie soundtracks), you can attribute the rise of synthesizers, in part, to him. Not only was the earliest concept of chorusing occurring with vocal and guitar 'doubling' already in effect(not to mention guitars thru Leslie cabs), but his(and Eddie Kramer's)sonic manipulation, done physically and in the studio only, created sounds unimaginable previously, and conditioned the public's ear to accept what could be done further. The sound of a plain electric guitar, even lightly distorted, was becoming old news. While Hendrix certainly was not the first to use fuzz, which is essentially square wave clipping(like an oscillator), or Wah(essentially a filter), he took it to the extreme. Live, he added the Vibe, a crude Leslie imitation, to try to recreate flange.
The pedal effects explosion, which occurred just a few years after his death, was a trickle down from the concurrently exploding synthesizer technology, and was embraced by not only guitarists, for whom plugging in direct was old hat AND wanted to take things to the next level, but also keyboardists for whom the old B3 and Rhodes wasn't cutting it as well. Then there was guitar/synth processing experiments, Eno and Manzanera of Roxy Music(a band creating the 80's a decade ahead)being a prime example.
Synths and guitar got on equal footing way before the 80's, but you had to be listening, instead of paying attention to watered down retreads of the Woodstock era. I always found it interesting how people who freaked out at Kraftwerk(or Tangerine Dream, if they ever dug that deep), still embraced Gary Wright's "Dream Weaver", or were so dazzled by the pedestrian synth noodling on Steve Miller records. Even Pink Floyd, a forward looking band in their early years, helped condition ears for the equal footing status of synth in the earlier decade.
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Great post, all of this is exactly true.
...but as you said many of those 60's records were far more exciting sonically, and I feel like the first half of the 70's was as well.
I felt that by 1977-78-79 the gear was leading the way and many of the artists were not, the prefabricated sounds made so many bands and records sound the same, everything got too slick and that a lot of the experimentation/innovation seemed gone.
Lowendtech
Happily trending in my own peculiar direction.
Do I really need to tell everyone who this is?
Plant & Jones, I think around 1972.
Keef is already dead, that's why. He can't be killed by mortal weapons or diseases.
