80's Punk, New Wave & Rock

It's not really a clear division between the 70's and the 80's. Punk and New Wave were rebellions against the commercialism of rock and the pretentions of Progressive Rock. Punk and New Wave both began in the mid 70's and dominated the 80's but hard rock refused to die and Bands like Def Leppard and Van Halen rocked the 80's. MTV became a force and gave bands like ZZ Top new life and made bands like the Eurythmics super stars.

Punk, New Wave, & Rock Discography.

Blondie: Parallel Lines. Early 80's New Wave/Pop with four number one hits is three years.

Clash: Clash (UK Version), and London Calling. The Best of 70's British Punk.

Elvis Costello: Imperial Bedroom. versatile British New Wave innovator.

Def Leppard: Hysteria. 80's Heavy Metal band from England, Hysteria sold 15 million copies.

Eurythmics: Sweet Dreams. MTV Trend setting New Wave Band.

Joan Jett and the Blackhearts: I Love Rock and Roll. 80's Girl Rocker Joan Jett had a platinum Hit with I Love Rock and Roll.

Cyndi Lauper: She's So Unusual. Trend setting new wave performer this album produced two gold and one platinum records: Girls Just Want to Have Fun (P), Time After Time (G), and She Bop (G).

Men At Work: Business as Usual. Australian New Wave Band and 1982 Grammy winner.

Police: Synchronicity. Reggae influenced New Wave band. Launched the career of Sting and produces the hit Every Breath You Take.

Pretenders: Pretenders. 80's New wave Band.

Ramones: Ramones and Road to Ruin. Early American Punk Band and high octane Punk innovators.

Sex Pistols: Never Mind the Bullocks. Defined British Punk. It's a train wreck but you can't help watching, ah er listening.

Talking Heads: Remain in Light. Very influencing New Wave band.

U2: Joshua Tree. Highly popular rock band. Blame them for Bono.

Van Halen: 1984. 80's Hard Rock.

Nirvana: Nevermind. 90's band. I had to put them somewhere but hey they never wanted the attention anyway. It was all about the music.

70's Rock

Arena Rock, Progressive Rock, Country Rock, Jazz Rock Fusion, Punk and New Wave the 70's just exploded. As the early innovators broke up and faded the progressive rockers got bigger and more complex sounds, while the Arena Rockers like Journey, Rush, Boston, and Foreigner developed the commercial rock formula. The punk rockers rebelled and went to rock and roll roots and made way for the innovation of the 80's.

My 70's Discography.

AC/DC: Back in Black, Highway to Hell. Late 70's early 80's hard rock band from Australia.

Aerosmith:Rocks, Toys in the Attic. 70's hard rock band that was still producing hits as late as 2001.

Allman Brothers Band: The Allman Brothers at the Fillmore. Southern Rock/Blues.

Black Sabbath: Black Sabbath 4. 70's Heavy Metal band that helped define the genre with Ozzy Osborn and Rick Wakeman..

Boston: Boston. The prototypical arena-album rock band of the 70's. They produced three Billboard number one albums.

Crosby, Stills, and Nash (and Young): Deja Vu. One of the most critically acclaimed super groups of the 70's.

Charlie Daniels Band: Million Mile Reflection. Charlie Daniels wrote for Elvis Presley played with Bob Dylan, Marty Robbins, Ringo Star, and Earl Scruggs. Rock or Country take your pick.

Deep Purple: Deep Purple in Rock and Machine Head. The definitive 70's heavy metal band. Don't miss Smoke on the Water, it's the heavy metal standard.

Eagles: Hotel California. All star 70's band that included Joe Walsh Don Henley, and Glen Frey the Eagles produced five number one hits and three gold records.

Emerson, Lake, and Palmer: Brain Salad Surgery. All star 70's super group.

Fleetwoon Mac: Rumors. Early British band that transformed into popular 70's Pop group. Rumors was one of the best selling albums of all time.

Heart: Dreamboat Annie. 70's band featuring the Wilson sisters. These girls could rock.

Led Zeppelin: Led Zepplin I, II, III, & IV. The definitive Heavy Metal band.

Lynyrd Skynyrd: Second Helping. 70's Southern rock Band.

Pink Floyd: Wall, Dark Side of the Moon. Began in the 60's, Pink Floyd was one of the great progressive rock bands. Dark Side of the Moon sold 25 million copies and had a run of 10 years on the Billboard charts.

Queen. News of the World, Night at the Opera. Prototypical Glam Rock/Progressive Rock band.

Rush: Moving Pictures. 70's Arena Rock band.

Yes: Yes Album, Close to the Edge, Fragile. Along with pink Floyd and Queen one of the most important of the 70's Progressive Rock bands.

60's Rock

Trying to break down Rock by decade doesn't really work. The Beatles hit the scene in the early 60's so there are some bands I always thought of as 50's Rock and Roll that were really 60's bands but I always put them with bobbi socks and Elvis. So rather than 50's Rock and 60's rock it should be before the Beatles and after the Beatles. Another natural division is Punk/New Wave which began making an impact on popular music in the mid to late 70's. However there is no clear dividing line between Punk and Rock like there was before the British invasion and after. Grunge was probably the last form of rock music that "spoke for a generation". I know that most Grunge followers cringe whenever someone says something like that but Nirvana was probably the last Rock group I can think of that reached the same level of Rock Star Fame.

Anyway.

Here's the discography for the 60's CD's I purchased for the collection. Get out your Tie Dye, lava lamps and light up that incense.

Animals:Retrospective. One of the primary British Invasion bands, the animals were almost as important in creating rock as the Beatles and the Rolling Stones. Don't miss House of the Rising Sun.

Beatles:White Album, Let it be, Magical Mystery Tour, Help, Sgt.Peppers lonely Hearts club Band, Revolver, Abbey Road, and With the Beatles. They were the most important Rock band. They changed Rock & Roll and kept changing Rock as long as they were together.

Byrds: Mr. Tambourine Man, Turn Turn Turn, Younger than yesterday. From 67 to 70 produced some of the most fresh and innovative music. Surpassed only by the Beatles in creativity.

Cream: Fresh Cream, Disraeli Gears. A British band that along with Jimi Hendrix created Hard Rock.

Creedence Clearwater Revival: Chronicle (1&2), Bayou Country, Willy and the Poor Boys, and Cosmo's Factory. West Coast San Francisco Band that was America's top band.

Doors: Doors, Strange Days. Early California Rock band, Jim Morrison is one of the 60's premier icons. Riders of the Storm and Light My Fire have become Rock standards.

Grateful Dead: Workingmans Dead. The Original San Francisco Acid Rock Band.

Jimi Hendrix Experience: Axis: Bold as Love, Electric Ladyland, and Are you Experienced. One of Rock Music's most influential musicians, he brought electric guitar playing to new heights.

Jefferson Airplane: Surrealistic Pillow. 60's San Francisco Folk/Rock Band, Surrealistic Pillow is one of the major albums that define the West coast sound.

Janis Joplin: Pearl. Made Famous at the Monterey Pop Festival she was another of the tragic 60's Icons.

Kinks: The Kinks are the Village Green Preservation Society and Ultimate Collection. Part of the British Invasion, they were a simple powerful band that inspired the Punk movement in the 70's.

Rolling Stones: Aftermath, Begger's Banquet, and Singles Collection-the London ABKCO Records. After the Beatles the Rolling Stones were the single most important Rock Band.

Simon & Garfunkel: Parsley Sage Rosmary and Thyme. Highly successful folk duo with four gold records, Sounds of Silence, Mrs. Robinson, Bridge over Troubled Waters, and Celia.

Who:Tommy, Who's Next, The Who: The ultimate Collection. A major British Invasion band and one of the early bad boys of rock. The Rock opera, Tommy, has since become a movie and a musical stage play.

Quick Update.

I want to try to blog every day but it hasn't really worked out that way. At the moment I'm working on Ballet on DVD and Opera on CD. Ballet because I think for a lot of young girls ballet is a right of passage, but there are so few really great Ballet companies around. Ballet on DVD seems a great way for them to see what truly great ballet can be like. Opera just because. I need to look at both the Jazz and Classical sections and opera just caught my eye. The Fayetteville Symphony is doing the opera Carmina Burana and I wanted to hear it to see if I wanted to go to a live performance. Listening to Opera while writing an annotated discography of sixties rock is definitely a weird experience.

Oh, for those of you who read Jenny Bryers newspaper article I decided to get Triumph of the Will for the Library. It is simply too important historically to ignore.

The Advocate

Our Young Adult Librarian looks at collection development as being an advocate for teens where as I tend to dig into a subject and learn everything I can about it. She wants to represent those who have no voice while I want to know why I'm putting something in the Library and it's place in our collection. I discovered Tito Puente that way and I went back and listened to Jefferson Airplane and Buddy Holly with a new and open perspective. I'm not saying my way is better. I'm building a collection for the long term while the teen collection has the shelf life of a mayfly. Different problems different solutions.

I've been trying to do a discography of the Rock CD's that I purchased. I've already put up the first installment on a previous post. I'm working on the rest of it now. However it is easy to do a lot of work on this kind of thing for nothing. Tilting at windmills is a occupational hazard with librarians. We can easily spend a lot of time doing something that people never take advantage of. I've planned programs for weeks and spent hours of my time then had no-one attend. We never have enough time but we priortize in a vacuum. Unless something checks out we don't know how we're doing. A business either makes a profit or goes broke but a government agency just goes on and on. That's why librarians count everything.

I think I'll at least finish my Rock discography and if anybody notices I'll keep going. But hey, what's a blog for?

New Versus Old

We had a customer recommend that we get more new DVD's. I get this complaint a lot and it's always a touchy subject. The library is not supposed to be Blockbuster and it's never a good idea to use tax money to compete with local businesses. On the other hand we can't abandon an important collection just because a video rental store opens up in town. The Library was here first.

A video rental business is a library that charges fees for services and their purpose is to make a profit but a public library has a different mission. While the Library does have materials for the recreation of Rogers Citizens, the library also collects materials for the education and information of our residents. Would you go to Blockbusters for research? Homework? Business Reference? Blockbusters doesn't purchase materials for research but the Library does. That's one of our more important missions.

So what's the big deal about DVD's, you say?

Movies, Television, newsreels, serials, and concerts are all a part of American cultural history. Consider Star Trek. "Beam me up Scottie" may easily be the misquoted line since "Play it again Sam." Cultural references to Star Trek abound in baby boomer culture just like references to Rudolf Vanentino's "the Sheik" had the same cultural significance to the "Flapper" generation of the Roaring 20's. Television and movies are just as important in spreading cultural concepts as ancient sagas and musical ballads.

It's not just movies making an impact on culture. It's Movies that define a generation. My favorite example is the Maltese Falcon. If you want to get a feel for the American generation that fought WWII, several lines from the end of the movie define the Hardboiled generation. When Sam Spade is telling Bridgid O'Shaughnessy why he is turning her over to the police he says:
"When a man's partner is killed he's supposed to do something about it. It doesn't make any difference what you thought of him. He was your partner and you're supposed to do something about it." Later he says. "Don't be too sure I'm as crooked as I'm supposed to be. That kind of reputation might be good business-bringing in high-priced jobs and making it easier to deal with the enemy." This is the essence of hardboiled, street tough but noble, the urban cowboy.

I want all the DVD's I buy to fly off the shelves but at the same time my job is to find collect and store those movies, films, television shows, and videos that define who we are as a people and have them here for all the residents of Rogers.

Cross Polination

One of the things I find fascinating about building popular music collections is how different musical traditions influence each other. Take Country Music for example. It was originally called hillbilly music because it grew out of Appalachian folk and gospel music. Then it merged with Western Ballads by way of guys like Gene Autry and Roy Rogers. These Ballads have a musical history that go back through Spain to medieval Provence (Southern France). Swing and Boogie Woogie were Jazz innovations that influenced C&W in the 40's and the Hawaiian guitar was a fad that hit the west coast and got picked up by West Coast C&W musicians. Hank Williams credited a blues man with teaching him everything he knew about music.

Rock Music has a similar broad based history. Boogie Woogie, Rythm and blues, and Country Music all had a major influence on Rock. Both Jerry Lee Lewis and Buddy Holly came out of Country Music and once Elvis topped the Country, Rock, and Gospel charts all at the same time. Crossover between Country and Rock has been a consistent theme in both musical forms. Buddy Holly gave Waylon Jennings his start in music and there has been major crossover between Country and Rock ever since. One of my more interesting discoveries has been Gram Parsons. Gram played with the Byrds and the Flying Burito Brothers but his roots were country. He produced two albums with Emmylou Harris, GP and Grievous Angel. These two albums have been an inspiration for such diverse musicians as Dwight Yokam and the Eagles. Listening to these albums is to listen to pure country but at the time Merle Haggard thought Gram Parsons was just a crazy long haired Hippie. But within two years Merle, Waylon, Willie, and the Charlie Daniels Band were all playing music that copied Gram Parsons.

Fifties Rock

The first Music genre I tackled was Rock and I think they are all in. So in alphabetical order the pre Beatles guys I bought were: Paul Anka, Bill Halley and his Comets, the Crystals, Buddy Holly, Jerry Lee Lewis, Little Eva, Little Richard, Platters, Elvis Presley, and the Shirelles. Before anyone starts flaming me to tell me which classics I forgot, remember that we had a solid collection before I got here so I was filling gaps rather than collection building. Also keep in mind that the Holy Grail for rock musicians up through the early 60's was having a song on the top 40 chart so I was after artists that had Billboard No.1 hits. Since that was the age of the 78 or 45 hit single with a cover I stuck with "the greatest hits of..." or the "Complete Works of..."
Here is a quick annotated list.

Paul Anka 30th anniversary Collection. A major teen idol of the 50's his first hit Diana started a long career that included Put Your Head On My Shoulder and Puppy Love.

Bill Haley and his Comets Rock Around the Clock. After Rock Around the Clock and Shake Rattle and Roll the pop music world would never be the same.

Crystals The Best of the Crystals. Early 60's girl band with He's a Rebel, Da do Ron Ron, Then He Kissed Me.

Buddy Holly Greatest Hits. An innovative performer Buddy Holly and the Crickets was the inspiration for the Beatles. His hits include That'll be the Day, Peggy Sue, and Oh Boy!

Jerry Lee Lewis 18 original Sun Greatest Hits. Rock music personified the 'Killer' produced hits like Whole lot of Shakin' Going On, Greats Balls of Fire, and Breathless.

Little Eva Best of Little Eva. Loco-Motion and Keep Your Hands Off My Baby.

Little Richard The Georgia Peach. One of the most dynamic performers in early Rock & Roll with a long string of hits including Tutti Fruitti, Long Tall Sally, and Good Golly, Miss Molly.

Platters All Time Greatest Hits. Incredible group with 23 top 40 hits, including five gold records: Only You, Great Pretender, My prayer, Twilight Time and Smoke Gets In Your Eyes.

Elvis Presley From Nashville to Memphis and King of Rock and Roll: the Complete 50's Remastered. I think I have the King Covered.

Shirelles 25 All-Time Greatest Hits. Early 60's all Girl band with hits like Will You Love Me Tomorrow, Mama Said and Soldier Boy.