I think the opposite happened to "alternative music" after Nirvana sold 12 million copies of Nevermind. Alternative music seemed more homogeneous after that.

I agree.

My other seventies thing right now is a mix titled "Ballrooms of Mars and other Glam Rock Ballads." Which (in my mind) should be Jill Tracy's next album -- all covers while she takes her sweet time writing new songs. I mean what's more dark cabaret than doing Bowie's "Time" or "Lady Grinning Soul"?

It was just such a wide open period in pop music after the Beatles and the Beach Boys innovations.

Among other influences -- any mainstream that can accommodate, say, Sly and the Family Stone, the 1910 Fruitgum Company, Glen Campbell, and Cream (just to touch the surface) is a very broad stream. It's one of the things I love about late '60s pop.

Then you get to 1974, when just about anything could -- and did -- make the charts.

Then you get to 1974, when just about anything could -- and did -- make the charts.

In the 60s, both rock and r&b could coexist in the top 40, but by the early 70s, music started to fragment. Rock music had become album oriented, with many artists, most notably Led Zeppelin, not even bothering to release singles.

R&B music had given way to Funk, but it's complicated syncopation and explicit Black Power message limited its ability to crossover.

This kind of left a void in the top 40, which would eventually be filled by Disco -- a dumbed-down version of Funk palatable to white audiences. But in 1974, Disco was still in its early stages, which meant that a whole lot of schlock ended up on the charts in 1974.

I agree that there was a lot of very bad stuff (and some very good stuff -- is there a love song quite like "I'll Have to Say I Love You in a Song"?), but I was also thinking that songs could just come out of left field.

Example -- Sister Janet Mead and "The Lord's Prayer." Call it good, bad, or indifferent, it's hardly the sort of thing you'd expect to go top 10 in any other year.

More Stones: Am listening to December's Children, which came out in 1965 (I was 0 then).

So the standard back then for an album was "a couple of good songs and the rest filler," right? When/what album did that change? It was the Beatles' doing, right?

So the standard back then for an album was "a couple of good songs and the rest filler," right? When/what album did that change? It was the Beatles' doing, right?

I'd say around the time of Rubber Soul. I think that's their first album without cover songs, depending on how you count the Hard Day's Night soundtrack.

But yeah, it was a singles driven market then. (EPs in the UK, actually.) Long Players were for classical and jazz.

Depends on what you mean by "filler." I have a couple of Perry Como albums from the early '70s that are a couple of singles and a lot of covers. Some of the covers are too good to be dismissed as "filler" (though someone should have warned him that it wasn't a good idea to cover "I Think I Love You"), but they'd never have been released as singles on their own.

I have a couple of Perry Como albums from the early '70s that are a couple of singles and a lot of covers.

That's a different market. An A&R guy would be employed specifically to find songs for a vocalist. Doing the Great American Songbook is different than remaking a current Top 40 hit.

Agreed, the Rolling Stones and Perry Como appealed to very different groups in the early '70s -- but the Como albums are It's Impossible and And I Love You So, both of which had significant pop hits.

The Beatles and the Beach Boys may have started the idea that the album was important as a coherent artistic statement (or at least something more than two-singles-and-filler), but the idea didn't immediately sweep all areas of popular music.

I think it sort of ties into yesterday's conversation about how wide open the mainstream was in the late '60s and early '70s. The Rolling Stones and Perry Como, Sticky Fingers/"Brown Sugar" and It's Impossible/"It's Impossible" together in the mainstream.

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