'Safe'
There's a lady plays her fav'rite records/On the jukebox ev'ry day/All day long she plays the same old songs/And she believes the things that they say/She sings along with all the saddest songs/And she believes the stories are real/She lets the music dictate the way that she feels.
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.
Malcolm McLaren Is Dead
Wow. Unexpected.
You know aside from the Pistols, I really did love that whackass opera/dance music album he did.
Either someone get me a paper bag or someone make Frank Iero less adorable.
It's a cute-head interview during the photo shoot for the NYLON cover. Gerard is talking about their look, as Gerard does.
Warning: Bob is here, but he looks sad.