Classic Rock

Something that happened on a Saturday in 1981 forever sticks in my craw. It was probably the first warm day of the spring, and I turtled along in the stacked-up traffic near the city’s hot spot, Bannister Mall. With all four windows down, I listened to a tape called Angry Young Them, by Them, a band of British rockers led by Van Morrison. The song “Mystic Eyes” played at a volume just boastful enough for a neighboring car to enjoy. At a traffic light, a station wagon filled with teens was equal to my Cutlass, and though I never looked explicitly in that direction, I could tell there was a lot of agitation inside that wagon. The traffic light was long. “Mystic Eyes” turned into “If You and I Could Be As Two,” and meanwhile the unrest in the car beside mine intensified.

Then a voice addressed me: “Hey, you.” I did a slow Oliver Hardy-like turn of the head to let the caller know I wasn’t easily bossed around. He, the driver, had underachieving whiskers and wore a ball cap. Five or six carbon copies of himself crowded the wagon. He smiled and said, “Ah, you like your bubble-gum music?” His passengers went apeshit with laughter.

I’ll tell you why this rankled me. I had never listened to bubble-gum music or, for that matter, the popular music of the day. From age nine forward I was, in my own fashion, a musical snob. Unfortunately, I was not the kind of precocious snob who listened to classical music and Gershwin and Cole Porter and Rogers & Hart, but instead I was more like the kind of snob a John Cusack might portray in an independent movie. I liked the stuff my older brothers liked, music by heady singer-songwriters who were rarely played on FM radio and never on AM. Meanwhile, I lived with the fear that classmates as well as strangers assumed I was into all of those arena-rock bands that had one name—Kiss, Journey, Heart, Boston, Yes, Styx, Kansas, Queen, Rush, Foreigner, Missouri.

Despite my resistance to it, the popular music of the day had an undeniable presence, as it always does, no matter the era; it played at high school mixers, for instance, and in shopping malls and restaurants, on television commercials, and in other kids’ cars. Therefore, I always had a working knowledge of what the crowd listened to and talked about.

I knew, for example, that Boston was too arrogant to tour, and that Steve Miller rhymed “Texas” with “facts is,” and that Kiss had a sensitive ballad called “Beth” that a popular senior couple reportedly played over and over while doing it. I’d of course heard the rumors about Rod Stewart needing his stomach pumped after a night of historic debauchery with the boys. I was fully aware that Joe Walsh had destroyed the Eagles and that because Jackson Browne was in love again his next album might really suck. I knew Bob Seger kept getting mistaken for a woman in one truck stop after another, and that cat scratch fever had nothing to do with cats, and that the fellows in Kansas were claiming I consisted of dust particulates. Meanwhile, across the state line, Missouri had a song whereby the road-weary rocker sings “Girl I want you but I just gotta go.” (My advice then as now is this: Stick with the girl; you need her more than the airwaves need you.)

Now, from this safe distance of twenty-five years, I sometimes dial up the classic rock station, as an amusement of sorts. KCFX, known as “the Fox,” is our city’s version of the cookie-cutter classic-rock station, and though I listen only periodically and with a pronounced amount of ironic detachment that I make sure is apparent on my face, I seem to hear the same twenty songs over and over, despite the station having fifty years of classic rock to cull. Curiously, whenever a caller wants to hear one of those twenty songs—“Hey, would it be remotely possible to play ‘New Kid in Town’ for my buddies and me?”—the dee-jay acts like the station could lose its license over this: “Ohhh, Jeez. Gosh, let me see. I think that is permissible.”

Last March, a friend and I set out to predict the ten songs KCFX would play in some randomly chosen hour. This friend, who now lives on the East coast, had been wary of radio rock in his teens as well and, like me, occasionally dips into it today. After fifteen minutes of thought, I devised my own list, as follows:

• “Bohemian Rhapsody,” by Queen
• “Heartache Tonight,” by the Eagles
• “Main Street,” by Bob Seger
• “Spill the Wine,” by War
• “Paradise by the Dashboard Light,” by Meatloaf
• “The Best of Times,” by Styx
• “Roundabout,” by Yes
• “Cold as Ice,” by Foreigner
• “Layla,” by Derek & the Dominos

I felt good about my selections until I saw my friend’s, and then I felt like the kid who orders a Mister Misty at the Dairy Queen only to catch an eyeful of his brother’s banana split. His list made my list look sick, and I was sure he’d gotten nine of the ten correct. (Nine was the maximum possible in his case, because for his tenth choice he listed a jokey song.) Here, then, is his list of nine:

• "All Right Now" by Free
• "The Boys Are Back in Town" by Thin Lizzy
• "Magic Carpet Ride" by Steppenwolf
• "Reeling In the Years" by Steely Dan
• "More Than a Feeling" by Boston
• "Carry On, My Wayward Son" by Kansas
• "Life's Been Good to Me So Far" by Joe Walsh
• "You Ain't Seen Nothin' Yet" by BTO
• "Barracuda" by Heart

A night or two later I bellied up to my kids’ portable CD player and tuned in to KCFX. In between promotional announcements for a national dee-jay team called Bob and Tom (or was it Rick and Dom, or Whacks and Wayne), the station played these ten songs in this order:

• “Fat Bottom Girls,” by Queen
• “Love is Like Oxygen,” by Sweet
• “Black Dog,” by Led Zeppelin
• “Angel is a Centerfold,” by the J. Geils Band
• “Fame,” by David Bowie
• “Stand Back,” by Stevie Nicks
• “Here Comes My Girl,” by Tom Petty
• “Dear Mr. Fantasy,” by Traffic
• “Night Moves,” by Bob Seger
• “Foolin,” by Def Leppard

I shared this list with my friend. I had envisioned a rollicking dialogue in which we’d jabber about each song as a representation of some memory or moment. Alas, neither of us could think of a single anecdote or association that pertained to any of these songs. I don’t know if that was the consequences of having rejected radio rock back then, or more a matter of not having gotten out of the house much. At any rate, the telephone line that connected us halfway across the country that night transmitted little more than vocalized pauses and strategic throat clearings.

What, ultimately, can we take from this experiment? The experiment disabused me of the notion that the Fox only plays twenty songs. Clearly, this classic-rock station plays thirty.