Thread for coordinating the order and timing of ILM ballot polls

All this makes me want to hunt down books about rock radio and its formats and history.

From what I remember, it was fairly settled as a particular genre format even as early as the late '70s.

All of the above makes sense to me. An imaginary, impossible-to-write history I'd love to see would track the popularity of particular tracks/sounds (wooliness vs. streamlined, etc.) in classic rock playlists over time, versus other things happening in the radio rock landscape. Did the heavier/fuzzier stuff get a boost from grunge, or would Steve Miller Band have cut through the landscape clearer as an alternative to alternative? If you were a programmer in 1988 trying to make the station sound as little like Def Leppard and Bon Jovi as possible, which tracks from the 1500 would help you do that?

Dunno if that would have really been the way these things worked - might be just as simple as "people know and like the songs they know and like" but...

I used to know a couple of guys who worked at Radio & Records magazine back before it caved in -- I might try to hunt them up and see what they recommend. xp to self

The precise point at which "AOR" became "classic rock" is probably hard to spot, because it rolled out over a number of years from, I don't know, 1980 to 1985 or '86? The big change to me, as someone who was listening to it at the time, is that the playlists were added to pretty regularly until sometime in the mid-'80s -- there was still a sense of new things coming out, new bands, or old bands with new albums. When it became "classic," that was like musical chairs ending -- the canon was set, things that were in were in and there was a high bar to get over for things that weren't. At least, that's how it sounded.

This is a funny history of some of the same questions through the other end of the lens: year-end lists from our local "modern rock" station going back to 1978.

http://www.spiritofradio.ca/Charts.asp#1986

I like how ELO is #40 on 78's best list, and then #9 on '79's worst. Were CFNY listeners deeply disappointed in Discovery after Out of the Blue? Possible but doubtful--with the exponential explosion of new-wavey stuff, I imagine they just cast ELO out of their universe.

if anything classic rock seemed to cement itself in the 80s, in opposition to the MTV hair metal on contemporary rock radio

I don't even remember a contemporary rock radio format in the '80s. My experience was probably more that Bon Jovi and Def Leppard were being played a fair amount on the same stations that were playing Lynyrd Skynyrd and Aerosmith. (These stations might not even have been identifying themselves as "classic rock" until late '80s or '90s.)

xp

The AOR/Classic station in my town when I was young (85-90 or so) is all I really have to go on when remembering the early days of the format. I'd say they tended to lean more classic, because very little new stuff was being played. Also, Styx is the personification of "classic rock" for me because the evening dj there had a huge hardon for Styx.

Hey, you're just trying to plant display names.

Thanks, Johnny Fever!

haha

i don't think i've heard Pearl Jam yet on classic rock radio. but "Smells Like Teen Spirit," yes.

The playlist I linked shows that CHEZ106 played an Eddie Vedder song about 5 minutes ago, "Come As You Are" 20 min ago. The Sam Roberts song they played is only about 10 years old.

Yeah, US classic rock stations that I've been exposed to seem to really love Styx! They don't seem to have quite the same presence here.

FWIW, here are the 10 songs most recently played on WCMF, my old hometown station (according to their website playlist):

"Takin' Care of Business" -- BTO
"For Those About to Rock" -- AC/DC
"Show Me the Way (Live)" -- Peter Frampton
"Finish What Ya Started" -- Van Halen
"More Than a Feeling" -- Boston
"Let My Love Open the Door" -- Pete Townshend
"Gator Country" -- Molly Hatchet
"Closer to the Heart" -- Rush
"Live and Let Die" -- Wings
"What's Your Name" -- Lynyrd Skynyrd

I have to go on another 9 songs to find anything released after 1983, and that's "Sweet Child O' Mine."

Point being that when I first started listening to this station, I could have heard all of those same songs -- but none of them were more than 10 years old, and some of them ("For Those About to Rock," e.g.) I actually heard when they were brand-new. So it is a strange kind of encased-in-amber experience to look at that playlist now.

The Buffalo station was playing 10 Journey songs in a row once when I was driving through.
xpost

Medium-sized hard-on at best (xpost).

Now I can't stop scrolling through their playlist. They played John Cafferty this morning!

haha save some of this for the actual thread guys

I don't even remember a contemporary rock radio format in the '80s. My experience was probably more that Bon Jovi and Def Leppard were being played a fair amount on the same stations that were playing Lynyrd Skynyrd and Aerosmith. (These stations might not even have been identifying themselves as "classic rock" until late '80s or '90s.)

In the late 80s/early 90s iirc, we had a 'hard rock' station that did make a point of playing new hard rock singles (whether Bon Jovi, Damn Yankees, King's X, Metallica) but still 'got the Led out' and played classic stuff too. But even contemporary active rock or modern rock stations play 20-year-old stuff, right? Didn't Toronto have a modern rock station in the 80s (named after a Rush song, with possible irony)?

xpost

Anyway some dude otm.

Didn't Toronto have a modern rock station in the 80s (named after a Rush song, with possible irony)?

Same station that I linked to above, CFNY--their slogan was "The Spirit of Radio." A decade or so ago they dropped the call letters and became "The Edge," which I remain unable to say with a straight face.

Okay, Edge, play the classic rock!

Sorry, missed that post, clemenza.

btw i know you classic rawk dawgs all want to send ballots for my Jay-Z poll so i get a nice turnout and feel good about doing another poll soon after: JAY-Z TRACKS / NEPTUNES TRACKS REDUX / I JUST WANNA POLL U (BALLOT 2 ME) voting closes June 16th

CFNY's 70s lists are intriguing. Apparently, they gave equal time to prog and new wave (+ some punk), with some of the rootsier end of what is now classic rock, and basically just avoided heavy rock. Eno and Zappa and Fripp!

Metheny/Mays in 1981!

"Greatest Music of All Time" from 1982
1. Genesis - Supper's Ready

^^Geir just had a joygasm.

I could have heard all of those same songs -- but none of them were more than 10 years old, and some of them ("For Those About to Rock," e.g.) I actually heard when they were brand-new. So it is a strange kind of encased-in-amber experience to look at that playlist now.

― something of an astrological coup (tipsy mothra), Friday, July 5, 2013

But this seems less encased-in-amber than Like it Never Was. Like when they counted down the the 96.5 Top Rock Songs of the Year you could always count on Freebird/Stairway at the top, but in a typical hour in 1984 you might get e.g. Scorpions, Starship, Baltimora, Michael Jackson, Joan Jett, Duke Jupiter and rock blocks of Billy Idol or The Tubes.

iirc the days of this kind of trainwreck are the sort of thing that the "JACK-FM" format has tried with limited success to reproduce:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uz5DkTF2RW8

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dIRP4gydheQ

I know this has been uploaded so many times but can someone re-up FFM's template spreadsheet?

Here it is as a google doc -- "make a copy" or "download as" as-needed. If you need, I can email you a copy.

whoops --

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0Alm9ijj_zohtdDhKV1NraFUtWXptd25nbEZ0cGxYeXc#gid=0

cheers!

Counting the days until Pink Floyd. . .

OK, what's the status of everything? Motown to Clemenza and JF for tabulation/rollout? Jay-Z in limbo until enough "voting is for other people" people can be corraled? What else, what's up next?

Okay, so: How much to you have to know about a band to run a poll for that band?

I've felt like suggesting a band or two for inclusion, not because I'm an expert on that band per se, but because I like a couple of albums and am interested in having my horizons expanded. Would that be considered poaching?

I think I asked three times about why no one was doing an Elton John poll before I finally claimed ownership of an Elton John poll. Basically, this thread is both for keeping things in order AND tossing around ideas.

I guess I'd like to revive the Jam/Style Council/Paul Weller idea that was floated upthread. D'ya think it would get enough voters?

...but my knowledge of Paul Weller's oeuvre post-Jam is close to nil. Hence the "poaching" question.

The thing is, if you volunteer to run a poll now, due to the amount of polls ahead of you you're gonna have like 2 years lead time to do your research. Unless Weller dies, which pushes things forward.

...and also two years to learn basic things like "how to embed an image into a post" and "how to use Photoshop."

haha, yeah...at least two.

Wait. Research? What research? Don't you just announce the poll thread and let the votes come in?

No, really. I thought the onus to do the research was on the voters, not on the poll-runner. The poll-runner just needs to commit to tabulation and to a few days of near-constant posting for a few hours each day at results time.

However much or little you know about the artist is definitely a minor variable. Or maybe it just feels that way. I've been super psyched to run the polls I've run (Pavement, GBV, Beasties, Madonna) because I was already crazy into them in the first place. If it had fallen on me to run the Neptunes poll, for example, it wouldn't have been as much fun since, though I like their productions alright, I haven't devoted large parts of my life to listening to them over and over.

Yeah, running one of these is generally a case of "my enthusiasms...let me show you it." Running one as a way to learn about an artist is a novel idea, though, and I wouldn't discourage it.

Indeed, I once ran an insane series of tournament-style polls on a theater board to learn about 1990's Broadway musicals. It was an awesome learning experience - you pay much more attention to the posts if you're nominally in charge of the whole endeavor. So yeah, that's my poll-running background.

Further bulletins as events warrant.

uhh okay I'm going to throw my hat into the ring finally -- I would like to put my name down to run a Pearl Jam poll in the year 2018

ie please add my name to the end of the list

hooray!

"Jeremy POLLED in class today..."