You’re probably thinking, dude, Elvis much? Beatles ever? And you’re right, those bands were the top-line signers of the birth of Rock and Roll. But that’s not what I’m talking about. I’m not talking about Album Oriented Rock which also uses AOR. I’m talking about Adult Oriented Rock, a genre born during the sweaty, sad death of the 60s and the sweaty, sad birth of the 70s.
Until the late 60s, pop music was about the singer
But in 1968 (ish) it was about the band. I know, it’s a fragile definition and won’t stand up to a solid argument by an actual music critic. But I’m telling you, the individual star, the psychopomp of the cult of personality, was drifting out of the spotlight into the shadows at the back of the stage. I don’t mean bands like the Doors or the Beatles, who were single, mutant personalities of their members. I mean bands like Yes, and the Doobie Brothers, and Roxy Music. Sure you knew the names of some of the members, but you didn’t really think about them that way.
AOR was the rise of the album over the single
Which became a little confusing in hindsight as 1971 is also the birth of AOR, album-oriented rock, a radio format which overlaps Adult Oriented Rock and remains entangled. The genres look alike enough to be fraternal twins. Both are about the LP, the long-playing record. But Adult Oriented Rock was more about listening to music as an adult. Which, again, overlap. Adults who’d crushed on Elvis in the 50s were having kids and buying homes and getting a raise. Their taste in music was changing from the granular, which is pop music, to the aerial, which is AOR. They used to throw a 45 on the record player to dance. Now they carefully slipped an LP from its paper sleeve and laid it carefully on their Bang & Olfsen turntable, poured a double Bourbon, and took a comfortable seat in their den. To listen.
They listened to rock music the same way people listened to jazz.
You didn’t dance to Bowie. I mean, you could. But you didn’t. You listened to it the same way you read Kierkegaard. It was literate. This is how AOR hit, with music that moved your medulla, not your hips. Which is not to say there weren’t groovy hits in the genre. Listen to Aretha’s Rock Steady, from her 1972 Album, Young, Gifted, and Black. She literally sings, “move your hips”. Chicago charted with “Saturday in the Park,” which is groovy as hell, even if that groove is all sideburns and handsy gin & tonics. But the albums that defined the time were more like T. Rex’s Slider, Rod Stewart’s Never a Dull Moment, and Mott the Hoople’s All the Young Dudes.
These were songs for thinking to, not for dancing to
And sure, they owe a lot to the rising popularity of pot, which is a thinking drug where booze is a fightin’ drug. Marijuana introduced a lot of people to daily euphoria. This leaked out into fashion and film and definitely influenced what they wanted out of their music, which was the sonic background they enjoyed while they listened to a hummingbird give a lecture on the employment of a Latinate taxonomy in string theory. There is value in audiophilia. There is value in curling your digits around a thick glass of Elijah Craig and sinking back into a deep chair to listen to the entire first side of Exile on Main Street because holy fuck.
Which is what we’re going to do all year.
This is the music that informed many of us. I was only eight years old in 1972 but I was already paying attention to music. Granted, I came from a family of steelworkers on one side and pipefitters on the other so in 1972, we were listening to Mac Davis (“Baby Don’t Get Hooked on Me”), Don McClean (“The Day the Music Died”), Love Unlimited (“Walkin’ in the Rain with the One I Love”), and Tony Orlando and Dawn (“Knock Three Times”) which I still know the words too after 46 years of not listening to it.
But the AOR records were creeping onto the radio and influencing everyone
Soon enough, I was a snobbish tween listening to Bowie, Neil Young, Led Zeppelin, and Three Dog Night. Naturally, it was all on the radio as I was a sheltered child and didn’t buy a record until 1974 when I picked up “Kung Fu Fightin’” by Carl Douglas which I listened to non-stop for a solid week until my mom threatened to kung-fu my ass into next week if I didn’t stop it and go outside. 50 years later, this music still resonates. It still matters to me. Even though I’ve broadened my interest to include the rest of the world, opera, punk, classical, ambient, ska, and a smattering of neo-country, I come back to these foundational classics. It is sonic nostalgia. It is still best enjoyed through a set of expensive headphones (now wireless) in a leather wingback with my feet up, smoking a pipe, and sipping on a double pour of Garrison Brothers or Milam & Greene.
