"The Strange Death of Easy Listening"

The strange death of easy listening

 

BTW, I am a fan of a lot of this kind of stuff.

 

He lost me at "Nobody actually listened to Jimi Hendrix in the 1960s."
So, were all those people at Hendrix concerts waiting for Streisand to come out and sing a song or two?

 

They were wanting to hear Hendrix. It is just that the reason why Herb Alpert and Andy Williams flood thrift store bins is that most of the audience had better equipment and took care of the records.

 

Pretty good read.

 

I too disagree with the premise as Hedrix's debut was the best selling album in the US in 1968 (a little late to the party but those are the figures nonetheless).

 

I think you missed his point.

He’s sarcastically saying that he doesn’t find any Hendrix albums in thrift bins but he finds many things like Herb Albert..because that’s what people get rid of. ( Not their Hendrix albums)

 

I don't think it ever really went away - look at the success of Amy Winehouse, Adele, Ed Sheeran and many many more mainstream and light pop or jazz acts that sell in the millions. It just gets called other things. The last consciously easy listening group I'm aware of is Pizzicato Five, perhaps Saint Etienne who were both somehow considered indie. I'd also add early Everything But The Girl, some Aztec Camera, and then music I'm not so keen on like Michael Buble.

 

I actually listened to both Hendrix and Streisand.
He's nuts...

 

me too...why not?

 

From the article:
Audiophile dorks who spend thousands of dollars obsessing over factory matrix numbers in the hope of finding a pressing of Rubber Soul that doesn't give the impression that it was meant to be played back on a toy are wasting their time.
Ouch.

 

thanks Bradley I enjoyed this...

 

me too...thanks to my Mom!

 

Most of those records I see in Goodwill and wherever else are thoroughly trashed!

Years ago, an older gentleman in his 80s had heard I was into records. He had an old 1975 Pioneer turntable and a cartload of old albums of this vintage that he gave to me. I went through every one of them and they all suffered from severe groove damage and were junk. His turntable is nice and I still have it. The only problem is that the table needs a new belt and motor, and the tonearm was tracking way too heavy, hence the groove damage. It still has the original Pioneer cart on it. One of these days, i'll refurbish it. It's very nice.

Anyway, I love this music and came to know it in the 70s via Andy Williams, carpenters, The Captain & Tennille, Barbra Streisand, Melissa Manchester, and Barry Manilow. We had a few Henri Mancini and Johnny Mathis albums in the 60s.

It seems this style of music disappeared around 1983, certainly the sound of the WWII generation which seemed to withdraw from the market as the industry was no longer targeting them.

 

The article is so flippant and sarcastic that I don't really take it seriously, but there is a point in there that is obscured by the attitude - in the 60's and 70's, rock was truly adolescent music and to my memory (mostly 70's) it was a counter-cultural or even underground thing. All the easy listening stuff he refers to was very much mainstream. So it's not like "nobody actually listened to Hendrix", but you wouldn't walk into a department store and hear it. Depending on where you were, you might be lucky to have one FM station that you could tune in to hear real rock music. I went to the dentist last week to have a crown replaced and he was playing classic rock, which was kinda weird. Last year it was mainstream pop. For about twenty years or more, every time I went to the dentist I heard the same Frankie Valli song. Not the same dentist either!

 

What’s the source for that? I see Wikipedia does claim that Hendrix’s debut was the best selling album of 1968, but also shows that - alongside the Beatles, Cream, and the Doors - Glen Campbell, Herb Alpert, Paul Mariat, and The Graduate soundtrack all had #1 albums that year, so, even at the height of the counterculture, easy listening was still holding its own atop the charts. In the first half of the 60s, the West Side Story, Sound of Music, Mary Poppins soundtracks, etc. outsold any rock album, I’m fairly sure.

 

Personally I've always found ridiculously distorted guitars to be very easy to listen to, and the saccharine coated crooning of Andy Williams very hard if not impossible to listen to.

On the other hand 60s Sinatra goes down as smooth and easy as the finest scotch whiskey for me. But then Frank wasn't really catagorized as easy listening was he? That's the difference between Sinatra and Williams. One was the greatest singer of the century. The other was a piece of sonic candy. A very successful piece but candy nonetheless.

 

Good to see the spirit of Lester Bangs lives on.

 

"Nobody actually listened to Jimi Hendrix in the 1960s."

I'm happy to be one of those nobodys.

 

Bing Crosby is the bridge between both.

 

I heard Jimi Hendrix being played in a Goodwill store a couple weeks ago. Sadly, I found no Hendrix albums in the bins.

 

I'll take most easy listening over bubblegum and the Monkees any day.

 

Yeah, kind of okay with this.

But there's plenty of excellent "mellow" stuff I've found to serve this purpose over my adult life: Zero 7, Beth Orton, Morcheeba, Van Morrison...lots of stuff. And streaming services are full of curated "Sunday morning" or "chill-out" playlists full of new (and old) tunes for passive, relaxing "easy" listening.

"Easy listening" as a genre died a much needed death, but I don't think the idea of music that "fills the gap between classical music and jazz on the one hand and kiddie fare on the other" is dead at all (except replace those genres with popular genres of today), it's just gone from syrupy strings and cheese to electronic-tinged or acoustic folkie vibes.

 

When one states:

Rock music was essentially adolescent. It was written and performed by very young people who had nothing of particular importance to say about a world they had very little experience of.

You might as well just declare yourself "get off my lawn!" guy.

 

Some of those guys whose popularity faded as entertainers nonetheless had pretty big publishing holdings in the stuff that was selling.
As to "whipped cream" records, I'm reminded of Miller's line in Repo Man about those car air "fresheners" that you find hanging from the rear view mirror.
I don't think the "youth" music caught on until Monterey Pop Festival, when I was told that the labels realized they had to scramble to sign acts that played this 'new' music. Figure that the lead time from signing to releasing an album was pretty short, right?