The History of Alt-Rock: Chapter 11

One of the great indirect heroes of modern rock’n’roll was born on March 21, 1865...his name was brigadier general George Owen Squier....he was an Army officer with a PhD in electrical science and a thing for music....he invented a technology to designed to compete with a new thing called “radio”....

Wireless radio, he figured, was useless...it was prone to static and fade-outs and just didn’t sound very good...his idea was to run wires into homes and businesses, just like we have with cable TV today or as they were beginning to do with telephones back then...he called the concept “wired radio”....

Just before he died in 1934, he came up with a new name for his invention.....playing with the words “music” and “Kodak,” he came up with “Muzak”...

The whole thing with “wired radio” didn’t take off with consumers, but businesses were into it...closed circuit music, specifically tailored to their environment, 24 hours a day without interruption or static?...that’s brilliant....and shopping malls and elevators haven’t been the same since....Muzak became the world’s biggest supplier of elevator music...

So where am I going with this...great question...

By the 70s, Muzak corporation was earning more than $400 million a year by distributing this type of music all over the world from its headquarters in Seattle.....it was used for crowd control, a management tool and something to fill the empty silence of a department store or dentist’s office...

And for a time, the Muzak executives thought this was a good unofficial slogan: “boring work is made less boring by boring music”....you bored yet?...

Fifty-two years after the George Squire died, a new type of music started coming from the back room of Muzak headquarters in Seattle......but it wasn’t exactly elevator music....

The music came from the shipping room where a Muzak employee named Bruce Pavitt spent his coffee breaks running a new independent record label devoted to the local music scene.....in fact, Muzak’s payroll supported at least half a dozen local musicians......and while no one could have possibly known what where this was going to lead, the decidedly non-muzak music these people were into would eventually change the world of rock’n’roll forever.....

This is the complete history of alt-rock, chapter 11...

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