Ongoing History of New Music

We’re going to spend a couple of programs tracing the history of “indie rock” and why music that has come up through these ranks has become to important to not just alternative rock but today’s rock’n’roll in general… Our story is of the records and the artists—but it’s also of the labels and the people behind them…you can’t tell one part of the story and not the other… But what are we really talking about?...what, exactly, is “indie rock?”…tough one, so we’ll have to unpack this carefully… Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In the early days of rock—and we’re talking the 1950s here—the most efficient and cost-effective way to put acts on tour was to bundle them together as a package and put them on the road… In some cases, there would be a common backing band for most of all of the artists…PA equipment—such as it was in those days—was often supplied on site… These became known as caravan tours…guys like Alan Freed, the pioneering disc jockey and Dick Clarke—you know him, right?—took all these acts on the road playing places like theatres and county fairs and wherever else they could find a booking… This package tour approach was pretty common until the late 60s when music business was producing artists big enough to tour on their own and play areas and later stadiums…that’s where the real money was…that and big festivals… But then along came Lollapalooza in 1991…Perry Farrell, singer for Jane’s Addiction, put together a multi-act bill to support what would be the last-ever tour for Jane’s Addiction…the net effect was very much like those old caravan tours… That ’91 tour was successful enough for Lollapalooza to try again in 1992…this time, things were expanded across multiple stages and multiple attractions…and for the next couple of years, Lollapalooza was thetouring music festival for the alternative generation… This spawned imitators:  Edgefest…Lilith Fair…Summersault…Another Roadside Attraction…and for a while, it was all pretty cool… Things are different now…Lollapalooza is a static festival held in Chicago ever August…Edgefest, Lilith Fair, Summersault, and Another Roadside Attraction are all defunct… But there was one travelling music festival that survived for 24 years…and it’s been so big that no one knows for sure how many acts have played it… This is the history of the Warped Tour. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

No one is born a rock star…well, maybe in terms of their attitude but not in terms of vocation…you gotta have the talent and you need to put in the work if you want to achieve actual rock star status… But that takes a lot of time and a lot of effort…and before you get to the stage where people acknowledge your rock star-ness, there are lots of twists and turns, false starts and dead ends… Later, when you’re rich and famous, these early attempts become part of your archeological record…some of this stuff may be found in shallow graves…the rest may be buried very, very deeply and need serious excavation work… Finding this material used to be hard…tapes were locked away in vaults…other early music on tape was erased, recorded over in order that this tape be reused… Cassettes were placed in shoeboxes and lost in closets…music that was released went out of print and was no longer available for sale… There were fires that destroyed archives…storage sites were wrecked with water damage…and then there were all the legal disputes…who owned all these old recordings…which member of the band?...the record label?...someone else?...until that can be sorted out, this music remained unheard… Some of this material did leak out and was released on bootleg albums and CDs, but they were very hard to come by… But then the internet hit…slowly, first through file-sharing sites like Napster, these demos, alternate takes and long-lost recordings started changing hands…and then came YouTube…that’s a treasure trove of old music… Finally, there are box sets and reissues…as physical music sales, record labels are looking deep into the catalogues to find stuff that might entice fans to buy high-margin physical product… The result is that today, a lot of the heavy archeological excavations have already been done for us…and I think it’s time we sifted through the results, don’t you? Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Buying concert tickets used to be easy…you show a show you wanted to see, went down to the box office, plunked down some cash and in exchange were given a couple of stiff pieces of paper with some words on them… When it came time for the show, you presented those pieces of paper to a person at the door who torn them in half—and you went inside to enjoy the gig… It really was that simple—in theory, anyway…it wasn’t, but we’ll get to that… As time went on, buying concert tickets got more complicated…through the mail…credit cards…bar codes… Then the local ticket sellers vanished, replaced by a big mega-corporation…physical box offices started disappearing…the internet came along with online sales…scalpers…the secondary market…bots…and all the while, concerts and touring became big, big, big business… These days, buying concert tickets is really confusing…you still exchange money for admission to gigs, but the experience has very little in common with the so-called good old days… Stay with me…i’m going to give you the honest truth about concert tickets… Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

People often ask me where I come up with ideas for this program…my answer is always the same… you know that feeling when it’s Sunday night and you promise yourself you’ll start on that assignment that’s due the next morning as soon as “the Simpsons” is over?... Yeah, that’s me…every week…and after more than 700 of these one-hour assignments stretching back to 1993, I hit a wall…total writer’s block… I started to panic…there are hard deadlines…I have a contract…I’m expected to deliver another new show…there are radio stations all over the place that need new programming from me…what the hell am I gonna talk about this time when I got nothin’?... I mean, this is the seven hundredth and forty-sev— Wait…show number 747?...that’s the same as the airliner…what about stories of alt-rock and airplanes?... And so I started go back through all my files—and sure enough, there’s tons of stuff on the subject…plane crashes, near-misses, air rage, terrorist bombings… Well, that settles it…show number 747 will be able civil aviation and alt-rock…there…that wasn’t so hard, was it?... Dodged that bullet for another week…. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

I don’t know if you realize this, but the music festival isn’t a modern creation…people have been gathering in fields to hear music for centuries…and in some cases, those original festivals are still happening… Ever hear of Fiera Della Frecagnola?...it started in the village of Cannalonga, up in the mountains in the south of Italy…as far as we’ve been able to tell, the first gig was in 1450…and it’s still happening today… There are other long-timey festivals in Germany, England, India, Latvia…so this isn’t a new thing… The first modern music festival—the thing that would be recognizable to us today—would be Monterey Pop, which was held in San Francisco in the summer of 1967…that led to Woodstock, Glastonbury, Roskilde and a ton of others… But the 1990s was the decade where the festival really came into its own with a series of regular events that reappeared year after year in the same spot—or ones that moved from place to place… Europeans were pretty used to standing in fields in the mud and the rain and the heat…but we north Americans were late to the party…there was no tradition of us doing anything like that…we’d go to the occasional outdoor gig, but it wasn’t the lifestyle thing it had become in other parts of the world… But by the time the decade was over, we had embraced the summer festival…now we have our own events and traditions…and it couldn’t have happened without the 90s alt-rock nation… Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Canada is now the sixth-largest music market in the world…only the US., Japan, the UK, Germany and France are bigger…not bad, considering that we’re living right next door to the biggest exporter of popular culture in the known universe—and considering that unlike Japan, Germany and France, most of our domestic music industry isn’t isolated and protected because of language… I mean, the whole world consumes English-language music…what’s the market for Japanese music outside Japan?...or German music outside of Germany?... Then there’s the matter of population…of those top six nations, Canada, with 36 million people, has the smallest number people…compare that to 66 million in both the UK and France and 83 million Germany… Canada also exports far more music to the rest of the world than we should…every year, the export numbers grow bigger and bigger thanks to stars like Drake, The Weeknd, Justin Bieber, Alessia Cara, Arcade Fire and a long list of artists that came before: Alanis Morrissette, Sarah McLachlan, Celine Dion, Shania Twain, Rush, The Guess Who and dozens and dozens of others… And maybe most important of all, Canada has a super-strong domestic market…Canadians listen to and support Canadian music…and the country tends to be very proud of its homegrown talent…just look at the national outpouring of affection for The Tragically Hip in the summer of 2016… But it wasn’t always this way…there was a time when “Canadian music” was a synonym for “substandard” and “not very good”…Canadians went out of their way to avoid Canadian music—unless it had received a stamp of approval from music fans in the United States…that was the only form of validation the country would accept… That attitude is pretty much extinct now…and the roots of our current musical nationalism can be traced back to the days of the alt-rock 90s… This is chapter 8 of our look at that decade…let’s call it “The CanRock Revolution”… Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

One of the great things about the alt-rock revolution of the 1990s was its diversity… The sounds from this part of the rock universe had always been varied…that’s because the idea of “alternative music” was so amorphous…if it was (a) non-mainstream and ignored by most radio stations; (b) a little left of centre in terms of aesthetics; and (c) considered weird by the majority, then it qualified as “alternative” by default, simply because the was no other way to categorize it…and humans love to organize things into piles, right?... Multiple genres thrived in the alt-rock universe…plus there were all the sub-genres and sub-sub-genres and even sub-sub-sub-genres…this mean that if you into alternative music before the 1990s, you were spoiled for choice…there was something for everyone… Then along came grunge, the biggest sound of the decade…it ripped a whole in the music-space-time continuum, opening a hole into this parallel universe, allowing all these sounds to invade the mainstream… And because these sounds and scenes and sub-genres had been happily evolving almost unseen for years, the people making this music knew what they were doing…the mainstream was flooded with new songs from scenes that were already mature—or at least close to it… Never before had so much solid music from so many seasoned performers been waiting in wings, ready to show their stuff…and when they got their chance—wow… This is our look at the alt-rock of the 1990s, part 7… Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The early 90s were an amazing time for music…generation x, a powerful demographic force, reached the age where they were in a position to demand music that reflected their needs and wants and wishes and desires and fears… The biggest sea change came with the rise of grunge, thanks to Soundgarden, Pearl Jam, Alice in Chains, and, of course, Nirvana…but that music was just the kick-start for the alternative nation that came to dominate most of the 90s…. For many, grunge was alternative music with training wheels…those who liked what they heard were invariably led deeper into a culture that had existed outside the mainstream for years…Gen X discovered different flavours of goth and industrial and electronic music…and they also discovered punk…. Punk had always been around…sure, it kinda got burned out at the end of the 70s, but it never died…the Ramones kept touring…bands like husker du were putting out records…and American hardcore established itself as a force to be reckoned with… But punk was still a niche thing, away from the attention of most music fans…but then an interesting set of circumstances came into play that resulted in a massive resurrection of interest in punk rock—and echoes of that resurrection are still being felt today… This is chapter 6 of our look at back at the 1990s…it’s the mid-90s punk revival… Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

If we look at the state of rock here in the 21st century, it is no longer the main musical driver of popular culture…hip-hop is king… This doesn’t mean it’s dead, that it doesn’t have a place in our lives, that it isn’t going to be around for decades to come…but if you’re honest, you’ll have to admit that hip-hop has extended its reach into popular culture with the strength and depth that used to belong to rock… And it’s not like rock’s appeal shrank…it’s that other genres have exploded, hip-hop being the genre with the most growth… Now let’s go back to the 1990s, the last decade where rock ruled everything…alt-rock was the thing…but if we dig through what happened in the 90s, we can see how hip-hop not only infiltrated alt-rock but how it was embraced, incorporated, and celebrated… Regions of the alt-rock universe began to evolve…the beats got bigger…the rhymes got tougher and more complicated…the vibe began to change…and it was all pretty good—but not all of it worked out well… What were hip-hop’s effects on alt-rock?...we’re going to continue with that topic on this next episode on the alternative 90s… Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices