On May 1st, 1985, the U.S. Federal Communications Commission assigned call letters to a new radio station in Springfield, Illinois: WYMG, with a broadcast frequency of 100.5 FM. The station chose its slogan as "Springfield's Classic Rock". Nationally speaking the notion that any music could be called "classic" had only popped into existence a few years prior; these kinds of cultural manifestations of course often begin in the hearts of large urban areas. Later then they branch into other places like smaller cities and more compact listening areas. In fact, on that day of WYMG's birth, "classic rock"—as an idea and a radio format—had been nearly five years in the making. Stations WMJI in Cleveland, Ohio, and KRBE in Houston, Texas, had already contemporaneously pioneered the idea of turning the decade old album-oriented rock (AOR) format into something more marketable.

AOR itself arose in the 1970s out of the '60s "progressive" or "freeform" practice of letting DJs basically play whatever they wanted. Eventually due to increasing competition in the proliferation of progressive/freeform stations, a few radio consultants and program directors in places like San Diego, Boston, and Chicago saw an opportunity to shift the emphasis of the current formats from long, eclectic playlists to shorter, more commercial ones by spotlighting so called "focus tracks", i.e. songs with an overall higher production value. Contrary to the nostalgia some people might feel for '70s AOR—you know, the ubiquitous good old days—it was mostly a programming format designed to increase the wealth, power, and influence possessed by a few folks pretty much already possessing those things. Aren't mass marketed products usually born like that anyway, though?

Whatever the case, classic rock pushed even further in the direction of marketability. In light of Michael Jackson's 1983 album Thriller, or up against the popularity of Madonna, for example, AOR had started facing criticism for its lack of ethnic and gender diversity and its exclusion of big newer popular hits. Its once undeniable appeal was largely waning. By the early 1980s, moreover, listeners entering the 25 to 34-year-old demographic age group were beginning to partake in the music of their youth (the 1960s and '70s) in sort of a new way. As it set itself apart in tone and style from the gleaned pop and synthesized strictness characterizing much of the sound of the Reagan era, popular classic rock began to emit a nostalgic retro-hippie glow. It had a harder, more blues- and jazz-based feel—think Jimi Hendrix, The Doors, Led Zeppelin, The Who, et al. And these artists had put out hits, too.

Classic rock sounded rougher and dirtier than a lot the cleaner, more electronic, more produced pop rock of the eighties. Sure one could simultaneous appreciate the second British invasion—Duran Duran, A Flock of Seagulls, Culture Club, and so on—and moments of the first invasion, too—The Beatles, Cream, The Rolling Stones, The Kinks, Traffic, The Animals. Who would stop you? But radio movers and shakers packaged the latter music up and resold it all as something old though new, something distinct but the same, something better than now—a "present" from the past. That's what the shrewdest marketing strategies have often done anyway. In appealing to emotions we feel in recalling or thinking of what happened long before, commercial products are sold to us with the promise of a better time than we're used to now, the assurance of a happier tomorrow even. Look, and you will see this happening everywhere in capitalism. The word is nostalgia, and it's a heck of a drug.


When WYMG became Springfield's first classic rock station, most people living in the Springfield area likely knew little of the format's appeal. But we listened and liked, and so we became exactly what the station managers wanted: into it. The advertisers paid the station owners to supply the music to us (the audience) and intersperse the music with their commercials, and then the advertisers saw sales increase enough that the whole business became profitable. As participants then, we were putting our time, energy, and dollars into producing an environment—a scene—where for the time being classic rock could thrive and reproduce. Here's how I know that. Since around 1982, my father and uncle's local rock band, named Starry Eye, had practically made an every-weekend career covering the hits of the 1970s. In fact by 1987 or so, it was a joke in our house that the band could perform a song not yet in WYMG's playlists, and then inevitably that song would start to be in rotation on the station.

That was all before the corporate takeover and control of radio markets, a time when DJs and their station managers had more freedom to spin what they wanted in a more dynamic way relating to the local scene. Yes, maybe some of my such observations were the result of selective perception, or perhaps the scene was reacting to the band reacting to the scene and so on; it was also true that WYMG's audience who were also members of Starry Eye would sometimes hear a song on the station and offer it to the rest of the group for working up.

This is how popular cultures operate, though really—performer and audience, producer and consumer, and deejay and listener are best understood as flawed dualities because they always assume on side has all the power. When you say to someone, "I listen to classic rock", you add to the cultural vigor of the format. You have to, because otherwise people would be confused as to what bands or songs you're talking about. Moments when one listens to "old" (older?) pieces of music—not just as songs from the past but suddenly as "classic" ones now—obviously contribute to the perpetuation of this special format. That being said, some contributions are bigger than others, but more on that in part 3.

Speaking of power, a sort of superior/inferior dichotomy reveals itself here at the very heart of the matter. Indeed the word "classic" derives from the French "classique", and before that from Latin "classicus" meaning something like belonging to the highest classes of the Roman people, or "superior" from "classis". It meant first class or top tier, relating to standard authors of antiquity—more or less, originally in English. Hence just as we read the classics of literature, drive classic cars, and aspire to be high class, so we listen to classic rock. And the implication is that the older is better than the newer, the former being the "original" thing, forgetting for that moment the origins of what led up to the classics—in the case of rock music in particular, we're referring to the many American musicians of the 1950s who contributed to its development.

In jargon likewise, classic means the first instance: instant classic; Classic Coke as opposed to New Coke; or Jane's Addiction's (now classic) 1991 song "Classic Girl". These plays on our feelings appeal to tradition, which is always set in a certainty of the past set apart from the uncertainty of the present and future. Or, to put it another way, the conflict of "classic" promises everything will be okay if only we privilege ideas of what was over ideas of what is. It incorporates conservatism and contradiction in its core, not just in the narrow U.S. political sense of conservative but in a comprehensive way. Economically it wants you to conserve your energy so that you don't have to touch that dial and change the station, because essentially we already have all the music we need.

There are just two problems with this sort of marketing campaign: 1) new music becomes old and eventually marked "classic" too, at the same time as old hits get even older, both of which factors weaken any case you can make for there being an "ideal" time period; and 2) most young people on the one hand typically gravitate to what is new and on the other aren't swayed as much by appeals to the distant past, mainly since they never lived it. Weirdly, I suppose, in the case of the new/old classic rock on the scene in the 1980s, I fell into both these hands: I enjoyed a lot of new music at the time, but I soon became deeply enchanted with the milieu and music of the sixties and seventies, practically nostalgic for a time I'd mostly never experienced but which I longed for nevertheless. Thus the 1980s progressed as a very active and volitile time for popular music lovers, who could readily be pitted against each other (or against ourselves!) for their listening preferences, and it was easy for young people to feel caught in the middle of a generational battle for market dominance. Somehow, though, I came out the other side.


It was that summer, 1985, when at the impressionable young age of fourteen I stepped out the back door of my parents' house on Price Street in Springfield, Illinois, and into the backyard where my brother was basking in the sun on a lawn chair. Just then I heard a noise that would come to change my life. Flowing steadily from our boom box on the picnic table came a relatively slow, steady beat of heavy-sounding drums; they were up loud in a mix of music that sounded exotic to me. I probably didn't have that word in my vocabulary yet at the time, though that's certainly how I would have described then if I could—like nothing I'd ever heard, something from the outside, foreign and strange but beautiful.

Nothwithstanding my long time affinity for WDBR, which was the pop station in town in those years, I'd recorded a few songs on cassette tape from WYMG broadcasts, but I had never heard anything like this piece of music. Later, asking my dad about it, I learned I'd heard a song titled "Kashmir" by a band I was not very familiar with at all and who were named Led Zeppelin. Nowadays, I completely understand the attraction "Kashmir" had for me—polymeters, Indian orchestra, lyrical tales of travels, and most importantly the drums. Back then, though? I probably sensed the perfect counterpoint to the music I'd been hooked on for years. Hitherto my artists of choice fell into genres like new wave and synth pop—Electric Light Orchestra and Thompson Twins being my favorite tween years bands. This fact says a ton about what, suddenly, the sound of Led Zeppelin felt like to me.

A reaction was taking place in me, like something in my DNA had fallen together—brain synapses connecting, new pathways forming—and "Kashmir" had been the catalyst. I remember I stood that day in the back yard for a moment hearing the song and then knowing, kind of with all my might, that I wanted to learn to play drums, specifically to learn how to make the kind of noise Zeppelin's drummer made. I soon read with fascination Stephen Davis's unauthorized biography on the band, Hammer of the Gods (published in a timely sense in 1985). I discovered the name of the drummer had been John Bonham and that he had died when I was nine years old, in 1980.

So I started learning to play on Starry Eye's practice drum kit (owned by Fred Edmonds, their drummer) which sat in my parents' basement. I can still recall the moment when I was able to play eighth notes on the hi-hat with my right hand, quarter notes with my left hand on the snare, and quarter notes with my right foot on the bass drum pedal, alternating kick/snare/kick/snare. BOOT tuh TAT tuh BOOT tuh TAT tuh, and so on. The beat collapsed when I attempted to strike a crash cymbal on a bass drum hit. Four years later, with more practice behind me, I was playing with others, practicing along with tapes of Zeppelin, and attempting to replicate Bonham's magic.

Had it not been WYMG broadcasting "Kashmir" that day, it probably would have been some other song over some other station at another time that set me on the path to instrumentation. Or maybe I would have come to that place via another, more circuitous route. But it wasn't, and I didn't. There was bang in my life the summer of '85, as it were, and a new universe expanded and opened up for me in the subsequent months. Drums in high school led to six-string and bass guitars in college, which led to singing and keyboards, and on.

I think, to continue the metaphor, that the ripples from big events in our lives continue to collide and interfere with each other even as time goes on. The closer ideas/feelings are in proximity to each other in our patterns of thought and emotion, the higher the propensity for constructive interference between them. "Kashmir" then, a song I was arguably primed to appreciate because it was riding to me on a swell named "classic rock", was a big stone dropped in my pond that hot summer day back in '85. Though the waves from that backyard moment have reached out and leveled off some, and though they've combined with other aspects of my daily life, they're still waving, so to speak. In small moments, like when I'm finger-drumming polyrhythms on the kitchen counter waiting for my toast to pop up, I can still sense them.