Classic Rock - Its Blessing & Its Curse

We all love classic rock. There’s the Beatles, Eric Clapton, Led Zeppelin, Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers, BOSTON and of course The Rolling Stones. Oh and lest I forget there’s Jimi Hendrix, The Doors, The Clash, The Police, The Kinks. & I’m forgetting at least 40 other bands that make up classic rock (come on, write a comment in and tell me)
Unless you have rotten taste in music, there’s a song that one of the bands play that you love.
I’m a paralegal at a law firm, and I work in the same room with young adults 20 years younger than me. Yes, sadly enough, I’m old enough to be their Dad. What I am continually amazed with is how knowledgeable they are about Classic Rock. They absolutely love their Beggars’ Banquet &/or Exile on Main Street CDs, have most the Led Zeppelin catalogue and have good working knowledge of punk rock of the late 70s. I work with a guy with absolutely encyclopaedic knowledge of the Grateful Dead and Bob Dillon. Man, I love working with that guy.
But there’s a downside to all that. Each decade of rock is invariably going to produce some good music. There’s more excellent songs to hear in 2005 than there were in 1990. & the point is that there’s a finite amount of time to hear all of these wonderful songs. If you are following and finding out as much you can about The Who, then you’re not spending much time finding out about the new bands. Show me the person who has encyclopaedic knowledge of classic rock and I’ll show you a person who doesn’t know much about Cowboy Mouth. I know I’m that person. The only way I ever would have even heard of Cowboy Mouth is that my nephew loves them and tells me how the crowd absolutely loves them too. I, on the other hand, can’t even tell you a song they play.

It’s like what Robert Plant observed a while back, “If people treated us the same way that people treat new bands these days, they would have ignored Led Zeppelin. When we were starting out, Donovan, Gerry & the Pacemakers and Herman’s Hermits were big. We would not have had much of a chance if people had continued to listen to them on the radio, bought their albums and continued to be their fans.”
Radio and a magazine like Rolling Stone doesn’t help. Radio is riven with payola and tired old bands with tired old songs. When Rolling Stone picks the top 200 albums of all time, albums after 1987 are maybe a quarter of the total. Top bands of all time? Rolling Stone won’t pick very many from the last 17 years.
“Don't believe in the 60's/The golden age of pop/You glorify the past/When the future dries up”
There now, Bono said it all in “God Part II”.
What’s the future of rock n’roll, the music we all love and give a damn about, if we perseverate on Classic Rock????
So, all you 3 or 4 people out there reading this blog, listen to a young band like CatchPenny or Cowboy Mouth!
By the way, that guy in the earlier paragraph who has an encyclopaedic knowledge of the Grateful Dead also knows a lot of new bands as well. I really do admire him, and he does get it right musically as well.