How Can The Allman Brothers Still Tour When One of Them Has Been Dead for 35 Years?

I hate classic rock radio. I just thought I would get that out in the open before I start my pig-headed rant of mildly epic proportions. I simply don’t understand it. You turn on your radio, tune in to your local classic rock station, and then sit back and enjoy the same songs you’ve heard every day for the last thirty years. Seriously, how many times does a person need to hear “Magic Carpet Ride?” Based on what’s on the radio the answer is twice a day until you fucking croak because they play that fucking song fucking constantly. “But Kris!” you say, “You can’t hate the classics! They’re the classics, they’re classic!” Yes, dear, devoted reader, they are classics; and they need to stop. Classic rock destroys the way people look at music, and I have a number of reasons for why this is true. Of course the main reason being that radio-goers place their taste in music in the hands of people like this:

Now before I get my scathing, convincing and eloquently written argument underway let me clear things up a bit for you non-believers. I will concede that not everything played on classic stations is unbridled shit. They will play the shit out of The Beatles, CCR, Stones, Jimi Hendrix, and the like to no end. But this isn’t entirely true; a more accurate list would be: “they play the shit out of ‘Yesterday,’ ‘Bad Moon Rising,’ ‘(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction,’ and ‘Foxy Lady.’” Variety is like kryptonite to Hotel California radio. It’s just single after single repeatedly, honestly it’s like they took some college freshman’s seventy track “Classix” iTunes playlist and played it on shuffle. It could be so much better if they would play album tracks or live cuts (besides Frampton Comes Alive). Seriously, they’re exploring roughly twenty years of music (1960-1980) and they come out with a dozen bands with two songs each, and they’ve been playing the hell out of them since the beginning of the 1980s. Dust in the Wind radio offers a stagnant pool of over-listened music and people still voluntarily dive in.

Moving on. The main damage that You Can Go Your Own Way radio does to people is that it makes them readily accept sub-par music as unsurpassable feats of human creation. Folks, I hate to break this to you, but The Allman Brothers kind of suck. I know, it’s a bit hard to accept, but it’s true. The only reason people think Duane Allman was a great guitar player is because he died early in his career and he was made into an idol by the radio. Nobody questions what they hear on these stations, they just automatically accept what’s coming out of their car speakers as solid gold. An entire generation has grown up being brainwashed by this stuff, and the results? Jam bands, red stater rock, and Dave Matthews being a successful musician. You know who opens for the Allman Brothers now? Government Mule. How can people support this?!

Another thing which Somebody to Love radio does is ignore important music from the era. Bands like The Velvet Underground, Love, Television, Big Star, post-“You Really Got Me” Kinks, Roxy Music, Brian Eno, The Stooges and other not really obscure groups are left un-played. All of those bands are more important and better than fucking Steely Dan but nobody would ever know that would they? And now that some stations are trying to appeal to Gen Xers by playing 80s pop hits they ignore a whole new era of music. Think you’ll ever hear The Smiths on the radio? No, because they’re playing “In The Air Tonight” again.

I suppose the main draw for Fly Like An Eagle radio is familiarity. Everyone enjoys listening to something that they know, you can sing along to it, and you know you like it. You don’t have to think when you listen to something you know, and that’s okay... to an extent. Since these stations play only music which their listeners can basically tune out or sing along to and not change it up with something that challenges them, it causes a dumbed down listening population. And it’s going to keep happening unless something changes in the way these stations are managed. It’s bound to happen someday isn’t it? One day people are going to get tired of hearing “Spirit in the Sky” everyday on the way to work, aren’t they? Please?