But That's Not All...

Ever watch those infomercials for Time Life Music's compilations? To show you how little of a life I have, I actually sat through two of them, back to back. The first show was about the 70's collection, hosted by Barry Williams (Greg Brady), and the next one was about the Country music collection with Kenny Rogers. They are surprisingly compelling, even though there's no way I'll actually pony up the money to buy their product. The funny part is that the copy is almost word for word in each infomercial save for the names of the artists and songs. You know how it goes: "You'd have to spend many hours and hundreds of dollars trying to put together a collection like this on your own..."

I'm not what you'd call a huge Country music fan, but the Country collection looked a whole lot better than the 70's. It might take an infomercial to remind people that there were a whole lot of bad songs on the charts in the 70's! I believe that the 70's was the greatest decade for Rock, with groups like The Who, and Zeppelin, and Floyd and the Stones all in their prime. But Pop? Not so much. There was probably a lot of good music on the charts in the 70's, but the producers of this infomercial chose to highlight a lot of songs that would best be forgotten. All-time classic like Jigsaw's "Sky High", The Raspberries' "Go All the Way", and "Gypsies, Tramps and Thieves" (an awful song in its own right, but Cher performed it about as well as Sonny negotiated the tree line.) I'm sorry, but some of these songs should make people cringe in shame at the memory of having enjoyed them. Not to mention just about anything by Bobby Sherman or Tony Orlando & Dawn.

It's always fun to debate over which was the greatest decade for Rock/Pop. The 60's was a great Pop decade, but modern Rock (and Progressive Rock) was just in its infancy. 80's music was insidious like fast food. It was appetizing and very accessible, but homogeneous and lacking in nutritional or intellectual value. It was also a decade in which erstwhile great Rock bands were bitten by the synthesizer bug and went hopelessly commercial - the worst offender of all being the Moody Blues. That's why bands like Nirvana and Pearl Jam were so timely when they came around, and helped bring Rock back to what it should be, so the 90's were excellent years for music. I'd love to stay and talk more about this, but I have to go and learn more about the Ronco Showtime and flavour injector.