The Year in Music

The Year in Music, 1977. A year of financial superlatives in the music industry. Over-all sales up ten percent above 1976, topping three billion dollars for the first time in history. Record divisions of the biggies—CBS, Warner Communications, Inc., RCA, EMI—consistently reporting quarterly sales increases of 20, 25, 30 percent over last year. The well-shaved jowls of entertainment-industry stock analysts and brokers glow with fulfillment. Doughty little Arista Records, Clive Davis, Prop., increases its first-quarter earnings by 123 percent. Stockholders' meetings are disrupted by spontaneous cheering as gruff but kindly board chairmen bend down to receive the tremulous blessings of widows and orphans.

Wait—there's more: Radio profits for 1976, before taxes, had increased nearly 100 percent. Country music now accounts for 20 percent of all records sold, due in part to the disinclination of housewives, both urban and rural, to distinguish between Engelbert Humperdinck and George Jones. Hold on a minute. The respective hit singles of Debby Boone (You Light Up My Life), Rita Coolidge (Higher and Higher), Crystal Gayle (Don't It Make My Brown Eyes Blue) and Linda Ronstadt (It's So Easy and Blue Bayou) quickly congeal into a plaintive, cloying metasingle that just seems to drone on and on for most of the year, while Frampton Comes Alive, rock's answer to animal tranquilizers, has sold as many copies as there are people in some Western states. There's something wrong here. Billboard said that by the end of 1977, it was expected that Cherry Hill, New Jersey, would "probably have one of the largest concentrations of audio and stereo stores in the country... there are 14 established record and stereo shops within a three-mile area." Hold on just a minute; I said there's something seriously wrong here! OK, take a deep breath; let's try it again.

Now, assuming that we're all reasonably mature music lovers, who also have had occasional brushes with the law of supply and demand (as opposed to complete vinyl junkies who think a record is in the store because they willed it to be there), it would seem to follow that the music industry is making all this boodle because it's selling more records; and if it's selling more records, that means more music is recorded, played on the radio and sold in the stores.

Unfortunately, that's precisely what isn't happening. More records (and tapes) are being sold, and at higher prices (the $7.98 list price became standard for most top acts in 1977), but the number of new acts being signed is tapering off. CBS, after two expansive years, is putting its checkbook away for a while and ABC announced that it will be releasing half as many albums this year as it did in 1977.

So you won't be hearing as many new singers or groups in the future, but the ones you do hear, you'll be hearing more often. And not only because the companies' promotional techniques and the stores' merchandising ploys have become more selective and sophisticated—which they have—there's also the increasingly unpleasant tendency among FM stations toward shorter play lists: fewer tunes, more repetition.

FM-radio listening is up 12 percent over 1976, but progressive, or free-form, FM is rapidly being supplanted by what's politely known as AOR (continued on page 172)Year in Music(continued from page 166) (album-oriented rock), or format FM. AOR stations have a superficial likeness to progressive stations—laid-back deejays playing album cuts rather than singles—but the actual choice of what's played is no longer left to the deejays (too many rambling, late-night monologs about how stoned they are, punctuated by extended selections from Firesign Theater or the Bonzo Dog Band), or even to the program directors themselves. Increasingly, the programming—which, after all, determines a station's sound and style—is being done by outside consultants who, after surveying a station's location and audience, supply a weekly play list calculated to appeal to the most listeners. So if it's suddenly dawned on you that the Eagles' Life in the Fast Lane is the most kick-ass rock 'n' roll to come over your car radio in months, now you know why. Even that is better than the ultimate extension of prepackaged formulization, the ear Pablum known as easy-listening rock—a flat-out contradiction in terms, as any real rocker will tell you.

If this is beginning to sound just a bit like Pavlovian conditioning, you're not far off. The latest wrinkle in AM radio, and one that is making inroads into the supposedly hipper FM formats, is an odious innovation known as passive research. It's based on the assertion that the traditional indicators of a record's popularity—mainly, sales and phone requests—reflect the taste of only about 20 percent of a station's listeners. This means that four fifths of the country's radio fans are living their lives in a state of unresearched innocence, somewhere outside the statistical pale. Enter the researchers, such as Jack McCoy, with his RAM computer-research system. The RAM system, now used by 26 AM and FM stations, involves calling "representative" listeners each week and asking them their preferences, sometimes even playing them tunes, and then following up with a questionnaire. All the information is evaluated and fed into the computer and the results determine what cuts get the most emphasis, in many cases superseding the already desiccated top-30 weekly play list: If the research (with a nod toward local sales) says the audience wants to hear 22 songs, that's exactly what it gets. Billboard reported a further refinement: The RAM system has a new "module" that "can now provide music preferences by format by Zip Code." In other words, if your neighborhood is in the mellow throes of a collective Fleetwood Mac attack, you may have to move to a rougher part of town to hear The Rolling Stones or Led Zep, or leave the state altogether. And even then, your chances of hearing anything different or new aren't too good; as a Minneapolis program director told Billboard, when asked about passive research: "'No, it's not valuable at all for finding new music. But it will tell you if a record is alive in your market and if you should be playing it.' "

There you have it. Like it or not, the music business has managed to mold the vagaries of individual talents and the vicissitudes of public taste to a degree undreamed of ten years ago, when the current cycle of explosive growth began. It's now an entertainment industry as effectively researched, promoted and merchandised as the television and movie industries. Cost effectiveness, getting the biggest return on each dollar invested, has won out, as the older generation of music-crazed, "I can feel it in my bones—we got a hit!" executives either pass from the scene or fall into line.

The ultimate irony, as far as rock fans are concerned, is that this growth cycle began with the amazing concentration of rock-'n'-roll artists who crowded onto the scene in the middle and late Sixties, fueling the revival of a then-moribund record industry. Now, original talent is less important than dependable acts turning out predictable product that sounds like everything else and doesn't make waves. The only authentic voices left are out on the fringe and, by all current indications, will be there for quite some time.

A few such voices from the musical hinterlands, nevertheless, did manage to make themselves heard over the relentless sound of Muzak during 1977. Records by most of the major punk-rock/New Wave bands became widely available for the first time, after two years of critical tub thumping that transmuted this latest installment of three-chord rock 'n' roll into a combination musical Fountain of Youth and Divine Wind. Now that the fog of hype and hysteria has cleared somewhat, it's apparent that—even more than the music—it's the attitudes of the punks that older critics, eager to embrace a new trend reminiscent of the hard rock of the earlier, pre-ELO or Yes era, find so attractive. The old-fashioned rock-'n'-roll self-destruction, dead-end nihilism and arrogant dumbness of the music of the Sex Pistols, Ramones, Richard Hell and the Voidoids and dozens of others is repellent—it's meant to be. But considering the slick pop morass much of rock has sunk into, the primal rock-'n'-roll anger and unremitting ugliness of the punks is also a kind of extreme, kill-or-cure musical corrective. Already, one can see this happening among the best of the New Wave bands —in the tight, stripped-down, overheated hard rock of Eddie and the Hot Rods; the spare, arch, street-smart R &B of Mink DeVille; the oddball mannerisms of Elvis Costello; and the tense, jungle-of-cities minimalism of Television.

There are other, better-known rockers, genuine masters such as The Rolling Stones, Jeff Beck and Eric Clapton, who, measured lay the yardstick of record sales and air play, have moved out to the periphery of mass popular taste, but whose musical standards and influence show no signs of fading. The same holds true for Neil Young, who has made a career of dodging stardom while producing a body of work—documented in his Decade triple LP—of cumulative quirky brilliance comparable only to that of Bob Dylan.

Then there are the established eccentrics, such as Randy Newman, Steely Dan and Joni Mitchell; unclassifiable pop innovators who occasionally startle their cults, record companies and most likely themselves by producing a hit (Newman's Short People was his first hit single ever; the Dan's Aja, their best-selling LP) or, in the case of Mitchell's Don Juan's Reckless Daughter, a marvelously odd essay into American art song that ranks as one of the best albums of the year.

The movement in black music toward mechanized funk and deracinated entertainment has pushed some artists working in earlier forms into premature obsolescence: Al Green, the greatest soul singer we have, is a premier case in point. Sometimes the "living legends" surprise even their most loyal fans, though, as did Muddy Waters, who, supported by Johnny Winter and James Cotton, came roaring back off the bluesnostalgia circuit with his Hard Again LP, just to let the world know he's still kicking. Levon Helm, formerly of The Band, combined his backwoods back beat with Paul Butterfield's blues harp and Mac Rebennack's New Orleans piano and, as The RCO All-Stars, they put together a fine album of revisionist R&B. Reggae fans consoled themselves with The Heptones' Party Time, while Garland Jeffreys mixed elements of Caribbean, soul and rock on Ghost Writer, a jittery organ-flavored debut LP of such incisive originality that he is probably (continued on page 215)Year in Music(continued from page 172) doomed to perpetual cult status.

What's left? A giant gelatinous middle ground occupied by music that has more in common with the movies and TV than with the rock 'n' roll and soul that spawned it. Blockbusters, for instance. The entire motion-picture industry is obsessed with them. Movie production is down to 120 pictures a year, but hope (and crass calculation) is limitless. Jaws made $121,000,000 so far. Star Wars made over $127,000,000 in 1977 alone. Translate that into popular-music terms and you have, pre-eminently, Peter Frampton. Frampton Comes Alive sold over 13,000,000, I'm in You is still selling, and when the Sgt. Pepper movie comes out later this year, the Robert Stigwood Organization has a good shot at a Blockbuster Movie! With a Blockbuster Sound-Track Album! to match Saturday Night Fever's, another would-be Boffo Box-Office Blockbuster with a Blockbuster Sound-Track Album! scored and mostly performed by the Blockbusting Bee Gees, the true kings of Saturday-night disco movie music.

Leaving the realm of capped teeth and perfect tans, there are blockbusters that owe their success more to musical accomplishment than to Pre-Raphaelite good looks. Hardy perennials such as Fleetwood Mac, whose LP of the same name had spent two years on the charts by the end of '77, while Rumours surpassed the all-time record for the number of weeks at the top of the charts—a record held by, that's right, Frampton Comes Alive. Stevie Wonder's Songs in the Key of Life generated hit singles and rock awards throughout the year and was still going strong after 15 months, as were Boz Scaggs's Silk Degrees, Boston (5,800,000 sales for a debut album), ELO's A New World Record and Heart's Dreamboat Annie (sold 2,000,000, as did its second LP, Little Queen). The Eagles spent 1977, in all likelihood, setting up tax shelters for their royalties from Hotel California and Greatest Hits (16,000,000 combined sales).

Although none of the above-mentioned artists could be accused of not knowing his audience, only a few—Frampton, the Bee Gees and that soulless clone off the living body of rock known as Foreigner—can be termed outright musical hypes, existing solely because of their audience's taste. Passing from figurative to literal movie music, however, this proportion is drastically reversed. Aside from the aforementioned Saturday Night Fever, a disco sound track to a movie about discos, and You Light Up My Life, a one-song LP from a movie concerning the plucky heroine's struggle to inflict the pawky title tune upon a cowering nation, there isn't much in the way of music that can stand on its own merits. Streisand's A Star Is Born LP is, like everything else she's recorded, an exercise in hermetic egoism: The music is secondary.

With Car Wash, we have the curious phenomenon of the sound track carrying the movie, which in this case is akin to the deaf leading the blind. A nasty little cartoon set to relentlessly thumping disco, Car Wash was nevertheless a portent: Witless entertainment, plus mindless music, sells. Star Wars and Rocky proved just how much.

Television, the great cultural Cuisinart, has known this all along, of course. As mainstream rock, country, soul and jazz have toned down the distinctive musical elements that made them popular art forms and are transformed into nondenominational entertainment, television has beckoned ever more warmly. Even discounting the rash of Elvis and Bing Crosby movies and specials, there was more music on TV last year than ever before. First there were the Grammys, then Don Kirshner put on a rock-awards show to complement his increasingly hopeless Rock Concert, while Burt Sugarman's Midnight Special spun off the Wolfman Jack show and Burt, not to be outdone, produced the Billboard #1 Award Show. Paul Simon, Bette Midler, Paul McCartney and Wings, Elton John and Neil Sedaka all had specials or filmed concerts, and Rolling Stone magazine celebrated its tenth anniversary with a Thanksgiving-weekend turkey that should have been called Shindig Goes to Las Vegas. Dinah, Mike, Merv and Johnny all featured "real" musicians in record numbers, while androids of the Donny and Marie, John Davidson, Captain and Tennille ilk continued to plague us. When the dust had settled, though, the best shows of the year were The Amazing Rhythm Aces and Jimmy Buffett concerts on Austin City Limits; no frills, just fine music.

The traffic on TV flows both ways, as rock fans were painfully reminded each time they heard Shaun Cassidy or David Soul. It's in country music, however, that TV has had its most insidious effects. Glen Campbell, Mac Davis and Roy Clark have become major country stars on the basis of their constant presence on TV and—what's more important to their labels—major pop or MOR (middle of the road) stars as well. Even so, the best country singers are much too real for TV to ever feel comfortable with them, or vice versa, the one exception being the inimitable Dolly Parton, who can make dumb men talk and blind men see. She also totally dominates any setting she's put in and plays hob with the reception, to boot, which may be why TV seems just a bit leery of her.

The one form of popular music able to deal with TV on its own terms and come out (relatively) ahead is disco —which is as it should be, since disco is a musical equivalent of television in the first place. Like TV, disco has an infallible instinct for the lowest common denominator; i.e., that pounding beat. Adherents claim that any tune or lyric can be done in a disco version—the more familiar, or inane, the better, since it illustrates disco's awesome, destructive power: It eats anything. This past hunting season, we had Disco Lucy and S.W.A.T. themes from TV, a Caribbean disco song called Bionic Man, straight from outer space, an update of Come, All Ye Faithful for the holidays and the first of what should be a long series of disco "learn-while-you-dance" reinterpretations, Jack and Jill. Not to mention Gonna Fly Now and Meco's Star Wars, which sound, respectively, like the themes from a TV cop show and a Seventies remake of Bonanza. And if that's not enough, there's Charo's Cuchi-Cuchi LP, just one of the many things disco and the Johnny Carson show have in common.

Ultimately, disco music and the discos themselves embody all the bad traits loose in the music industry and general culture today. Aside from the dreary assembly-line music, the discothèques represent the furthest extension of current tendencies toward rigidly programed entertainment for a self-indulgent audience that gets exactly what it wants: a sound Hack for its own personal disco movie starring itself. It also is driving out marginal live-music clubs and helped strike the final blow against soul music. Black popular music, as such, no longer really exists. In the places of R&B and soul, we now have disco and pop, the latter encompassing equally Dolly Parton and Rose Royce, Kiss and Parliament/Funkadelic, the Commodores and the Bee Gees.

The major result of this ballooning of the pop and easy-listening rock categories has been the drift in that direction of most of the numerous female rock and soul singers, joined by a few of the younger, more ambitious country ladies. Crystal Gayle's (Loretta Lynn's younger sister) big single was second only to Debby Boone's on the charts for weeks, and Dolly Parton's switch to a more pop-oriented approach finally paid off as the title tune from her Here You Come Again LP simultaneously topped the country charts while climbing into the top ten on the pop charts—appropriately enough, just in time for Christmas. Linda Ronstadt's singles and Simple Dreams album took up what appeared to be permanent residence in both country and pop. Emmylou Harris' To Daddy did the same on a more modest scale, as Natalie Cole, Thelma Houston and Mary Macgregor were the strongest finishers out of at least a dozen black female vocalists and groups to place high in the pop as well as soul charts during 1977. Add to this sorority Karla Bonoff, Carole Bayer Sager, Maria Muldaur, Carly Simon, Bette Midler, Jennifer Warnes, Melissa Manchester, Bonnie Raitt and God knows who else, and you have the largest contingent of female singers swelling the pop ranks since the Patti Page era of post—World War Two pop.

Jazz, too, has been experiencing this expansion of the musical middle ground, coupled with the resurgence of interest in (and recordings of) the classic jazz of the Forties and Fifties—music that was driven underground by the ascendancy of rock during the Sixties. The renewed activity of truly great musicians such as saxophonists Dexter Gordon and Sonny Rollins and pianists Cecil Taylor, McCoy Tyner and Randy Weston served as a welcome antidote to the mélange of pop-jazz, R&B and jazz/rock riffs that characterize the music of George Benson, Les McCann, Lonnie Liston Smith, Jan Hammer, Eric Gale, et al. Then again, it was hard to get too excited about the latest from Grover Washington, Jr., or Bob James, when one could pick through the deluge of reissues and try manfully to choose, say, between the Lester Young/Billie Holiday sessions on the three-volume Lester Young Story and some prime Bud Powell or Fats Navarro or Charlie Parker at Birdland....

Most of the major labels went in for jazz repackaging with such fury in 1977 that at times it seemed to be a race to see which company could empty its vaults first. Fantasy/Prestige/Milestone/Stax, however, finished the year with the best mixture of classic and current, with such highlights as the first American release of Cecil Taylor's landmark The Great Concert (recorded in Paris in 1969), McCoy Tyner's Supertrios and Ron Carter's Piccolo. Manfred Eicher's ECM label (distributed here by Polydor) continued to turn out beautifully recorded albums by some of the best younger musicians, such as Keith Jarrett, Gary Peacock, Jan Garbareck, Paul Motian, Jack DeJohnette, Paul Bley and Ralph Towner, to name just a few.

Being on the fringe of the music industry, and of popular taste in general, has been a way of life for the jazz world for at least 15 years, but it's a relatively new experience for fans of genuine rock, soul and country music. In the past, there was always a profit to be made in catering to generational, racial and regional tastes, by either the major or small, specialized labels. The small labels are gone, though, and the growth of a nationwide amorphous audience aged 14 to 44 has made the limited groups to which those labels catered superfluous to the musical conglomerates.

Moreover, it's unlikely this situation will soon change: The parallels to the movies and television are too strong. Still, there's one crucial difference. The record industry, for all its growing sophistication and marketing acumen, can never totally predict, much less control, the music that someone decides to tape in his own basement or record in some cheap studio. It's as simple and as impossible as that.

And to those who remember, or can just imagine the excitement and the absolute shit storm of righteous indignation Elvis Presley caused when he first hit the airwaves, the latest attempts to save rock 'n' roll from its own success—especially punk/New Wave—have an eerily symmetrical logic, coming in the year of his death. If you've forgotten, or want to be reminded, of how clear and strong and jubilant his music actually was, pick up the sound track of his 1968 TV special, and then go back to the source: The Sun Sessions from 1954. And remember: Good music doesn't get older—it just gets better.

Which brings us to the part you provide—the voting results. We thank those of you who voted, even the ones who did so in crayon or spaghetti sauce; and, as always, we remind you that these are your results. If they make you want to scream and tear your hair, and you didn't vote, well, tough tweeters. Maybe next time it will induce you to take out the ballot and scud it in—using, of course, only a sharp, dark spaghetti sauce. Here we go again.

Records of the Year

Best Pop/Rock LP: Rumours / Fleetwood Mac (Warner Bros.). After starting off ten years ago as hard-edged British blues rockers, and many changes (very much including the addition of Stevie Nicks), Fleetwood Mac has mellowed without going soft, which may be why the Big Mac appeals to everyone from teenyboppers to relics in their 30s.

Best Rhythm-and-Blues LP: Songs in the Key of Life / Stevie Wonder (Tamla). As far as we remember, it's a first—this album won in this category last year and quite clearly has just kept on going.

Best Country-and-Western LP: Simple Dreams / Linda Ronstadt (Asylum). Linda did it this time with a new album, but, just like last year, our readers voted no fewer than three of her albums into the top 20.

Best Jazz LP: Heavy Weather / Weather Report (Columbia). George Benson almost repeated here with Breezin', but Zawinul & Shorter & Co.'s crowd of Miles Davis graduates finally stormed over Benson's milder weather.

Best Pop/Rock LP

Best Rhythm-and-Blues LP

Best Country-and-Western LP

Best Jazz LP

Music Hall of Fame

This was definitely the year of la Ronstadt. Winning in several categories, with three albums in the favorite top 20 and two simultaneous singles on the charts, she was no surprise as this year's new entry to the Hall of Fame.

Not far behind her is the man who taught a generation of musicians how to croon into newfangled electric microphones, traveled funny roads around the world with Bob Hope and moved a mountain of orange juice—the late Bing Crosby. Remaining in a high holding pattern at number three for the second straight year is Neil Diamond, and Jimmy Page repeats at number four.

The top 20 goes like this:

Readers' Poll

With a few bright new exceptions, our readers stuck mainly with old favorites. Many winners were repeats and some settled in for the third straight year—a reflection of their popularity and talent, certainly, but also of the creeping conservatism in the music industry.

The news in the Pop/Rock category is that James Taylor, on the strength of JT, jumped from ninth last year to top male vocalist. Lovely Linda did it again as female vocalist, but Fleetwood Mac's delectable Stevie Nicks came from nowhere into the number-two slot. Peter Frampton was again top guitarist, followed hot by the cat-scratch fever of Ted Nugent, who was up to number six from number 18 a year ago. On drums, the perennial top three kept slugging it out; notable new additions were Kiss's Peter Criss and ex-Band member Levon Helm. Paul McCartney remained settled in on top in the bass category, as did Stevie Wonder as composer and Fleetwood Mac as best group. New to the list of favorite groups from last year were Crosby, Stills & Nash; Boston; Heart; Steve Miller Band; Santana; Kansas; and Bob Seger & the Silver Bullett Band. The bullet goes to Kiss, up ten notches from number 19 to number nine.

Not much new was happening in the R&B sector, either. Stevie Wonder did it again as male vocalist and composer; Natalie Cole nudged Phoebe Snow from top female vocalist, up from second last year; and Earth, Wind & Fire and the Average White Band were again one and two as favorite group. Big news here was the sudden appearance of the Commodores as number three.

In Jazz, almost all the winners were doing it one more time. George Benson was up from number 14 to take male-vocalist honors away from Lou Rawls; and Jeff Beck, having great crossover success, was voted best guitarist. Otherwise, it was mostly business as usual.

Country-and-Western stock also held steady—even steadier than most. In every category, at least the top two finished exactly as they did last year. The only notable new faces, one not so new, were Crystal Gayle (who beat out her more famous sister, Loretta Lynn, in the female-vocalist category) and Ralph Stanley, who at last and deservedly made the picker list at number 20 for his fine traditional bluegrass banjo playing.

Here are the final markets for '77's musicians' stock.

1978 Playboy Music Poll Results

Pop/Rock

Male Vocalist

Female Vocalist

Guitar

Keyboards

1. Keith Emerson

2. Barry Manilow

3. Elton John

4. Rick Wakeman

5. Gary Wright

6. Billy Preston

7. Jackson Browne

8. Leon Russell

9. Gregg Allman

10. Nicky Hopkins

11. Brian Auger

12. Isaac Hayes

13. Andrew Gold

14. Todd Rundgren

15. Neil Young

16. Robert Lamm

17. Booker T

18. Chuck Leavell

19. Edgar Winter

20. Bill Payne

Drums

Bass

Composer

Group

Rhythm-and-Blues

Male Vocalist

Female Vocalist

Composer

Group

Jazz

Male Vocalist

Female Vocalist

Brass

Woodwinds

Keyboards

Vibes

Guitar

Bass

Percussion

Composer

Group

Country-and-Western

Male Vocalist

Female Vocalist

Picker

Composer

"The primal anger and unremitting ugliness of the punks is a kind of kill-or-cure musical corrective."

"Witless entertainment, plus mindless music, sells. 'Star Wars' and 'Rocky' proved just how much."