When rock was still pop

A few seconds is enough. You recognise the riff of Smoke on the Water by Deep Purple (1972) after three chords, All Right Now by Free (1970) after a few strokes on the guitar, Thunderstruck by AC/DC (1990) after the first notes Angus Young plays on a single string. For forty years rock was the music that filled the charts, the radio and the stadiums. Rock was pop. Then it went quiet.

Rock has broad roots: rhythm and blues, rock 'n' roll, country, jazz, blues and soul. The core line-up is a band with rhythm and lead guitar, bass guitar, drums and vocals, often supplemented by keyboards: first the organ, later the synthesizer. The guitars are amplified and distorted with distortion and fuzz. The building block is the riff, a short, repeated motif that in rock is often the hook, the part that sticks. In a pop song that is usually the vocal melody. From the late 1960s something was added: the album and the band as a unit, no longer the individual single. After that, rock split into dozens of subgenres. What do they still have in common? That is the question that keeps returning in this chapter: what makes something rock: the sound, the line-up, the attitude or the album?

This mixtape is a selection. Anyone who misses their favourite band has the start of a good discussion, as long as they can explain why that band belongs here. A second thread runs through the story: should an artist move with whatever style is popular at the time? Some rock bands did so successfully, others refused. The answer to that question explains in part why rock was no longer pop after 2010.

Until the mid-1960s pop music revolved around the single: a record of two or three minutes with an A-side and a B-side. Albums were often a collection of hits padded out with filler tracks. That changed in the second half of the decade. In the United States, radio stations on the FM band began to play whole album sides instead of only hit singles. That format later got the name AOR: album-oriented rock.

For rock bands that meant freedom. A song no longer had to fit into three minutes, and there was room for long solos and for experiments in the studio. The album became a work of art: the sleeve, the order of the tracks, the transitions between them and sometimes a story or concept that held it all together. From then on rock sold more albums than singles. The LP was the music industry's money-maker, and would remain so well into the 1990s.

How important the sleeve became shows in the fact that you recognise many of them without knowing the music. The prism on The Dark Side of the Moon by Pink Floyd (1973) came from the British design studio Hipgnosis, led by Storm Thorgerson. The four Beatles on the zebra crossing in front of the studio in London, on Abbey Road (1969), were photographed by Iain Macmillan. Annie Leibovitz took the photo of Bruce Springsteen in front of the American flag on Born in the U.S.A. (1984). And the swimming baby on Nevermind by Nirvana (1991) is so well known that the image has been recreated endlessly, even in LEGO. A good sleeve tells you what to expect before the needle touches the record.

In 1967 rock suddenly sounded very different from two years earlier. Bands drew inspiration from Indian music, from the classical avant-garde and from drugs such as LSD. You can hear it in three things: drones (one long sustained note or chord above which the music moves), modal sounds that do not fit into ordinary major or minor, and studio effects that distort the sound of the instruments. The music was called psychedelic, after the Greek word for 'making visible what is in the mind'.

The Doors from Los Angeles closed their debut album (1967) with The End, a track of eleven minutes. It revolves around a raga-like drone in D. The band had no bassist: Ray Manzarek played the bass lines on a keyboard bass, alongside his organ. Singer Jim Morrison declaims more than he sings. The same year saw the release of Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band by The Beatles, which includes Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds. The verse is in 3/4 time, the chorus in 4/4, and John Lennon's voice was recorded twice and processed with studio technique, which makes it sound high and light. George Harrison's guitar goes through a rotating speaker in the chorus: a Leslie speaker, actually meant for the Hammond organ. Mixtape 3 goes further into this record and the Beatles' studio techniques.

In London, Pink Floyd played in clubs where light shows were projected onto the band. Astronomy Domine opens the debut album The Piper at the Gates of Dawn (1967). Guitarist and singer Syd Barrett wrote a chromatic chord sequence, chords that keep shifting by a semitone, and put echo on his guitar. The American Jimi Hendrix had come to London in 1966 and formed the Jimi Hendrix Experience there with two British musicians. Purple Haze begins with a tritone, the interval that was avoided in medieval music theory and later got the nickname 'the devil in music'. Then comes a chord that became so closely linked to him that guitarists call it the 'Hendrix chord': E7♯9, a dominant chord with a raised note in it, major and minor at the same time.

In San Francisco 1967 was the Summer of Love, and Jefferson Airplane was one of the bands of that scene. In White Rabbit Grace Slick sings about the rabbit from Alice in Wonderland. The song is built like Ravel's Boléro: a march rhythm that keeps getting louder, with a Spanish, Phrygian sound. This harder, drug-oriented variant is also called acid rock. Bands known for raw rhythm and blues joined in too. In 1967 The Rolling Stones made Their Satanic Majesties Request, which includes She's a Rainbow: piano by session musician Nicky Hopkins, mellotron by Brian Jones and strings in an arrangement by John Paul Jones, the later bassist of Led Zeppelin. These are the Stones in their Sgt. Pepper period, and the critics found it unconvincing. It was a first example of a band moving with the fashion.

Cream, the trio of guitarist Eric Clapton, bassist Jack Bruce and drummer Ginger Baker, brought the blues to the big halls. In White Room (1968) the intro is in 5/4 time and Clapton uses the wah-wah pedal, with which he makes the sound of his guitar 'talk'. Blues rock, with long solos and loud amplifiers, became the basis of the hard rock of the 1970s.

In New York a very different sound emerged. The Velvet Underground of Lou Reed and John Cale was supported by the artist Andy Warhol, who designed the banana sleeve for The Velvet Underground & Nico (1967). Cale had worked in the avant-garde with the composer La Monte Young, who worked with long, sustained notes. In Venus in Furs he plays electric viola: a drone full of dissonances. The album sold poorly at first, but later influenced punk, post-punk and alternative rock. In this way the end of the 1960s already shows what rock would become: a family of subgenres, with the hit parade on one side and the art school on the other.

In the 1970s rock grew into the biggest musical movement in the world. Bands filled stadiums and sold millions of albums. At the same time the genre broke up into subgenres that each got an audience of their own. You recognise them not by the clothes or the sleeve, but by what you hear: the time signature, the riff, the line-up, the rhythm, the form.

Some of the musicians returned to the roots of American music. For Sticky Fingers (1971) The Rolling Stones recorded the acoustic Wild Horses, with a clear country influence. That came from Gram Parsons, an American country singer who spent time with the band in those years. Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young brought the folk rock of California. In Our House (1970), which Graham Nash wrote about his life with Joni Mitchell, three and four voices sing in close harmony: vocal harmony with the voices lying close together. Eagles from Los Angeles mixed rock with country. Hotel California (1977) runs over a chord sequence in minor (Bm-F♯-A-E-G-D-Em-F♯) and ends with two guitars playing a solo together, in harmony.

Southern rock emerged in the southern United States. Lynyrd Skynyrd came from Jacksonville in Florida. Sweet Home Alabama (1974) was a reply to two songs by the Canadian Neil Young, who had criticised racism in the South. Musically the riff is interesting: D-C-G, in D the degrees I-♭VII-IV. The C is the flattened seventh degree, and that makes it sound Mixolydian, a scale you hear a lot in blues and country.

At the other end of the spectrum stood symphonic rock, which took classical music as its model. The title track of Close to the Edge (1972) by Yes fills a whole album side: eighteen minutes in four parts, built like a sonata form. Here the AOR of side A is taken to the extreme. This was no longer a single, and it did not need to be.

Hard rock grew out of the blues rock of Cream. Led Zeppelin was formed in London in 1968 by guitarist Jimmy Page. Stairway to Heaven (1971), from the untitled album that is called Led Zeppelin IV, begins with recorders and acoustic guitar and grows over eight minutes to a hard climax. Deep Purple went further still. In Child in Time (1970) Jon Lord plays Hammond organ and singer Ian Gillan screams up into his falsetto, the high head register of the voice. Together with Black Sabbath, Deep Purple laid the foundation for heavy metal. A year later the band wrote Smoke on the Water, about the fire at the casino in Montreux during a concert by Frank Zappa in 1971. The riff, played in parallel fourths on the notes G-B♭-C, became the first one that beginner guitarists learn.

Fleetwood Mac chose the soft side. The album Rumours (1977) was recorded while the relationships within the band were falling apart, and you can hear that in the lyrics. Go Your Own Way was written by guitarist Lindsey Buckingham about his break-up with singer Stevie Nicks, who was in the same band. Drummer Mick Fleetwood plays the drum pattern as it were 'the wrong way round', with the accents in unexpected places. Soft rock like this, with a smooth production and strong vocal melodies, was close to pop. Rumours became one of the best-selling albums ever.

Around 1972 rock acquired a theatrical side. In glam rock, costumes, make-up and a stage persona were just as important as the music. David Bowie went furthest. On The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars (1972) he invented a character, a rock star from space, and then he became that character, on stage and off it. The album tells the story of Ziggy's rise and fall. Bowie showed that rock could be a role, and that an artist could keep reinventing himself.

Progressive rock, prog for short, turned the album into a composition. The Dark Side of the Moon by Pink Floyd (1973) is one continuous work about pressure, money, time and madness, in which tracks flow into one another. Money is in 7/4 time, and the rhythm is made by a tape loop of cash register sounds: coins, a till bell, a tearing piece of paper. During the guitar solo the band switches to an ordinary 4/4. The album stayed in the American album chart for years.

Queen combined everything in one song. Bohemian Rhapsody (1975), from the album A Night at the Opera, begins as a ballad, moves into an opera section for which the voices were recorded over one another some 180 times, then becomes hard rock and ends in a quiet coda. The song has no chorus. Even so it became a number-1 hit in the UK. You can call it opera rock or art rock. Jazz rock is something else: Steely Dan, the duo of Walter Becker and Donald Fagen, used jazz chords in pop songs. On Peg (1977), from the album Aja, you hear so-called mu chords, with an added second. The band recorded with the best session musicians that could be had.

In New Jersey Bruce Springsteen was working on the opposite of all that studio wizardry: rock about ordinary people, work, cars and the dream of getting away. That is called heartland rock. For Born to Run (1975) he built a sound modelled on the 'wall of sound' of producer Phil Spector from the 1960s: layers of guitars, piano, organ, saxophone and glockenspiel that together form one wall of sound.

In West Germany bands were looking for a sound of their own, separate from American and British rock. English journalists called it krautrock. Neu! was founded by Michael Rother and Klaus Dinger, who had briefly played with Kraftwerk. Hallogallo (1972) revolves around the motorik beat: an endless, stoic 4/4 rhythm without fills, like a car driving along the motorway at a constant speed. That beat would later return in post-punk, in electronic music and with bands such as Radiohead. The story of Kraftwerk is told in Mixtape 8 (Electronic music).

By the mid-1970s many young people found rock too big, too long and too expensive. Punk was the answer: short songs, three chords and an attitude of 'I could do that too'. In London manager Malcolm McLaren put the Sex Pistols together, with singer Johnny Rotten. Their first single Anarchy in the UK (1976) is a wall of double-tracked guitars. You can read more about the punk scene as a youth culture in Mixtape 2.

The Clash began as a punk band, but soon showed that punk did not have to be a fixed style. On the double album London Calling (1979) the band mixes punk with reggae, ska, rockabilly and soul. The sleeve, with bassist Paul Simonon smashing his bass guitar on stage, quotes the first album by Elvis Presley with its pink and green lettering. The end of the 1970s is therefore also the end of punk as a single style.

In the late 1970s disco was the most popular music in America and Europe. Rock bands had to choose: bend with disco, or not at all. Quite a few chose to bend, and scored the biggest hit of their career with it.

Kiss, the band from New York with the painted faces, put a four-on-the-floor under a hard rock band in I Was Made for Lovin' You (1979): a bass drum on every beat, the foundation of disco. The Rolling Stones recorded Miss You (1978) for the album Some Girls. The bass line jumps back and forth in octaves as in disco, Mick Jagger sings partly in falsetto and a harmonica plays the melody. Rod Stewart, who was known as a raw rock singer, made a disco record with synthesizers and strings in Da Ya Think I'm Sexy? (1978): the rock star became a disco star.

Queen did it in 1980 with Another One Bites the Dust. Bassist John Deacon wrote the bass riff, inspired by the disco group Chic. In America the song became a number-1 hit, on Black radio stations too. Not everyone was happy about it. In July 1979, during a baseball game in Chicago, at the so-called Disco Demolition Night, disco records were blown up. 'Disco sucks' was the slogan of part of the white rock audience. Here the question from the introduction comes into play: should you adapt to what is popular? The bands that did had hits with it. Some of their fans saw it as betrayal.

Meanwhile the musicians who had been touched by punk went on in a different direction. Post-punk kept the energy and the do-it-yourself attitude of punk, but let go of the three chords. Joy Division came from Manchester and released its records on the local label Factory. On She's Lost Control, from the album Unknown Pleasures (1979), producer Martin Hannett made the drums dry and almost mechanical. The bass plays the melody, the guitar provides colour. After the death of singer Ian Curtis in 1980 the band continued as New Order, and the sound moved towards electronic dance music.

Talking Heads played at the punk club CBGB in New York, but sounded very different from the Sex Pistols. Singer David Byrne and the other members had met at art school. Psycho Killer (1977) runs on a bare bass line by Tina Weymouth around the note A, and the lyrics are partly in French. Talking Heads showed that rock could also be nervous, ironic and danceable, and in the 1980s would turn more and more to funk and African rhythms.

On 1 August 1981 MTV began in the United States, a television channel that broadcast music videos all day. From then on a rock band also had to look good. The decade became the era of stadium rock: big shows, big hair and a production that sounded as good on the radio as in an arena. Mixtape 7 deals with the pop music of the 1980s in a broader sense.

Glam metal was the clearest example of this. Bon Jovi from New Jersey scored with You Give Love a Bad Name (1986) from the album Slippery When Wet. The song was written together with Desmond Child, a songwriter from outside the band. It is a pop song in hard rock clothes: a chorus everyone can sing along to, with distorted guitars around it. Survivor did the same with Eye of the Tiger (1982), the theme song of the film Rocky III: arena rock on a film scale.

Van Halen from Pasadena, California, had in guitarist Eddie Van Halen one of the most influential guitarists of his generation. It was precisely he who played the riff of Jump (1984) on a synthesizer, an Oberheim OB-Xa, instead of on the guitar. For some of the fans that was betrayal. Jump became the band's biggest hit and its only number 1 in America. Once again the same question: adapt or stay true?

Arena rock and AOR sounded mostly smooth and polished in the 1980s. Toto consisted of session musicians from Los Angeles who also played on other people's records, including Thriller by Michael Jackson. In Africa (1982) drummer Jeff Porcaro plays a light, straight groove under layers of percussion. Foreigner made a power ballad with I Want to Know What Love Is (1984): a slow, emotional rock song that grows to a loud climax. At the end a gospel choir sings along. The Canadian trio Rush kept progressive rock alive. Tom Sawyer (1981), from the album Moving Pictures, has time signature changes, with a middle section in 7/8, and a synthesizer that seems to breathe.

Heavy metal became harder and faster. Around 1980 the New Wave of British Heavy Metal, NWOBHM for short, emerged in England. Iron Maiden was the best-known band. Run to the Hills (1982), from the album The Number of the Beast, is about the conquest of North America from its original inhabitants. Bass and drums play a gallop rhythm, and two guitars play the same melody side by side in thirds. In California Metallica made thrash metal: faster still, with downpicking, in which the guitarist strikes each string with a downward stroke only. Master of Puppets (1986) has time signature changes and a middle section that sounds almost classical. Shortly after the album's release bassist Cliff Burton was killed in a bus accident during a tour in Sweden.

Goth rock grew out of post-punk. The Cure, the band of singer Robert Smith, is represented by A Forest on the album Seventeen Seconds (1980). The guitar sounds through a chorus effect, which doubles the tone and makes it float. The bass plays an ostinato, a motif that keeps coming back, and everything is bathed in reverb. The song is about someone who follows a voice in a forest and gets lost. Smith's black clothes and dark hair became the uniform of a new youth culture, the goths.

Alongside the stadiums, a second rock world grew up in the 1980s. It did not run on MTV and big record companies, but on small labels, clubs and university radio. It was called alternative rock, or in America college rock. The biggest musical difference from glam metal: fewer virtuoso solos, a less smooth production and the band's own songs instead of songs by hired songwriters.

U2 came from Dublin. Sunday Bloody Sunday, from the album War (1983), is a protest song about the violence in Northern Ireland. The title refers to 30 January 1972, when British soldiers shot demonstrators dead in Derry. Drummer Larry Mullen Jr. plays a military pattern on the snare, and a violin is heard. U2 began as an alternative band and, after its appearance at Live Aid in 1985, grew into one of the biggest stadium bands in the world.

R.E.M. came from Athens, a university town in the American state of Georgia. The band became big through the radio stations of universities, which played the music that commercial stations ignored. It's the End of the World as We Know It (And I Feel Fine) (1987), from the album Document, is a torrent of words at high speed, in which singer Michael Stipe fires off images and names one after another.

Dire Straits, led by guitarist Mark Knopfler, had a foot in both worlds. The album Brothers in Arms (1985) was one of the first fully digitally recorded albums and became one of the first albums to sell better on CD than on vinyl. In Money for Nothing Sting sings along on the line 'I want my MTV'. The lyrics take a mocking look at the life of a rock star through the eyes of someone who lugs televisions around in a shop. The video, with computer animation, was the first that MTV Europe broadcast, in 1987.

Living Colour from New York was a Black rock band in a genre that had become mostly white in the 1980s. Guitarist Vernon Reid belonged to the Black Rock Coalition, a group of Black musicians who felt that rock was just as much theirs. Cult of Personality (1988) mixes hard rock with funk. That was not a new combination, but a return to the roots: rock 'n' roll came from Black music, from Chuck Berry to Little Richard. You can read more about that in Mixtape 1 and Mixtape 6.

In 1991 a striking number of rock albums appeared that would define the decade. Guns N' Roses from Los Angeles released two albums on the same day, Use Your Illusion I and II. You Could Be Mine was used as the soundtrack of the film Terminator 2. Metallica made, with producer Bob Rock, the album known as the 'Black Album'. Bob Rock made the band radio-friendly: Enter Sandman is shorter, slower and tighter than the work of the 1980s, and became a worldwide hit. The Red Hot Chili Peppers from Los Angeles released Blood Sugar Sex Magik with producer Rick Rubin. On Give It Away bassist Flea slaps his strings and Anthony Kiedis raps more than he sings: funk rock.

The biggest news came from Seattle. A scene had grown up there around the small label Sub Pop, with bands that mixed punk and heavy metal into a raw, heavy sound. It was called grunge. Nirvana, with singer and guitarist Kurt Cobain, moved to a major record company and recorded the album Nevermind with producer Butch Vig. In January 1992 it pushed Michael Jackson's Dangerous off the top spot of the American album chart. Suddenly alternative rock was the music of the hit parade.

Smells Like Teen Spirit is strikingly simple. The whole song runs on four power chords: chords of only root and fifth, without a third, which makes them neither major nor minor and sound good with a lot of distortion. The form is quiet-loud: soft verses, loud choruses. Cobain had borrowed that dynamic from the Pixies, an alternative band from Boston that he admired. The video, in a gym with cheerleaders wearing anarchy symbols, was played endlessly on MTV. Cobain found it hard to cope with fame and died in April 1994.

Pearl Jam, also from Seattle, became just as successful as Nirvana in the United States with the debut album Ten (1991). Alive shows that the band stood closer to the classic rock of the 1970s, with a long guitar solo at the end. Soundgarden, with singer Chris Cornell, is on the album Badmotorfinger with Jesus Christ Pose (1991). The guitars are tuned to drop D: the low E string a whole tone lower, which gives a heavier sound and makes power chords possible with one finger.

After grunge, punk came back, but with pop melodies. Green Day from California broke through with the album Dookie (1994). In the verse, Basket Case follows a chord progression that also underlies Pachelbel's Canon: I-V-vi-iii-IV. The Smashing Pumpkins of Billy Corgan from Chicago showed in Today (1993), from Siamese Dream, how far apart music and lyrics can lie: a cheerful-sounding guitar motif under a lyric about suicide.

England responded to grunge with Britpop: guitar music that harked back to the British pop of the 1960s, from the Beatles to the Kinks. In August 1995 Oasis from Manchester and Blur from London released a single on the same day. The British newspapers turned it into the 'Battle of Britpop'; Blur won the fight for first place. Oasis then won on album sales. Don't Look Back in Anger (1995), sung by guitarist Noel Gallagher instead of his brother Liam, uses, like Basket Case, the chord progression of Pachelbel's Canon. The piano intro quotes Imagine by John Lennon.

In America too a band looked back. With Buddy Holly (1994) Weezer made a declaration of love to the 1950s, but with heavily distorted guitars: power pop. The video, directed by Spike Jonze, places the band in the television series Happy Days.

Radiohead from the Oxford area went the other way. Paranoid Android, from the album OK Computer (1997), is a suite of more than six minutes in four parts, with time signature changes and a section in 7/8. You can see it as a Bohemian Rhapsody for the 1990s: no chorus, but a series of contrasting sections. The album is about alienation in a world of computers and motorways. With Kid A (2000) the band then largely let go of the guitars in favour of electronics. Muse from the English seaside town of Teignmouth extended the line of progressive rock and classical music. On Muscle Museum, from the debut Showbiz (1999), Matt Bellamy plays guitar parts that sound classical-romantic; the composer Rachmaninov is one of his great influences.

Around 2000 nu metal became popular: metal combined with hip hop and electronics. Linkin Park from Los Angeles had two singers: Chester Bennington sang and screamed, Mike Shinoda rapped. Numb (2003), from the album Meteora, combines heavy guitars with an electronic beat and synthesizers. That rock mixed with hip hop here was a sign of what was to come.

Coldplay from London made pop rock that was softer than anything on this mixtape so far. The Scientist (2002), from the album A Rush of Blood to the Head, is a piano ballad in F. The guitar only comes in at the end. In the video everything runs backwards. Coldplay would grow into one of the biggest stadium bands of the twenty-first century, but with a sound that increasingly resembled pop.

In the first years of the twenty-first century rock bands still scored worldwide hits. The Killers from Las Vegas released the album Hot Fuss in 2004, which includes Mr. Brightside. Verse and chorus have almost the same melody, and the tempo is high. Since then the song has returned to the UK chart again and again, more than five hundred weeks in total, longer than any other song: every new generation sings along at parties.

Kings of Leon consisted of three brothers and a cousin from the Followill family, who grew up in the southern United States and started a band near Nashville in 1999. They began with southern rock, the line of Lynyrd Skynyrd. Sex on Fire (2008), from Only by the Night, is one of the last rock singles to reach number 1 in several countries. Mumford & Sons from London released Little Lion Man a year later, from the album Sigh No More (2009). A banjo and an acoustic guitar are heard, but the kick drum and the build-up come from stadium rock: folk rock on the scale of an arena. It is a fitting closer, because the story of this chapter also began with folk and roots rock.

After 2010 the classic rock line-up of guitar, bass and drums disappears more and more from the radio. There are several reasons for this. MTV became a channel for lifestyle and reality programmes; the music video moved to YouTube, which began in 2005. Because of downloads and later streaming, with Spotify from 2008, the album became less important. Since then it is not the AOR of side A but playlists that determine what is heard, and those are made up of individual tracks. Precisely the format that rock had broken free from in the 1960s.

Something else is going on too. Over the years rock had become mostly white and male, and no longer spoke the language of the street. Hip hop did, and took the lead. According to the measurement firm Nielsen, hip hop and R&B were listened to more than rock in the United States for the first time in 2017. Rock became a niche genre, with a loyal audience at festivals and in clubs, but rarely at the top of the charts any more.

Has rock then not adapted enough, or has it in fact stayed true to itself? Both answers can be defended. The bands on this mixtape that moved with disco, with synthesizers or with hip hop scored their biggest hits. At the same time rock was at its strongest when it set itself against what was popular, like punk in 1976 and grunge in 1991. It is also a question whether rock is dead, or just no longer pop. Plenty of rock is still being made. The Italian band Måneskin won the Eurovision Song Contest in 2021, Olivia Rodrigo had hits with pop-punk in that same year, and the hardcore band Turnstile fills venues. Anyone who measures popularity in charts and streams sees a genre that has shrunk. Anyone who looks at scenes, festivals and the influence on other music sees a genre that is still alive. That brings us back to the question from the beginning: what makes something rock? If the answer is the sound or the line-up, then there is less rock than there used to be. If it is the attitude, then rock is in more places than you think.