In his latest book, “The Endless Refrain: Memory, Nostalgia, and the Threat to New Music,” David Rowell asks the question whether we even want new music.
The signs are there that we don’t: Popular music of the last century remains ubiquitous on radio, television and in films. It plays endlessly in shopping spaces, and bands from the latter half of that century dominate on the concert circuit.
Throughout the book, Rowell explores a variety of phenomena in the present musical landscape: veteran acts whose new music remains unheard; audiences who are indifferent to unfamiliar songs; tribute acts who give listeners something approximating the experience of seeing Journey or some other classic rock giant in an intimate setting, or the recent arrival of hologram shows, which have celebrated the likes of Ronnie James Dio and Frank Zappa.
Rowell discussed the book’s origins and his thoughts on the future of popular music from his home in North Carolina.
“The Endless Refrain” is out now via Melville House.
The following interview has been edited for length and clarity.
The book asks this question about what the point of new music is.
I was with my friend Bob Funk seven or eight years ago. He had managed to put a string of dates together in New England. What was notable about that was that Bob had never been to New England, so no one really knew him there. He had [released] one CD. Bob was used to playing in the Triangle area of North Carolina. He got these dates together that were in cafes and restaurants that hosted live music. I went with him just to see what would happen. At the time, I was writing a book about a range of musicians, famous and not so famous.
So, there we were. It was a weeknight. He had been playing at this place in Portland for about 45 minutes before there was a single clap or acknowledgement. I thought, “Well, that’s pretty tough.” He was playing all original songs, but he had been booked for a three-hour set. Just to fill that set out a bit, he threw in a couple of covers. He announced that he was going to play this Tom Petty song, “You Don’t Know How It Feels.”
He didn’t mean that to be ironic, but that’s certainly how it hit me because it had been an evening [to that point] of just zero acknowledgement. The thing that was remarkable to me is that as soon as he played the very first notes of that, everyone in the restaurant stopped what they were doing. The wait staff, the customers. It was this dramatic reaction, almost as if it was on a Broadway stage, as if all of a sudden there’s a whole different kind of lighting. [The audience] was so into it. The guy next to me was keeping time on the bar.
[Bob finished] the song and then he introduced his next song that no one would have known, and everyone went right back to what they were doing before. It was really like those four minutes had never existed. It was so telling to me. What it said to me was that on the one hand they were listening enough to know that it was original music; music they didn’t know and thus didn’t want to know. Also, just the reaction: It was as if they were in rapture because here’s a song they did know. In that moment, I just wrote in my notebook: Do we even want new music anymore?
I think that’s the first sentence of the whole book. I found myself kind of consumed with that question because in many ways I felt like I knew the terrible answer. Once I had that idea in my head, I was newly attuned to the fact that everywhere I went, I was hearing, basically, an incredibly small amount of songs within the context of the history of recording, everywhere.
I would hear the songs on commercials, and I would hear them if I was in an automotive store. It was always some Steve Miller Band song. If I was in a doctor’s office, it was always Bad Company’s “Feel Like Making Love.” If I was in Target? Always Men at Work. I just became aware that we hear the same songs over and over. Whether it’s the Scorpions’ “Rock You Like A Hurricane” promoting Fiber One or it’s Boston’s “More Than A Feeling” promoting Yoplait, there’s an obsession with those songs.
You could say, “Well, it’s because they’re great songs,” and the book explores that. But I think it has so much more to do with nostalgia as much as with the song itself. It’s nostalgia for that era; it’s nostalgia for who we were when we were listening to songs at a much younger stage of life.
There is that body of songs that is utterly ubiquitous. But there are other songs that have essentially disappeared. The other day, I visited a friend’s record store, and he was listening to Electric Light Orchestra’s “Rock ‘n’ Roll Is King.” That was a pretty big hit in 1983. It felt like it was everywhere the summer it came out, but I bet it had been 20 years between when I had last heard it and when I heard it because my friend was listening to the album it's on.
I think the ELO song that is now the most ubiquitous is “Mr. Blue Sky.” Why is it that song? I happen to think that ELO had an amazing number of great songs, but I think, increasingly, we just get obsessed with one particular song and then we can’t get enough of it. We’re very content to hear the same songs over and over. Maybe in the book I describe them as comfort food. That’s a bummer for me because music was never really supposed to be comfort food. It can be soothing, and it can be a comfort to hear a song, but we hear those songs in so many places they were never meant to be heard.
That’s part of what the book is exploring: We’ve gotten into this strange relationship with a select number of songs. It stops even being about the music. When you’re at a pharmacy and the pharmacist is describing to you how to take this drug and you’re hearing that great riff or that great drum fill, you just know that something’s gone wrong at that point.
Younger people hear some of these classic songs without the original context. A Beatles song will come on at a gathering, and I’ll hear children say, “Oh, that’s from ‘Sing,’ or they’ll hear a Van Halen song and say, ‘Oh, that’s from ‘Ready Player One.’”
There’s so many ways we hear those songs and one of the things the book is wrestling with is: Why is it never songs from this century? I’m not even arguing that the songs of the last century are better than the songs in this one. I’m just arguing that we’ve become obsessed with the same old music that we’re really not open to the possibilities of forming new relationships with the new music that’s being made today. Also, my worry is, “What does that mean for the music that’s going to be made in the future?”
I think it’s going to be harder to come by if the larger message is, “Well, we basically have all the music we need.”
I work in non-commercial radio so a comment I hear sometimes is, “Wow, I liked your show last night. You actually played some songs that I know.” What I do is about discovery, and I often think about how when classic rock formats started to take hold and radio stopped being a vehicle for discovery.
For me, some of the greatest moments of my life have been about discovering great music, so I’ve made a lot of discoveries. But the idea that I’ve made enough discoveries? I can’t even fathom that. I’ll listen to new music and sometimes I’ll like it and sometimes I don’t, and sometimes I love it, and it becomes some of the best music that I know. Part of this is that it’s so at odds with how we interact with other arts and mediums.
We consume new TV shows. We get obsessed with binging on new TV shows. We may not go to the movie theater as often [as we once did] and that’s also a lament for me. But we still stream new movies. We listen to new podcasts. So, it’s not like everyone is sitting around watching old ‘Bewitched’ episodes and listening to podcasts from 2017. But when it comes to music, my observation is that it’s just very different. We have a contentment with what we already know.
In that way, I think of the book as an alarm bell of sorts. I’m saying, “This is going on and it does have consequences.”
I saw an artist the other day whose debut album came out in 1986. This band has so steadily produced great music almost like clockwork every two years. I went to see them with my wife. They started off with a couple older songs, as is often the case. Then the singer said, “We have this new album out.” I had listened to it, and I thought it was great. I thought it was entirely in keeping with the consistency of their music. But [the singer] was so sheepish in describing the new album. I’ve been around enough to know what this was, which was almost asking for permission that they play this new music. She said, “We’re really proud of this album.”
You could just tell by the stiff response that the audience didn’t want to hear about new music. This band has produced a bunch of albums, and they had every right to promote their new music. What she said was, “We’re going to play a new set, a few songs off the new album, then we’ll come back and play all the old songs that you expect.” Everyone got very excited about that, but it both made me sad, and it made me a little bit angry.
All of these ideas have been in my system for a while now. It was really hard for me to not just stand up and say, “Play your new music! That’s what you’re here for. We’re here for you!” One of the implications is [that] if these bands put out new music, and they understand that the fans just want to hear the old music and thus they don’t buy any new music, they’ll stop recording and every single concert for that band will be about playing the same songs over and over. Maybe they’ll change the sequence a little bit.
Some people might hear that and say, “Well, that’s great. I just want to hear the old songs.” To me, there’s a real danger in that. That’s a danger as a listener, as someone who’s trying to support music in this century. Someone could make the argument that for some of these bands they’ve lost their spark. They made their best music back in the ’70s. That is true sometimes, but then you should be putting all that energy into new artists who are putting out new music that’s maybe not played on the radio but it’s still worth checking out. Getting back to what you were saying, it’s about discoveries. To me, should be about always being open to discoveries.
I love that you wrote about the Yes box set, “Progeny: Seven Shows from Seventy-Two,” which is 14 discs of music from the “Close To The Edge Tour.”
[Laughs.]
I got that when it came out and sometime later had to drive to New York, so it was all I listened to on the way there and the way back. And, yeah, it’s all the same stuff. Same material. But then I got involved with the story: Bill Bruford, their original drummer quit right before they left for the U.S. tour, they got Alan White to play drums, but he had a radically different style. And then they’re playing what was at the time new material for audiences who didn’t really know those songs. So, I got invested in the story and also heard the music evolve.
It was a revelation for me. No one would ever describe Yes as the Allman Brothers or the Grateful Dead. Yes takes almost a symphonic approach: Here’s the music and it’s not jazz. It may have jazz influences, but this is the way it’s supposed to be presented. I listened to those seven shows all culled from the same tour but if you were listening carefully, as you clearly were, there are little differences in each concert. Some of them are not so significant but they’re thrilling if you hear them.
This is a group of master musicians who, as you say, are playing with a new drummer and there are all kinds of great things going on in those recordings. For me, it was just a reminder that there’s nothing more exciting than listening so intently. It’s just one of the greatest things in life: Listening so carefully to what a great band is doing.
Yes has continued to make new music, and I think Steve Howe has made some incredibly vital albums in recent years with the band and on his own. But who, aside from maybe you and I, is out there saying that?
I interviewed Steve Howe for the book, and he took [a particular point of view] just like Nancy Wilson of Heart and Jonathan Cain of Journey. They had a very patient response to the larger situation, I thought, particularly in the case of Yes. Their concerts these days are almost entirely made up of those three incredible albums, “The Yes Album,” “Fragile,” and “Close To The Edge,” which they made in the early ’70s. It is what fans want to hear so much because they’re so brilliant, those albums. He gets that, just like Nancy Wilson and Jonathan Cain. They do appreciate that fans continue to love that music, and they do appreciate that their fans have had children who have been raised on that music.
When I saw Yes last year, they had put out a new album and [Steve Howe] spoke about that album in very hopeful terms. But predictably, they played one song from it, just as when I saw Journey. They had put out an album the previous year and sure enough they played one song from that. One some level I’m sure they’re excited to be playing that song, but they just spent all this time on new music. It’s not hard to imagine that they would like to play more songs from that, but I think they ultimately see it as not good business to do that.
Recently, David Gilmour suggested, as he was about to go out on tour, that the only Pink Floyd material he was going to play was from the period without Roger Waters. That was quite a bold claim and apparently there was so much backlash to that that he backpedaled. Sure enough, if you look at the setlists, he is playing some of the classic stuff. But to his credit, I saw that the other night, he played his new album in full. He didn’t play it straight through but that’s something you don’t see all that much. Peter Gabriel did that with his new album. He was playing all his new album, and it still hadn’t been released yet.
So, there are some artists who believe so strongly not only in the new material that they’ve created, but they believe in their fans’ ability to stay with it. It can be seen as a risk but, to me, that whole idea is a drag.
There’s a famous anecdote about Neil Young playing a concert in England and playing an entire new album that hadn’t been released yet. He played it all the way through, and the fans were restless. He said, “OK, here’s a song you’ve heard before.” Everyone cheered but it turned out that he was playing the same song that he started the show with.
[Laughs.]
Some bands really pay attention to what fans want and some bands don’t. They’ve all earned that right.
You spend some time discussing the idea of the hologram tours, in particular The Bizarre World of Frank Zappa, which was out in 2019 and featured alumni of his band, including Mike Keneally, who is quoted in the book. There was backlash about that, but the thing that I kept on hearing both from those who attended the shows and members of the band via social media was, “This is much cooler than you think.” But I probably carry some ambivalence about it.
I had all kinds of ethical issues with it. But I talked with fans about it who were there at the shows. They were making a conscious decision because no one goes to see a hologram show and looks at the dead performer, the digital creation of this dead performer, and says, “Wait a minute! What’s going on?” No one went to the Dio hologram show and said, “Wait a minute! That’s not Ronnie!”
Some people said, “It could be weird. I wanted to come and see.” But to me it all speaks to the same point, which is connected to why tribute bands have become so popular which is because, more and more, we just want to hear that music again. The difference with the hologram performances, in some ways, is that those are vocals that were taken from that performer, either in studio recordings or live performances. It depends on the company. The company that produced the Roy Orbison and the Buddy Holly shows feature the recorded vocals that we all know and the company that created the Frank Zappa and Dio shows [featured] live vocals. There are live musicians on stage. It just depends on what you want from live music.
If you are such a fan and this is the only way to hear someone like Frank Zappa again, you can have it. I don’t think it’s entirely clear yet what the future of those shows will be but, increasingly, I’m starting to think it will be part of the live experience. ABBA’s live show, which is done with digital avatars even though all the members of ABBA are still very much alive, was hugely profitable and a big deal. And then KISS, in the very final moments of their very last show, [revealed that they will have avatars], so you can go and hear that music again.
Boy, that’s just where we are. We are just always in search for ways to hear the same old music and connected to that [are] all these artists who in recent years have been selling their back catalogs to Wall Street, basically, to venture capitalists. If we think we hear that music a lot as it is, we’re going to be hearing so much more Huey Lewis and The News and ZZ Top and all the bands from the ’70s and ’80s who have sold their catalogs in ways we can’t even imagine right now. These companies are paying anywhere from tens of millions to hundreds of millions for this music, and so they have all kinds of plans that we don’t necessarily know about.
That music is not going anywhere. You can say, “That’s great, that’s great music and it shouldn’t go anywhere.” I’m just saying that the level of repetition that we’re about to be exposed to is, from my purposes, going to be really overwhelming and will just keep us stuck in the musical past.
