Changes in the Relationship Between Music and People (since the 1960s and 70s).

Changes in the Relationship Between Music and People (since the 1960s and 70s).

     If you are at least as old as me you will remember when middle class people could afford real pianos. People would come over and play and sing for each other, too, although the practice had been slowly dying out since records and radio took over what had once been the market for sheet music. I remember going over to a friend’s house and finding a treasure trove of old sheet music singles in their piano stool. I have never been a good sight reader, but I learned “As Time Goes By” from a once-glossy folio with Bogart and Bergman on the front. The first “gospel licks” I learned were from the folio for John Lennon’s “ Plastic Ono Band,” which had a reasonably good transcription of what Billy Preston played on “God” ( is a concept by which we measure our pain, yeah, pain, yeah, pain.)
     There were also pianos everywhere at school. There was one on the stage in the cafeteria/assembly room of the public high school I went to that was a focal point at lunchtime. There were musical factions then too of course, like the kid who only played Bacharach and had a coterie of swooning girls surrounding him. I could play things other people couldn’t because I either made them up or there was no accurate sheet music for them. My feeble by-ear attempt at “Linus and Lucy” or the piano groove to Joe Cocker’s “Feelin’ Alright” were frequent requests from my audience, which consisted only of another self-taught piano player. He was a rather tough guy, and we weren’t friends outside of meeting occasionally at the keyboard, but I won his respect because I could play some rock and roll. He taught me a boogie-woogie he knew and we played four-hand blues together. This was before I really started hitting it at the piano and was just messing around, but it was how many of us learned the basic blues.
     It was all so different from today’s nation of I-Pod earphone wearers. When I was a kid if someone asked “What are you listening to?” it was usually a parent trying to figure out what we heard in Frank Zappa that made us smile. The fragmentation of the “markets” for music has made us more consumers of product and less involved in the way music reflects the culture. And the music doesn’t reflect the culture in the same way either, but in shards and fragments. Outside of these smaller audiences, we are aware of some popular artists only through the applause heard coming from an unseen adjacent theatre.
     We listened to records in groups, too. We sat in cars in school parking lots for the purposes of listening to and playing new music for our friends. You had your choice of vehicles and cliques to hang around whenever a new Zeppelin album came out. The top 40 radio then included a mix unheard of today: Aretha, Streisand, the Beatles, the Jackson 5, Jimi Hendrix, Credence Clearwater, Marvin Gaye and Tom Jones. It was possible to hear the Doors and Frank Sinatra on the same station, or Ray Charles and Roger Miller. 

     Our culture’s relationship with music hasn’t changed in at least one respect though: whatever pop music was new and hip when you were young will always seem to be better than what these kids nowadays are listening to.