I’m struggling to find new music that I want to listen to. Maybe you are too. I cannot say that I have found that the Internet has made it easier and I’m not finding new artists the way that I once could.

In The Olden Days

When I was in my teens there was the radio. Not AM radio, but FM radio. I could be the giant Rush fan that I am and call this section The Spirit of Radio, which I would do, but it’s been done. Instead I will put the lyrics to The Last DJ in the sidebar, because Tom got it. He got it right from the start.

Growing up in the suburbs of Toronto was very much like the Rush song Subdivisions. Not cool, not one of the crowd, an outsider, and going into the city to hear music was a big deal. More often than not, for monetary reasons, my introduction to new music didn’t come from clubs and bars, instead it came from late night FM radio.

Back then, there were a few rock FM stations by the time I graduated high school, but in middle school and until I guess 1976, there was CHUM FM. We know that radio today is a different animal. Radio died for me with the advent of hard drive radio and preprogrammed playlists. I don’t really want to listen to what someone else is trying to tell me is worthwhile, especially when so much of it makes my teeth hurt.

Late night FM radio was awesome. There were two hosts, I suppose DJs, but I thought of them more as teachers. Their names were Rick Ringer and Larry Wilson. They would play entire album sides. They would play stuff that I had never heard before, and a lot of the time, I would find that I wanted to hear it again. Records were of course expensive, and we did not have a lot of money, so the radio was the way to hear the music that made a difference. Did I like everything? Of course not, I was young, and at that time more cognizant and concerned about what other people liked. Wearing the wrong band T-shirt could get you into trouble with some people. I learned about Led Zeppelin and Pink Floyd and David Bowie via those guys. I also learned about other bands and singers from Rick and Larry. I first learned about Springsteen there, and while he was never really my thing, Steely Dan turned out to be a really important band as I was growing. I also learned for the first time about this blond guy from Florida in the mid seventies who has come to be in my mind, the greatest poet of the generation simply because his songs fit my life so well. I identified more with Neal Peart’s lyrics as a goal and statement of right before that, but Tom described life in a way that was understandable.

I Really Miss That Radio

I’m one of those people who loved albums. I would listen to an entire album, not just a song, because I figured that the artists had thought about the song order and the arc that the album could create for a listener. I spent hours poring over the album sleeve and the liner notes when they existed. I was amazed by the covers by Hipgnosis and the level of sometimes silly detail in the covers. It was years before I learned that the cover of Led Zeppelin III had been botched in layout and never delivered what the band intended. I pored over album covers for the little secrets and in art class tried to paint like Roger Dean had on Yes albums.

I knew that if I wanted to learn about a new artist, that I would get introductions to consider on CHUM FM. I knew that as a would-be guitarist, I could learn about bands and music hanging at the local music store. I could listen to records in art class as we were allowed to bring records from home to play while we worked. I was in grade eight when I first heard Johnny Winter and his playing stayed with me. The more I worked on guitar, the more music I would learn about. Not just rock, but blues and jazz. Reading an interview with my guitar heroes introduced their heroes and I was happy to find I was not the only kid who liked The Hot Club of Paris with Django Reinhardt and Stephane Grappelli.

I could also look to print music magazines for stories about new artists, and where it interested me, guitar driven music. I learned about Kenny Wayne Shepherd and Jonny Lang from magazines, and then took a chance. Sometimes I liked the stuff and sometimes not. That’s how it goes, but there was always something there.

It’s 2021

Come to now. Radio as I knew it is dead. There are still stations but they’ve changed to be faceless featureless corporate dreck. Satellite radio is just hard disk radio for more money. Streaming means being inundated with playlists that I don’t care about with music that I don’t like and a focus on singles not albums. I get Amazon Music as part of being a customer. I pay for Apple Music simply because it makes it easier to access my library that I created in iTunes from my own records and CDs. Still the user interface is not built for me, and the suggestion service is worthless to me. I listen to Tal Farlow and get suggested some Bakersfield country. Nothing wrong with Bakersfield country for those who like it but it’s not my thing. Plus I know just how little the artist makes from streaming and how much of that goes back to the record company, or more likely the music rights holder as we see older acts needing cash selling off their musical intellectual property so as not to die in poverty. They say that video killed the radio star, which is absolutely true, but streaming has killed the album entirely.

Magazines are mostly writing stories about the artists I followed early in life. There are regular issues dedicated to Jimi Hendrix, Zeppelin, Pink Floyd and The Beatles. Not much focus on new acts or rising successes. I’ve been lucky in a couple of cases, finding Samantha Fish and my happiest find of 2021, Larkin Poe. I cannot say it was the stories or the photos, mostly the stories are lame and in the case of female artists the whole things are horribly sexist. Rolling Stone has always been a communist rag. There’s no Creem or the like anymore. A photo of some player trying to look menacing while being festooned with enough body ink to generate skin cancer at 10 feet isn’t encouraging me to give that record a spin.

Except for vintage vinyl, record stores are dead. I still go to guitar stores. When I am in guitar stores, I am not hearing new stuff, I’m hearing another 12 year old fighting Purple Haze without a tuner, or my goodness, Smoke on the Water, still not played the way that Ritchie Blackmore intended. I ask lessons shop owners what the kids want to learn when it comes to guitar. I’m told it’s classic rock, plus some grunge (mostly Nirvana) and not much else. I cannot fault the kids for wanting to learn those songs, but it saddens me to think that there’s nothing since then.

I’m not into hip hop or trance or rap. I don’t get into any of the myriad metals. I haven’t heard real funk since George Clinton and I get my reggae from Peter Tosh and Jimmy Cliff. I like rock, blues, and jazz. I want to know who is new and coming up, not just about those who’ve already been and gone. It’s a bit easier with jazz, that space seems to be more self supportive and perhaps less driven by advertising BS. Where do you find new music that appeals if you are into the same kind of thing that I am? Please click this link to send me an email with ideas on where to look for new guitar oriented music that isn’t disposable.

Thanks for reading. Until next time, peace.