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70's soft-rock groups like Hamilton, Joe Frank & Reynolds have no modern analogs
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Date: August 9th, 2022 6:28 AM Author: Twinkling Private Investor National i specifically picked that group as an example because of its lengthy CSNY-style name and the fact that the band was 3 fairly competent musicians doing middle-market soft-rock and romantic pop. who does that anymore nowadays? 'seals' from Seals and Crofts died a couple months ago, which also brought this to mind. (http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5169861&forum_id=2Reputation#44986574) |
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Date: August 9th, 2022 6:31 AM Author: sickened cruise ship boltzmann (http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5169861&forum_id=2Reputation#44986588) |
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Date: August 10th, 2022 12:29 PM Author: self-absorbed exhilarant macaca rip, 'Seals' (http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5169861&forum_id=2Reputation#44993407) |
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Date: October 4th, 2025 5:33 AM Author: Twinkling Private Investor National (http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5169861&forum_id=2Reputation#49324113) |
Date: August 9th, 2022 6:31 AM Author: sickened cruise ship boltzmann (http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5169861&forum_id=2Reputation#44986587) |
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Date: August 9th, 2022 6:38 AM Author: irate big church No because this would be too intellectual. MSM and the music biz want everything to be as dumb as possible. This is why they killed the Sega Saturn and JDU and why they retardified liberal arts (http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5169861&forum_id=2Reputation#44986601) |
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Date: August 9th, 2022 6:38 AM Author: sickened cruise ship boltzmann Whoa (http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5169861&forum_id=2Reputation#44986603) |
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Date: August 9th, 2022 9:27 AM Author: Onyx infuriating school cafeteria (http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5169861&forum_id=2Reputation#44986934) |
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Date: August 10th, 2022 6:31 AM Author: Laughsome sooty church building it's the one idiom of the rock era (50s-80s) that has not been successfully recreated, even parodically.
every other style (from rockabilly to neo-Beatles to post-punk, etc) has been excavated at least for kitsch value, but no one has pulled off a convincing imitation of 'soft rock'. the cultural muscle memory required to reproduce the nuances of that style may no longer exist.
i think the trouble is that, to modern sensibilities, the blending of masculinity/softness seems alien. it's too subtly done. there was a kind of 'mellow' masculinity -- 'soft' without being faggy, 'gentle' while still being patriarchal/macho (lots of regressively themed lyrics about seduction and 'making love to MY LADY') -- that existed in the 70s that confounds the Gen-soyboy. they think 'soft' and they immediately want to go full-on gay emo, which misses the mark.
the soft-rock formula is more testosterone + Quaaludes. |
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Date: August 10th, 2022 2:07 PM Author: Twinkling Private Investor National it's also interesting because this was one of the most popular genres in modern american pop-music history. the soft-rock/romantic rock category was a mainstay of radio stations for decades (it still is to some extent). but it gradually vanished. the 'rock' component in soft rock often reached back to the 1950's and early-60's for its template, rather than the rock music which had become popular in the late-60's and beyond, eg:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ketWS66TjmQ
it was already kind of a 'nostalgic' genre in the 70's itself, and 'reviving' it would involve multiple layers of nostalgic cross-referencing. it's kind of like that band 'sha na na.' they did a 50's nostalgia set at the woodstock concert which was well-received by the hippies in the crowd, because it related to something about their own youths. at this point, though, that kind of music is more like an excursion into a foreign and bygone land. |
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Date: August 10th, 2022 4:18 PM Author: Laughsome sooty church building i agree w/ what you're saying, but when i think of 'soft rock' like Seals & Crofts and Hamilton, Frank, & Reynolds, i think very specifically about the distinctive 1970s 'soft rock' sound. Bread, America, 10CC, etc.
technically, later records like Extreme 'More than Words' or Train could have been categorized broadly as 'soft rock', but i tend to think of the 70s iteration as a genre unto itself.
and no one has ever really attempted to do a pastiche of that sound, which i find weird. there are 10 million bands doing 70s punk rock send-ups, blues rock imitators, 1950s imitators (Sha Na Na, as you mentioned, and hundreds more), 40s 'swing', every pop microgenre from every decade has its own school of devotees/revivalists. but no one has ever gotten a handle on that 70s mellow rock vibe, even in an ironic/indie rock format. it's like no one can sing/play that way, because it was so singularly of the era. |
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Date: August 10th, 2022 4:46 PM Author: Twinkling Private Investor National there is something about this kind of music that seems harder to replicate accurately. if you want to do something like '60's garage rock,' you can just grab a shitty guitar and a cheap amp and start strumming. if you wanted to do "1970's soft rock," you have to do a lot more. those songs were often pastiches of different styles which were re-interpreted slightly into the 'correct' sound. for example, something like this:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8R6zZ1EwNsg
since it's from the late-70's, it has obvious disco influences. but it's not a disco song. it's not a bee-gees song. it has some easy-listening elements (the flute; some of the instrumentation), it has a short sax interlude, it has a certain kind of vocal delivery, it has some spacey-sounding keyboard work which verges on 'new age,' etc.
if i were to try and rip this off, i'd need to start with a piece of graph paper to list out the various layers and elements here. the guys who made this kind of music often seemed to 'emerge' from other genres, or their bands started out quite differently from how they ended up. it's kind of like 'soft rock' required a learning curve and some experience with other forms of music. most of these albums:
https://i.imgur.com/AKND4JF.jpg
were not by debut/novice musicians. something like 'silk degrees' was boz scagg's SEVENTH studio album, and his sound had changed on each previous release until he had his big success. |
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Date: August 10th, 2022 5:12 PM Author: Laughsome sooty church building "if you want to do something like '60's garage rock,' you can just grab a shitty guitar and a cheap amp and start strumming."
exactly; and even much more sophisticated forms of rock, like Led Zeppelin or something, seem relatively straightforward to pastiche, because the salient markers of the music are really obvious, and just aping those gets you 80% of the way. but with 70s soft rock, it's like there's nothing to really hang your pastiche on. nothing to caricature. it's a slippery sound. it's more an esoteric vibe that distinguishes it than anything else. a lot if it is down to very subtle production/mixing effects, the compressed drums, the very specific way they groomed the harmonies/vocals, even the outdated diction of the singers (listen to James Taylor in an interview some time; he speaks the most perfectly enunciated American English).
'it's kind of like 'soft rock' required a learning curve and some experience with other forms of music.'
i think this is it too. soft rock was a 'musician's musician' genre, a vibe that those guys arrived at by a kind of process of elimination/paring down of all of the baroque excesses of 60s/70s hard rock/prog etc. it was like any form or reactionary 'minimalism' in that it doesn't make sense divorced from the context of the excesses that preceded it, to which it is a response. so you can't approach it directly, as you say. you had to graduate into it, as a kind of meta-genre of its period. it's closed off to later would-be imitators, who can never fully comprehend it, for this reason. |
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Date: August 10th, 2022 6:00 PM Author: Twinkling Private Investor National yeah; if you wanted to do a 1930's big band revival album, you would mostly just need the musicianship to play those instruments. 'big band' as such is a well-defined type of music with a set of conventions and protocols that can be learned and adopted directly.
'soft rock' never had that kind of meta-structure. it was more like an emergent phenomenon from a particular place and time, and it was also in active competition/evolution with all the other popular genres of its era. so there is some country influence in certain songs, disco influence in others, R&B/soul influence in others, 'crooner' influence from guys like engelbert humperdinck, or various combinations.
you can hear this easily when later bands do covers of 70's soft-rock hits. a song like 'brandy' has been covered a lot, but the original still sounds much more 'correct' than the various copies. it's the entire structure of melody/pacing/vocals/instruments/etc. if you miss one, you miss the whole thing. |
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Date: August 10th, 2022 6:14 PM Author: Laughsome sooty church building the only hope is for some especially autistic indie producer to make a new retro cult around 70s soft rock, and to autistically fixate on reproducing 70s soft rock w/ the same degree of Rain Man obsessionality that people once brought to reproducing elements of the 1960s pop sound.
you should be able to buy Pro Tools plug-ins that immediately make you sound like Poco, etc. i would love to see a new generation of soft rockers, w/ Jim Henson beards. would be 180 cultural development. |
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Date: October 11th, 2022 10:27 PM Author: Twinkling Private Investor National i was thinking about about the similarities between 70's soft-rock and 70's country-pop, in terms of the modern incapacity to replicate the precise sound of the music. 70's country-pop was also kind of a pastiche of orchestration and melodies and was a kind of evolution from 'traditional' country/western. a lot of people hated it for that, but in retrospect, it was a very stylized genre which stood on its own and had its own cultural niche for a while. stuff like this:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P-nZUzw9A08
in a song like that, there is a mix of easy-listening band orchestration + traditional country elements + post-60's pop music along with some other stuff. it's basically irreplicable today. |
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Date: October 12th, 2022 12:08 AM Author: Laughsome sooty church building this came out in 1972, and it has a very late 60s/early 70s orchestral pop/Burt Bacharach kind of feel to it, to my ears. apart from the twang in Jody Miller's voice, there is, interestingly, not much that is explicitly 'country' about the sound. you can almost imagine stripping the vocal and putting a Cher or Nancy Sinatra vocal over the same backing track. it would fit that purely pop style.
it just shows how in many ways 'country' and 'pop' kind of merged in the early 70s and 'country' became the dominant flavor of pop music (Eagles, Linda Ronstadt, Neil Young, CSNY, et al, all copped the 'country' sound during their commercial peak).
when you get into the mid 70s, the two styles became briefly almost indistinguishable. Waylon Jennings, Dolly Parton and lots of bona fide country artists had huge crossover hits that sounded like slightly twangier Eagles or America tunes more or less. same production concepts, same instrumentation, harmonies, etc.
this is totally different from the brief 'country pop' resurgence in the 90s. those songs sounded totally incongruous to anything in 90s 'pop'. |
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Date: October 12th, 2022 4:02 AM Author: Twinkling Private Investor National the interaction between 'pop' and 'country' was one of the defining trends of 1970's popular music, but a lot of it seems a bit forgotten now. guys like ronnie milsap made their careers out of pop-crossover hits in the 70's:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=30D9_S4eAaU
there are some R&B/gospel elements in there, along with pop, country, and others. and in turn, this kind of music had a feedback effect on pop. a lot of the 'soft rock' groups tried to turn to country (as well as folk elements) in an attempt to bring 'authenticity' to their sound, but within the context of the soft-rock idiom.
nowadays, that kind of thing would probably sound 'fake' due to modern production techniques alone. |
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Date: October 12th, 2022 12:09 AM Author: Fiercely-loyal Motley State Pocket Flask (http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5169861&forum_id=2Reputation#45318080) |
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Date: August 10th, 2022 12:31 PM Author: Nubile hospital toilet seat I have some soft rock 70s mix CDs from back in the 90s-- I used to poast on a rock music bort and a guy there made all of these yacht rock 70s mixes. It makes for great beach music. |
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Date: August 10th, 2022 5:08 PM Author: yapping step-uncle's house old irish cottage Literally never heard of “Hamilton Joe Frank and Reynolds”
You just made that up |
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Date: August 10th, 2022 5:16 PM Author: Laughsome sooty church building (phoebe snow) (http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5169861&forum_id=2Reputation#44994951) |
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Date: August 10th, 2022 5:21 PM Author: Nubile hospital toilet seat Listening to this music kinda makes me sad-- not because the music is sad, but because the culture that made that music is gone forever. Like I can listen to a Stones song and it can seem timeless. Seals and Croft is the 1970s, in the summer, with a chick with long straight hair in a sun dress walking by. |
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Date: August 10th, 2022 5:28 PM Author: Laughsome sooty church building cr. it's easily the most evocative music for this reason. when you hear Elvis you don't really think of the 1950s, but the used car dealership commercial you once heard that had Elvis playing in the background, etc.
but when you hear 'Summer Breeze,' it's like you are transported to a 1970s teen recreation center make out party w/ a Marsha Brady lookalike. |
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Date: October 12th, 2022 12:11 AM Author: amethyst floppy turdskin (http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5169861&forum_id=2Reputation#45318088) |
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Date: August 10th, 2022 5:29 PM Author: bright tripping lodge affirmative action What about Steely Dan? (http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5169861&forum_id=2Reputation#44995028) |
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Date: August 10th, 2022 5:54 PM Author: Twinkling Private Investor National they had soft-rock elements, but they were more of a jazz-pop band than an 'adult contemporary' sort of 70's band. their contemporaries at the start of their career were usually considered bands like CCR, and during their later albums they were often compared to 'weather report' and other jazz-influenced rock bands, or even elton john to some extent. they were more explicitly an 'art' band than the soft-rock genre as a whole. (http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5169861&forum_id=2Reputation#44995178) |
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Date: August 10th, 2022 6:41 PM Author: galvanic community account range great discussion ITT and i too am surprised there hasn't been a revival of this shit, especially after the yacht rock series was so popular. guy above is right though, this was music by studio pros. your average college band isn't close to pulling this off. so you've got a limited pool of guys who can do this and i guess they just see it as too cheesy to mess with? i don't know. seems like a good transition for bruno mars. (http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5169861&forum_id=2Reputation#44995392) |
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Date: August 10th, 2022 6:45 PM Author: Bearded titillating marketing idea deer antler someone told me the white kids that would've started rock bands are EDM DJs now. they can just be soloists and not have group drama and shit (http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5169861&forum_id=2Reputation#44995408) |
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Date: May 12th, 2023 9:58 PM Author: multi-colored circlehead Yeah, especially true for cheesy “let’s make love by the ocean” type music. It’s easier and cheaper to produce than yacht rock and more accessible. (http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5169861&forum_id=2Reputation#46305703) |
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Date: August 12th, 2022 6:23 PM Author: Nubile hospital toilet seat listening to soft rock 70s on my deck (http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5169861&forum_id=2Reputation#45005963) |
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Date: August 12th, 2022 6:46 PM Author: Twinkling Private Investor National England Dan & John Ford Coley for me - this one's for dupa:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vb8vHM3x-Tk |
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Date: October 12th, 2022 12:11 AM Author: amethyst floppy turdskin (http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5169861&forum_id=2Reputation#45318093) |
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Date: October 12th, 2022 12:12 AM Author: Bossy faggotry modern equivalent is that Harry Styles song that sounds like the Strokes
or OneRepublic |
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Date: October 12th, 2022 4:03 AM Author: stirring kink-friendly pisswyrm Ed Sheeran (http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5169861&forum_id=2Reputation#45318546) |
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Date: May 12th, 2023 8:43 PM Author: Twinkling Private Investor National that stuff sounds absolutely nothing like 70's soft-rock, though. it's full of autotune-sounding vocals, clapping/snapping-style syncopation, etc. actually, that's one of the big differences - modern pop vocal delivery is full of both sudden stops, or long trailing melismatic flourishes and weird noises. 70's delivery to a large extent was based on older traditional easy listening vocals, which are more controlled and directed. (http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5169861&forum_id=2Reputation#46305554) |
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Date: May 12th, 2023 10:24 PM Author: Nubile hospital toilet seat melismatic flourishes are an awful aspect of modern music. show off shit. I blame mariah carey, etc. (http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5169861&forum_id=2Reputation#46305770) |
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Date: May 12th, 2023 7:03 PM Author: Nubile hospital toilet seat On my deck listening to 70s soft rock. 180 (http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5169861&forum_id=2Reputation#46305270) |
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Date: May 12th, 2023 9:10 PM Author: White alcoholic dysfunction There is something of a revival of this sound. Bands like Young Gun Silver Fox (http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5169861&forum_id=2Reputation#46305613) |
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Date: May 14th, 2023 12:06 AM Author: Laughsome sooty church building listened on youtube. this is getting close, clearly they are self consciously/ironically aping the mellow 70s style. but the one element holding it back is the millennial/gen-z 'tell' of ultra gayvoice. the voice is all wrong. lacks that 70s flat affectless, luded out quality. Karen Carpenter sings like a 'white person' robot. passionless passion. (http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5169861&forum_id=2Reputation#46309211) |
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Date: May 14th, 2023 12:12 AM Author: Twinkling Private Investor National if i had to pick the modal 70's soft rock vocal 'sound,' it would be somewhere around here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7c3LmWJkXBg
obviously there was a lot of variance, but as you note, a lot of modern variance is simply beyond the bounds of what was being recorded back then. |
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Date: May 14th, 2023 12:28 AM Author: Laughsome sooty church building great pick. it's a 'less is more' thing. the past 1.5 generations have been brought up on cookie-cutter 'American Idol' style, overwrought vocal gimmickry, or else lisping connor oberst post-emo rock backwash. a lot of otherwise fairly decent contemporary songs are often ruined by the sheer fagginess of post Gen-X vocal mannerisms.
'AI' technology might have the answer. this is an AI rendering of 'George Harrison' singing a shitty Oasis song and it actually sounds surprisingly good and 'period' authentic.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HF48vIoYrBI |
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Date: October 4th, 2025 10:13 AM Author: amethyst floppy turdskin (http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5169861&forum_id=2Reputation#49324258) |
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Date: May 14th, 2023 12:35 AM Author: doobsian crusty bawdyhouse Ah that marimba solo I love that... I I remember listening to this song as it was being played in a Orlando nightclub in 1976... (http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5169861&forum_id=2Reputation#46309265) |
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Date: May 14th, 2023 12:39 AM Author: self-absorbed exhilarant macaca Why Not Lounge? (http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5169861&forum_id=2Reputation#46309284) |
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Date: May 14th, 2023 10:17 PM Author: doobsian crusty bawdyhouse How about a little afternoon delight?
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=wu1UXCdyNo0 |
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Date: October 4th, 2025 10:13 AM Author: amethyst floppy turdskin (http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5169861&forum_id=2Reputation#49324257) |