Download `Heritage rock`: Music, culture and DIY preservationism

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‘Heritage rock’: Music, culture and DIY preservationism
Andrew Bennett
This article considers emergent trends that seek to position rock music as an aspect of
late twentieth century cultural heritage. The discourse of heritage rock embodies a
range of practices spanning the performative, the ideological and the aesthetic.
Examples covered in this article include ‘classic albums live’, a relatively recent
concept that involves the ‘faithful’ reproduction of selected, critically acclaimed rock
albums in a performance context. The classic albums live concept applies a rhetoric
derived directly from classical music – the performance being referred to as a
‘recital’, the musicians on stage as an ‘ensemble’, the songs performed as ‘works’.
Such articulations of the heritage rock discourse adhere to relatively conventional
notions of rock mastery and achievement – the albums chosen for replication being
those generally cited in mainstream popular music magazines such as Rolling Stone
and Mojo as milestone recordings. However, the article also examines an instance of a
rock music enthusiast turned DIY (do-it-yourself) preservationist whose focus is upon
artists who do not figure in such canonised discourses of rock achievement as those
espoused in the aforementioned magazines. Rather than see such artists disappear into
obscurity, this expression of DIY preservationism seeks to preserve the artists’ music
through a range of DIY activities, including the salvaging and remastering of old,
unreleased music and the establishing of small, independent label that allows
particular artists to carry on recording and releasing new music. Significant here are
the discourses applied in describing and justifying such actions. In referring to the
artists he works with as ‘heritage acts’, and their music as ‘art’ - in opposition to
current popular music trends which are often dismissed as purely ‘commercial’ – an
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attempt is made by this individual to distance the music of the artists he works with
from its popular cultural origins and align it with discourses of high art linked to
issues of national culture and heritage.
Defining rock
Since the 1980s, the term rock has essentially become a by-word for a range of guitardriven musics that dominate the playlists of FM radio stations, feature heavily on
MTV and similar music-television channels, or play to mass audiences in arena
settings. Such tendencies bespeak a corporatisation of rock that began to take hold in
the late 1960s, becoming steadily more prominent during the 1970s (Laing, 2004).
Thus, to speak of rock in a contemporary cultural context is to speak of a ‘supergenre’ which incorporates a range of artists spanning different generations and
musical eras and collapses the distinctions between the latter. To put this in context,
although artists such as the Rolling Stones, the Eagles, U2 and Coldplay all originated
during very different eras of popular music, and although the discourses they apply in
situating themselves as ‘artists’ rely on quite distinct, and historically contingent,
aesthetic sensibilities drawn from the particular music scenes through which they rose
to prominence, in terms of the mediums through which their music is disseminated
and consumed, and the levels of commercial success they enjoy, each of these artists
could be, and are, referred to as rock bands in the contemporary idiom.
The origins of the term ‘rock’, however, are somewhat different from the
context in which the term is currently understood. Emerging during the mid-1960s,
‘rock’ bespoke a new musical sensibility that espoused its own performative, cultural
and aesthetic discourses (Bennett, 2001). Central to the rock aesthetic was the notion
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that rock was ‘serious’ music, and that rock performers were ‘artists’. During the mid1960s, groups such as the Beach Boys and the Beatles, both of whom had enjoyed
unprecedented commercial success, began experimenting with less commercial, more
album-orientated music. The trend set by these and other groups established a pattern
whereby the recording studio came to be regarded not merely as a means of capturing
an artist’s live sound, but as a creative resource in its own right (Zak, 2001). At the
same time, the emergence of new artists such as guitarist Jimi Hendrix, the Doors, and
the formation of ‘supergroups’ 1 such as Cream (regarded as the first rock
‘supergroup’) placed a new purchase on the importance of musicianship; this came to
permeate the culture of rock and was a key antecedent in the aesthetic separation
between ‘rock’ and ‘pop’ by rock musicians, journalists and audiences alike (Shuker,
2000). Sociologically speaking, rock and pop also exhibited important cultural
distinctions during the late 1960s and early 1970s. As Frith (1981) observes, while
pop became a moniker for light-weight, chart-orientated music, rock assumed the
status of a signature anthem of the hippie counter-culture and the basis for an
ideological counter-cultural community (see also Frith, 1983). Although, as Clecak
(1983) argues, the term counter-culture has been over-generalised, central to its
ideology was a counter-hegemonic discourse that pitched the hippies against the
mounting technocratic nature of western capitalist society (Roszak, 1969). Rock
musicians were regarded as key spokespeople of the counter-cultural movement, a
quality that also separated them, in the minds of their audience, from those artists who
populated the singles charts and produced songs that were, from the point of view of
rock audiences, musically effete and lyrically vacuous.
This rock-pop distinction continued into the 1970s, even as it became selfevident that the most ‘serious’ of rock artists were also among the most commercially
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successful popular music acts of the decade (Frith and Horne, 1987). The dominance
of the rock aesthetic was consolidated with the rise of progressive rock, a genre that
retained the emphasis on technical skill and musical exhibitionism established by late
1960s rock artists such as Hendrix and Cream and infused this with new influences
drawn from the spheres of classical and jazz music (Macan, 1997; Martin, 1998). In
the UK and across Europe, the rise of punk in the mid-1970s saw the demise of
progressive rock and the rock aesthetic around which it revolved. In the US, however,
punk failed to challenge rock in the same way. Indeed, a new wave of groups, such as
Boston, Styx and Kansas, successfully fused the characteristic hallmarks of the
progressive rock sound with a more radio-friendly, three-minute song format (Straw,
1990) that, along with the revived heavy metal style of the early 1980s (see Walser,
1993; Weinstien, 2000), would became a staple of MTV and the beginnings of a new
commercial canonisation of rock (Kaplan, 1987).
Only with the emergence of grunge in the late 1980s was the supremacy of
rock in North America significantly challenged and, with hindsight, it is clear that
even grunge ultimately did little to supplant rock’s hegemonic hold in North America
or, indeed, as an aspect of global popular entertainment. Indeed, what were once
considered signature tunes of grunge’s counter-cultural sensibility, notably Nirvana’s
‘Smells Like Teen Spirit’, are now regularly featured on rock radio alongside artists
whose music grunge was originally intended to sonically and ideologically oppose. In
the same breath, however, it is important to note significant developments during the
early 1990s that registered their own impact on the significance of rock around this
time. The CD – reissue market, the release of rock bio-pics (such as Oliver Stone’s
The Doors), the reunion of the three surviving Beatles to work on the Beatles
Anthology documentary, and accompanying CD box set, together with the burgeoning
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tribute band scene (see Homan, 2006) re-alerted an ageing babyboomer population to
the music of their youth and prompted them to re-assess this music and its impact on
their lives (citation withheld). At the same time, a new generation of what could be
termed retro-rock bands, notably Australian group Wolfmother, have cited late 1960s
and early 1970s rock bands such as Cream, the Jimi Hendrix Experience and Led
Zeppelin as key influences on their own music.
Rock as heritage
It is in the context of this renewed interest in the rock music of the late 1960s and
early 1970s that the term ‘heritage’ rock must be situated. Broadly speaking, the term
heritage refers to aspects of culture, custom and tradition that help shape the collective
identities of particular societies. In everyday parlance, the term heritage is most
commonly associated with notions of a national culture and the collective, national
identity that this espouses (Hobsbawm and Ranger, 1992). Conventionally speaking,
in its equation with culture, tradition and identity, heritage has been regarded as
something set apart from the ‘popular’, an example of this being the way in which
state subsidy for ‘arts’ and ‘culture’ has generally been directed towards more highbrow definitions of the latter. As Shuker observes: ‘“Popular culture” is then
constructed in opposition to this, as commercial, inauthentic, and so unworthy of
government support’ (2000: 68). However, such high culture / low culture distinctions
are increasingly unsustainable in the context of late modernity, where aspects of
‘high’ and ‘low’/ popular culture frequently merge (Storey, 1993).
Aligned with this is the changing nature, and perception, of the term ‘culture’
itself in late modernity. Chaney (2002) has argued that a key impact of mediatisation
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and the increasing centrality of consumerism in daily life since the end of the Second
World War has been a gradual fragmentation of everyday culture and the rise of new
forms of authority – notably, fashion, music, television drama etc. – that have begun
to replace traditional forms of authority, grounded in issues of community and
tradition, as key resources through which individuals frame identities in the context of
late modernity. This is not to suggest that these previous forms of authority have
disappeared altogether. On the contrary, instances of what Williams (1965) refers to
as residual culture, for example, language, local dialect, particular mannerisms and so
on, continue to influence notions of cultural identity to a fair degree. But these are
tempered by more recent, mass produced cultural forms. Indeed, such is the centrality
of mass produced culture in the context of contemporary everyday life that it has
effectively become intertwined with residual cultural forms to the extent that, in
naming what they consider to be the key aspects of their cultural milieu, individuals
regularly conflate residual and mass cultural elements into seamless narratives of
national and regional distinctiveness. With reference to popular music, an obvious
example here is Britpop, a loosely defined musical style of the mid-1990s, that,
despite possessing many of the hallmarks of a globally indiscriminate, guitar-driven
indie-pop approach, was praised by critics and fans alike because of its distinctive
‘Britishness’ – a definition that turned largely upon a use of regional – and largely
English regional – accents (Bennett, 1997). 2
The intertwining of popular culture with broader cultural narratives in this way
also gives rise to new understandings of popular culture’s role in the shaping and
trajectory of culture. Through its appropriation and use in everyday, vernacular
contexts, popular culture ceases to be regarded as something set apart from culture per
se (which, as previously argued must in any case be regarded as an increasingly an
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artificial distinction) but as an integral part of culture, its production and reproduction
over time. It is in this context that we can begin to understand and examine the
significance of the heritage rock discourse. An important point to make at this stage is
that ‘heritage rock’ as it is defined and considered must be regarded as something that
goes beyond the rock-as-art discourse of the late 1960s and early 1970s which, as
previously noted, was based around a rock-pop distinction that regarded rock as the
product of ‘serious’ and talented artists while dismissing ‘pop’ music as commercially
derived ephemera (Frith and Horne, 1987). In contrast, the heritage rock discourse
… enshrines particular rock musicians of the late 1960s and early 1970s not
merely as sub- or counter-cultural icons, but as key contributors to the
essential character of late twentieth century culture per se and an integral
aspect of the way in which this era of history is to be remembered, represented
and celebrated’ (citation withheld).
In this sense, those musicians who have created rock music and, by definition, much
of the spectacle and aura of the rock phenomenon, take their place among other icons
and public figures of note – politicians, sports stars, film actors and so on – the latter
deemed as having made significant contributions to the development of late 20th
culture at both the national and global level. In marking the distinctive contribution to
culture and heritage – legacy is a significant measure. In the case of rock musicians,
the music itself comes to be regarded as the primary legacy and, thus, the focus for
preservation and consecration.
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Classic album recitals
A significant aspect of the heritage rock discourse is the recent vogue for what are
referred to as ‘classic album recitals’. There are obvious parallels here with the BBC
television programme Classic Albums, the latter bringing together musicians, studio
producers and engineers to talk about their contributions to what are critically judged
to be landmark recordings. The ‘recital’ takes the classic album concept a stage
further by attempting to faithfully reproduce a given album in a live setting. The
classic album recital is significant for a number of reasons. Most importantly, it seeks
to recreate a body of work that was never intended to be reproduced ‘note-for-note,
cut-for-cut’ in a live context. As noted above, from the late 1960s onwards, rock
bands increasingly came to regard the studio as a space in which the limitations of live
performance could be transcended (Zak, 2001). This is clearly illustrated, for
example, by the proliferation of overdubs heard in the guitar work of Jimmy Page on
Led Zeppelin’s studio albums or the multi-layered vocals that characterise the studio
work of Queen. That such studio-created soundscapes could not be reproduced live
was considered of little consequence by rock artists and their audience, for whom
albums and live performances were considered quite separate musical statements.
Indeed, as Toynbee observes, traditionally live ‘performance [has] hint[ed] at the
uncompleted nature of pop – the fact that there tend not to be so much great works as
versions, mixes and shifting genres. In short, performance [has] refer[ed] to a creation
in progress (2006: 74-5).
Similarly, the notion of the album as a body of work has rarely crossed the
threshold from the studio to the live performance context. With the exception of
progressive rock acts such as Yes and Genesis, whose albums often followed a
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concept-format and thus called for accurate live replication, the contents of an album
were not generally performed in their entirety on-stage. In the context of live
performance, songs from a new album were rather mixed in with existing material to
create the optimal effect in terms of aural dynamics, tempo and variety.
The classic album concept critically revises these established norms of the
rock aesthetic, re-casting the album as a body of work to be appreciated and
understood in its entirety both as a recorded and live artefact. The performative
conventions underpinning the classic album recital draw directly on the rhetoric of
classical music performances. The following example serves to illustrate this point. In
November, 2006, the author attended a live recreation of British hard rock band Led
Zeppelin’s second album Led Zeppelin II. Prior to the beginning of the performance,
the producer of the event took to the stage to address the audience. He described the
performance about to take place not as a ‘concert’ but a ‘recital’; the musicians who
would presently take to the stage, he stated, were not a tribute band (who would
attempt to capture the image of Led Zeppelin’s stage image with costumes and special
effects), but an ensemble of the best possible musicians brought together specifically
for the purpose of recreating the music from the album Led Zeppelin II live on-stage.
The programme notes supplied for the event extended this rhetoric of classical music
performance:
Classic Albums Live … specialises in recreating live … the greatest albums
from the 1960s and 1970s … Each performance is faithful to the exact sound
of the albums. All of the musicians’ focus is put into the music; they perform
the works of Queen, Led Zeppelin, the Beatles, Pink Floyd and more, the same
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way an orchestra performs the works of Mozart. Every sound, every note, and
every guitar and drum solo is performed live (Classic Albums Live, 2006: 13).
Such rhetoric is centrally important to the positioning of the Classic Albums Live
concept as a contributing element of the heritage rock discourse. Most obviously,
comparing a rock performance to an orchestral performance seeks at some level to lift
the former above the standard perception of the rock concert or ‘gig’ by stripping it of
the visual gimmickry associated with this mode of performance and recasting it as
something to be appreciated purely in terms of its musical content. Similarly, at a
semantic level, the substitution of the classically imbued term ‘works’ for the more
familiar rock terms ‘songs’ or ‘tracks’ also assists in the task of elevating the recorded
output of the featured rock artists to the status of art.
Here we see a subtle, yet telling, rearticulation of that precise characteristic
identified by Toynbee (op cit) as separating popular and classical music. Rather than
assuming the album to be a work in progress, a collection of ‘versions’ of songs to be
re-worked in a live context or covered by other artists, the classic albums concept
insists on an understanding of the album as the master-narrative or ‘primary text’
(Moore, 1993). It also insists upon the manifestation of this understanding as a
collective listening experience. Drawing individual fans of the music together, the
classic albums concept enshrines the listening experience within a unique, and
relatively exclusive opportunity to experience a meticulously performed recital of the
‘great work’. There are clear parallels here with Benjamin’s (1973) notion of the aura.
For Benjamin, the massification of an art object led to a loss of aura. In the case of
Classic Albums Live, a tantalising renegotiation of this process occurs, Classic
Albums Live attempting to re-instate the aura within a mass produced object through
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inviting its critical re-assessment in a spatial and discursive context specifically
designed to re-represent the object as a work of art. The aurifaction of the rock album
as an art object is further achieved through the its performance aesthetic, which is also
borrowed directly from the world of classical music. Disregarding the theatrics of the
rock performance and offering the audience instead an ensemble of musicians
observing a quasi-classical performance ethic of faithful reproduction (which in some
cases extends to reading from music scores), the Classic Albums Live concept focuses
the attention of the audience squarely on the musical text and the mastery of the
musicians in interpreting that text. The musical text as presented on the album chosen
for recital is thus allowed to flow seamlessly from the original production, as
conceived in the recording studio, into the public space of the contemporary public
auditorium.
Heritage acts
The Classic Albums Live concept represents one initiative through which selected
examples of late 1960s and early 1970s rock music are symbolically lifted above the
mass cultural context of their production, re-represented in a quasi-high art fashion,
and discursively re-worked as an aspect of late twentieth century cultural heritage.
Ultimately, however, Classic Albums Live constitutes an essentially conservative
articulation of the heritage rock discourse. The groups and albums chosen for the
recital format are entirely consistent with those generally acknowledged by rock
critics, together with the readers’ polls of mainstream popular music magazines such
as Rolling Stone and Mojo, as having made a major contribution to the field of rock. 3
Significantly, however, if contemporary cultural history is largely defined and
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understood through mass mediated representations documenting the character and
flow of this history, it is also increasingly open to contestation. In comparison to
previous eras, where the power to define and interpret history relied upon access to
various, and at that time relatively scant, resources, notably education, intellectual
knowledge, books and archives, the mediatisation of society has functioned to
undermine such exclusive forms of authority. As with other spheres of mass mediated
popular culture, a central aspect of rock music fandom is the knowledge and expertise
that individuals frequently bring to bear when defining, justifying and legitimising
their particular tastes (Bennett, 1999, 2004). Within this, debates concerning the
authenticity and historical merit of particular rock groups and solo artists play a major
part. Thus, as Hayes (2006) observes, although dominant canonical discourses,
notably those created by leading publications such as Rolling Stone, carry
considerable weight in marking out the cultural terrain of rock and identifying key
historical moments that are said to define it, this is offset by enclaves of resistance to
such ‘official’ discourses – notably vinyl record collectors for whom an understanding
of rock history is often created through an appreciation of precisely those artists who,
for whatever reason, do not feature in the accounts of Rolling Stone and comparable
magazines such as Mojo and Classic Rock.
Such contestation of accepted rock histories is also present within particular
expressions of the heritage rock discourse. Alongside more conservative expressions
of heritage rock, there also exist alternative discourses within which the key to
representing rock as heritage is the reassessment and critical re-working of some of
the more ‘taken-for-granted’ aspects of rock’s historical development. Eschewing the
classic albums concept of ‘heritage rock’, such alternative discourses work to bring
more obscure, unacknowledged artists to public attention. While these discourses also
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seek to reposition rock as ‘art’, they invoke an altogether more bohemian aesthetic of
art as self-perpetuating – existing for its own sake, beyond the popular gaze and
resistant to the commodification rational of consumer capitalism.
These new avenues for individual involvement in determining moments of progress,
achievement and innovation in rock, and for understanding the latter as integral to the
character and flow of contemporary cultural history, have also led to a proliferation of
self-fashioned attempts to preserve and cherish particular artefacts of rock. Such DIY
preservationists concern themselves with re-representing the roots of the rock
phenomenon, digging below accepted terrains of rock to expose those artists whose
contribution to the field of rock have been lost or forgotten.
These alternative discourses of heritage rock have produced specific clusters
of fan-based activities which embody a distinctly DIY preservationist aesthetic.
Applying their own conventions of taste and distinction to the heritage rock discourse,
such preservationists initiate DIY projects as a means of rescuing particular songs,
albums and artists from obscurity and reinserting them into the rock historical context.
An illustrative case in point here is a small, UK-based independent record label,
Songworks, which specialises in the reissue of deleted albums and the issuing of
previously unreleased material by less well known artists associated with the
progressive, folk and jazz rock fusion styles of the late 1960s and early 1970s.
Speaking in an aesthetic language more readily associated with punk and alternative
record labels than one associated with rock music, Mike, the founder of Songworks,
explained the rational behind his decision to establish the label:
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The basic history of Songworks is that … it was the late ’80s and early ’90s,
and the accountants had taken over all the major record companies. So it was
all about bean counting essentially. The only way you got people to listen to
demos in those days was to tell them that it cost 50 grand per demo, and then it
suddenly meant something. Eh, art itself had lost its actual value as art and it
was just measured by its cost y’know … So the music which I liked, which
was a type progressive rock, was few and far between and nobody was doing
anything. So, I managed to locate [a favourite artist] David Allen [former
guitarist with early 1970s progressive rock group Gong]… I phoned him up [at
his home] in Australia and said: ‘I can’t buy your records, why have you
stopped making records, why have you stopped recording?’ And [I discovered
that] he’s not stopped recording, but the major record companies have stopped
releasing. And the indies weren’t that interested in that sort of thing anyway
’cause, y’know, it’s like a guy on the other side of the planet who was in a
band in 1969, who had a vague chart success and had a couple of, like
psychedelic albums on the Virgin label. Nobody was really that interested. CD
was still a little bit in its infancy, all the obvious CDs had been reissued like
Dark Side of the Moon, y’know, things like that or the Beatles, or Genesis. But
nobody had really got into the swing of putting out unreleased things, all that
sort of stuff … Nobody was really doing reissues or actually speaking to these
more heritage type acts at all, y’know. An’ eh, we managed to unearth a few
through my Gong connections and a few Van der Graff [Generator] people.
And essentially that was the start of Songworks.
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In this context, heritage rock, or as the interviewee puts it, the ‘heritage type act’, is
regarded as something distinct from more well-known, established and ‘commodified’
rock groups and artists. For the interviewee, the term ‘heritage act’ is essentially
synonymous with the realm of the non-commercial. Indeed, from the standpoint of the
interviewee, the very fact of commodification distorts the representation rock history
– highlighting the contribution of the few but dismissing the equally important work
of the many. The term ‘heritage act’, then, is designed to address this bias by
attempting to reposition these hidden or forgotten artists and their music back into the
frame of rock historical consciousness. Just as the concept of heritage, when applied
in the rhetorical context of national culture and identity, highlights aspects of
tradition, achievement and perceived distinctiveness (and the enhanced need to
preserve the latter in the face of encroaching global cultural trends), so the notion of
the ‘heritage act’ works on the principle that it is often those acts who have worked,
for whatever reason, below the radar of commercial success who give rock music its
true distinctiveness, integrity and heritage status over those that have been canonised
within the mainstream rock super genre.
However, the perception of the heritage act as a historical and cultural artefact
went beyond the level of the purely discursive; it also informed the hands-on technical
work carried out by Mike and his colleagues in relation to the music they put out as
reissues or first-time releases. Indeed, in discussing this aspect of Songworks, Mike
articulated a deeply invested preservationist sensibility, which became accentuated
when discussing the interventionist possibilities afforded by the contemporary
recording studio, digital technology and the compact disc (CD). With the rapid
emergence of the CD during the mid-1980s, CD-re-issues of albums first recorded
during the 1960s and 1970s began to appear. In most cases, material re-issued on CD
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was left in its original state and simply re-mastered to conform with the new aural
parameters of digital sound quality. In other cases, however, songs or whole albums
were re-mixed, in some cases adding elements of songs that had been edited out of the
original recordings. In relation to this, Mike was at pains to point out that albums reissued by Songworks were re-mastered, but not re-mixed. Thus, a further dimension
of Mike’s particular articulation of the heritage rock discourse became apparent, one
in which he interestingly compares his own practices of caring for and respecting the
creative decisions of the original artist with those informing the care of and respect for
more conventionally acknowledged aspects of heritage and culture. This is clearly
evident in the following interview extract:
Interviewer: Do you remix albums before putting them onto CD?
Mike: We remaster, we don’t remix … I think remixing is tampering with history. It’s
like nipping down to the Sistine Chapel and changing the colour scheme of it,
y’know, as opposed to just cleaning it up.
I: So you never do anything like that … even when the sound quality could be better
by …
M: Well that’s remastering, not re-mixing. You’re asking me about two different
things. That’s why [I use] the analogy with nipping down the Sistine Chapel. If you
clean it up you can see it better, that would be like re-mastering. But you don’t change
the colour scheme, ’cause that would be like re-mixing.
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This preservationist discourse was also employed as a means of protecting the sanctity
of recordings, even when their quality was clearly well below that of material usually
made available for public purchase and consumption. For Mike, in such cases the
physical condition of a recording was superseded by its sheer historical significance –
something which again related back to Mike’s desire to engage with and re-address
the more popular history of rock as conveyed through its mainstream representation.
In justifying Songwork’s decision to work with and release such material, Mike again
employed an analogical rhetoric that drew comparisons with more conventional
understandings of history, culture and heritage:
…there’s a couple of tracks by Soft Machine which we released which eh, in
fairness, they’re completely abysmal quality, they’re terrible quality. But those
are the only recordings which exist anywhere which ha[ve] got Andy
Summers 4 on them … So, historically they’re [of] value y’know. At the risk
of completely going over the top, you could say ‘well’, y’know, ‘you
could[n’t] chuck the Dead Sea Scrolls away [just] because they’re knackered’,
y’know.
In many ways, the type ‘heritage act’ discourse articulated above amounts to a form of
musical archaeology, working over the rock cultural terrain and resurrecting those
parts of its history which have become lost in time. **** More on this.
Conclusion
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This article has considered a number of ways in which a discourse of heritage rock is
articulated by fans in an attempt to discursively and aesthetically transform selected
rock texts into aspects cultural heritage. As has been discussed, a variety of practices
are utilised in this respect, each pursuing a different aesthetic sensibility in the
recasting of rock as heritage. Thus, the Classic Albums Live concept draws on an
established cannon of ‘milestone’ recordings and attempts to raise these beyond their
status as commercially orientated, mass produced products through their aurification
in a quasi-classical, ensemble-style performance context. Alongside such articulations
of the heritage rock discourse are a series of DIY practices that seek to challenge such
conservative readings of rock as heritage by re-introducing forgotten and lesserknown artists into the sphere of public awareness and, hopefully, wider appreciation.
Such DIY preservationist initiatives work at a variety of levels; in some cases
justification for naming an artist as a heritage act is based on the relative rarity of their
recorded output, brought on in large part through its rejection by the mainstream
music industry as commercially non-viable.
Notes
1. The term ‘supergroup’ refers to a group formed of already established, and often
highly revered, musicians.
2. Also important here was Britpop artists citing of 1960s British popular music artists
such as the Kinks and the Small Faces as key artistic influences. The latter were
similarly acclaimed by critics and audiences alike for producing a distinctly ‘British’
sound despite the emergence of both of these groups from the rhythm and blues
inspired British Beat boom of the mid-1960s.
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3. For an extended discussion of this trend in rock music consecration, see Schmutz
(2005).
4. Better known for his work with British post-punk band The Police, guitarist Andy
Summers was a member of Soft Machine for several months in 1968, appearing live
with the group but not recording with them.
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