In the late 60s the gap between the culture and thinking of the bands was never bigger between them and the record company people. In the 70s they got younger more in-tune execs on board but not in the late 60s. So when Warner Brothers sent Joe Smith to find out what the Grateful Dead were doing with the $100,000 advance and found Phil Lesh trying to record ‘thick air’ he thought he was certainly insane.
That sort of chasm of knowledge wouldn’t happen now because the middle-aged and old understand much more of contemporary culture than Joe Smith ever did. That four or five years before the industry adapted to the new realities are really interesting because record execs hadn’t a clue what they were listening to and just signed up bands regardless, without a clue if they’d be popular or even liked.
When you hear of the record companies just signing up anyone who played at the Monterey Pop Festival on the basis that they must be part of this new hippy counterculture thing, it proves how random it was. When you think about it, how strange it must have been for a few years. Aside from broader cultural issues, the music changed so much. One year you had Tom Jones or Petula Clark, the next Iron Butterfly and Hendrix. The change was so rapid.
Imagine giving a bunch of people like The Dead a lot of money when you were used to dealing with Pat Boone or Dean Martin? They must have been so pleased when they released Workingman’s Dead and American Beauty with ‘proper’ accessible songs on, something they could understand as opposed to half hour tripped out jams.
When Iron Butterfly had such a big hit album with In-A-Gadda-Da-Via it must have seemed like noise from another planet to these people. What I love is how hard it all was to classify. I mean how do you even say what that or a Dead album is? Genres had to be created to fit the music, not the other way round. As I’ve said before, it was all rock to us as kids. We didn’t want or seek any further definition and by then, the culture clash was less of a gulf, though it did still exist very profoundly. By 1975 genres had helped predetermine what bands sounded like, as much for sales reasons as anything else. Though they often made little sense. For example I never thought Zeppelin were ‘heavy rock’ but they were forever defined as such even though there’s plenty of acoustic, folky elements to most albums.
There was an ‘innocent' period where music was released from the grip of show business agent/managers and when industry men and it was almost all men, took over in the 70s. That’s why you get so many interesting releases that feel undefined by the business and launched what became in the 70s, the rock industry more dedicated to turning big profits as the culture became widespread and not confined to long hairs living in a squat off brown rice and cashews.
