Time to lift your Bic lighters up over your heads, Slackers!

By 1981 the radio belonged to a handful of bands we still hear almost every day. Most people remember the massive ballads, the ones that cleared the floor at middle school dances or showed up in every movie montage. Because those songs were so huge, the bands got stamped as “soft rock” or “corporate” and that label has stuck for forty years.

The part that rarely gets mentioned is how good the actual players were. These weren’t studio creations or hired guns. These were working bands who spent years on the road or in the studio before anyone had heard of them. When the hits finally came, the same guys who wrote the three-minute love songs could still stand on stage and deliver hours of tight, inventive rock that most critics pretended wasn’t there.

This episode looks past the hits everyone knows and focuses on the musicianship that made the hits possible in the first place. I’ll breakdown some of the biggest radio friendly rock bands of the era and lay out why their reputation as musicians never seems to align with their massive fame. If you’ve written this whole corner of the 80s off as lightweight, as I certainly did as a teen, this one's for you.