Raised on Radio
Power Ballads, Cocaine & Payola – the AOR Glory Years 1976-1986
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4.6 • 8 Ratings
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- $15.99
Publisher Description
A massively entertaining oral biography of the golden era of critically derided yet monumentally popular radio rock, when Journey, Boston, REO Speedwagon, Toto, and more ruled the airwaves
Paul Rees’s Raised on Radio is, remarkably, the first biography of AOR (“Album-Oriented Rock”), critically derided at the time but massively popular during its 1976–1986 heyday when artists such as Journey, Boston, Foreigner, Toto, REO Speedwagon, Heart, Pat Benatar, Bryan Adams, and Styx sold many millions of albums and toured stadiums. Today, those very same songs are streaming in record numbers and many of the artists continue to play to sellout audiences around the world. They may have been dismissed at the time as terminally uncool by elitist rock critics in thrall to punk and new wave, but their music was, and is still, the soundtrack to so many people’s lives.
For better or worse, AOR’s prime movers lived life in the fast lane. Cocaine use was rampant, egos were unchecked, and intra-band fighting became par for the course. What’s more, their influence stretches across generations and through the fabric of popular American music. AOR invented the power ballad, and the sound of it has traveled on through hair metal, pop rock, and right up to Taylor Swift.
Raised on Radio is a stadium-sized, massively entertaining oral and pop-cultural history in the bestselling tradition of Meet Me in the Bathroom, Nothin’ But a Good Time, and Please Kill Me, capturing a time and place that was as big, booming, and unabashed as the music that provided its soundtrack.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Music biographer Rees (Shooting Star) pieces together a colorful if crowded oral history of album-oriented rock and its key practitioners, including Journey, Bon Jovi, and Def Leppard. The genre emerged in the disco-dominated mid-1970s, as record execs brainstormed a mix of polished pop melodies and hard rock suited to the increasingly popular FM radio format. Rees traces the genre's history in chronological chapters, unraveling its roots (radio executive Lee Abrams describes wanting to develop a highly commercial, radio-friendly genre where listeners already knew the artist; another executive notes that the aim was to create songs that "giv you goose bumps... even before the vocal comes in"); the origins of specific bands, like Toto; and how the genre influenced the music industry, including by inspiring the 1981 debut of MTV, which featured music videos by AOR bands. (The channel ultimately contributed to the genre's decline, however, as the popularity of music videos began to erode "the sanctity of the relationship between listener and radio," according to solo artist Billy Squier.) Rees nicely balances the expected tales of sex and drugs with more intimate, revealing disclosures from AOR acts, even if the cocktail-party cacophony of quotes may confuse readers less familiar with the era. Still, superfans of 1970s and '80s rock will find this a screaming good time.
