I’ve Never Had a Dream That Made Sweet Love to Me

I guess because I heard so much of it on the radio when I was growing up, I will always have a lot of affection for ’70s soft rock and MOR. I hear it and it puts a big smile on my face. A smile not entirely untainted by condescension, but not defined by it either.

As a little kid I had no real context for this stuff – it was all just music to me. I’d hear, say, the Hues Corporation’s discofied “Rock the Boat” on the radio, and I would love it, and it would never occur to me that this was anything but rock & roll, that it was in any way qualitatively different from the next thing I heard on the radio, like Paul McCartney’s “Maybe I’m Amazed” or something. (Which latter, by the way, I rediscovered a couple years ago and just couldn’t get enough of for months. I love it when that happens.)

Anyway, cue “paradise lost” reference.

Now, of course, this stuff all sounds like kitsch, it’s impossibly dated, it evokes powder-blue jumpsuits. I heard Dr. Hook’s “Sharing the Night Together” on some TV show the other night (a ’70s flashback, of course), and I instantly burst out laughing.

Not entirely sure why that is, but it’s not just because the song is corny. Maybe it’s because in “Sharing the Night Together,” Dr. Hook aren’t just selling the promise of tender-yet-robust sexytimes, they’re selling some kind of lifestyle accessory. There’s something essentially aspirational about so much of the era’s soft rock: the fine “lovemaking” (I know, ugh), just the right wine, the hi-fi at a tasteful volume, the barbarians safely on the other side of the gate. The tag “yacht rock” sprang up a few years ago to reflect exactly this kind of thing, right?

On the other hand, Alice in Chains – or even Nirvana – were clearly selling a lifestyle accessory, too, just as much as, say, Alan O’Day or Rupert Holmes. And Alice in Chains sounded like kitsch to me right from the start.

And I think, however ludicrously, of the very end of Philip Roth’s American Pastoral, the idyllic suburban dream blasted to pieces and Zuckerman furious: “And what is wrong with their life? What on earth is less reprehensible than the life of the Levovs?”

• The Hues Corporation, “Rock the Boat” (buy here)
• Dr. Hook, “Sharing the Night Together” (buy here)
• Alan O’Day, “Undercover Angel” removed by request of artist (buy here)

(Limited time only for these ones, I think.)