But even when I didn't know what the different groups sounded like, I knew that, when it was announced that the next song was that of the Byrds, that this was a group that was "famous." Which is to say that certain names gain status by themselves, just as names. This is another minor trick to being accepted in rock radio's medium. A great name can make it for you, an average name doesn't affect your standing, and a difficult name can actually hurt your acceptability.

Sounds trivial, doesn't it? But, as I have said, the rock radio medium is an essentially unknown (or not understood) experience. We are constantly probing for explanations to the things which have "unnatural" importance.

As to the importance of a name, take the example of the Who. The Who are a fantastic group who do very simple, big beat rock 'n' roll, heavy on the guitars with lots of really tricky rhythms. It's the perfect stuff for radio because none of their songs depend on complex combinations or sensitive sounds that go beyond radio's threshhold of scratchy reproduction. But their name isn't known on the radio inspite of the fact that they've come up with many hit singles ("Magic Bus" was one of the best radio songs last year). This fact, combined with the problem that their record company, Decca, has handled their publicity miserably, has left them low in the sales. The trouble is that when the Who first got their songs into the Top 10 (somewhere around four years ago), there was another new hit group also from England called the Them. At the time groups were branching out from "the Beatles" into new kinds of names. The Who were simply confused with a lot of others. And the name was psychologically difficult to deal with. Everyone attaches a little of the literal meaning of a name to the way they think of a rock group--that's one of the charms of calling yourself something. "The Who" implied that they were unknown; this idea stuck.

It is a common belief that rock music is a heavily sexual experience. You feel the vibrations of the primal beats of rock most sensitively in those places where you are most sensitive . . . and it's those same places on your body where you are most sexual. The lyrics to one out of two rock 'n' roll songs say "sex" in so many words. The title (the title!) of a song that was number one by the Rolling Stones is "Let's Spend the Night Together"; and I recently heard an oldie called "Do It Again," which I can now remember as being a hit: the words go "Do it again just a little bit slower. Do it again just a little bit slower. I can't stand it when it's over."

And for more sexuality, people point to the way rock is danced to. That is, with a lot of moving your pelvis in and out. People who do this wear short dresses, which means they want sex. And they have long hair, which means they get sex all the time without end.

People who play rock are, themselves, the symbols of sex Rolling Stone Magazine's performer of the year for 1968 was Jimi Hendrix. Jimi Hendrix is the most sexually threatening being walking on this earth today.

However, most of this kind of sexuality is experienced at live rock show performances. At places like the Boston Teaparty. The Boston Teaparty drips sexuality. All the people standing around watching the show can feel it tingle kinetically like a spark from person to person. Also, they put loads of policemen downstairs at the door with shining holsters and guns--it's like handing each girl a leather whip as she walks in. The Boston Teaparty is a wonderful place. The whole scene is a very honest one somehow. It is not a very good "activity" for participation, but as a source of energy, it is a great test for your desperate youthfulness. How much of the kids in creaking brown leather do you want, how much can you take?

But this sexuality has nothing to do with the rock radio experience. The radio is only as loud as we set the volume to be. We get none of ths visual motion type of sexuality. The radio statics out the gasps, and fuzzes over the grunts. Besides, our minds aren't wandering because we're doing something specific in addition to having the radio on. And the disc jockey who controls the experience is hyping us up into activity rather than slowing us down into sensuality.

Recently when I was home for part of a vacation period, I started watching a lot of tube, consciously thinking what a new and different medium this was from the one I'd been on for the whole time before that (radio). Now that I've been at college for a long time I've really done sporatic tube and had effectively dropped out of that experience. Then when I came back to it, I was amazed to find out just how sexual the whole television experience is. The ads, of course, are incredible--mostly girls suggesting they could be touched, suggesting they want something (like a cigarette?), smiling that they like you, and leaning and sighing, talking slowly all over the place. The TV shows leave you believing that your life gives you all you want, including. . . .

The myth is that sex is an excessive part of the kids' existence. But it is much more on the grown-ups minds. I almost got up panting from the TV. Their medium is lots more full of sex than ours.

The way the medium of rock radio changes the way we experience our music is by forcing a series of compex comparisons on us of all the sounds we hear.

The disc jockey gets a rush of feeling going on inside of us It isn't really hard to do because he's got everything going with the flow for him. He's got what we're doing while we also listen working for him to keep us changing. And he's got oldies and hits that have proven to work on us while at the same time he controls the presentation of the three bits of information we want (time, weather, news).

The disc jockey maintains us by making contrasts to define how we feel. A slow solo followed by a fast, but simple catch-you-up kind of song makes you see not so much how different the two pieces of music are. Because you don't really care much for what the music is. But the change makes you feel how different you can feel like.

See, it is important to realize that listening to the rock radio is not an experience of listening to music; it is an experience of simply affecting the way you feel.

All is brought about by comparison between the sounds of successive records, by the way in which the order of the records played lifts you up, makes you bop, lets you think. A record really will sound different on the radio if a different record is played before it. If we are going to understand the sound of rock radio in the metaphor of being one continuum, a big flow, then every part of that flow is effected by the parts behind it pushing and the parts leading it on.