Easy: A Hard Look at Soft Rock(New American Canon)

About the Book

“‘Soft Rock,’ they call it; low-key stuff with wide appeal.” So stated a 1971 Chicago Tribune article on the Carpenters. Over time, Soft Rock became the butt of jokes, yet during its heyday, it fit America’s changing mood, blending rebellion with conservatism. Easy explains how Soft Rock and associated genres emerged in the late 1960s and achieved broad recognition in the 1970s. Tracking hundreds of songs, Timothy Gray supplies Billboard’s chart rankings to show how soft music easily crossed over from one fan base to another. Featuring acts as familiar as Fleetwood Mac and Carly Simon, and as underappreciated as the Three Degrees and J. D. Souther, Easy provides an entertaining aircheck of American culture during a transformational era.

About the Author :
Timothy Gray is professor of English at College of Staten Island, City University of New York. He is author of Gary Snyder and the Pacific Rim (Iowa, 2006), Urban Pastoral (Iowa, 2010), and It’s Just the Normal Noises (Iowa, 2017). He lives in Plainfield, New Jersey.

Review :
“In Easy: A Hard Look at Soft Rock, cultural critic and scholar Timothy Gray dives deep into the genre that ruled airwaves in the ’70s and ’80s and still haunts karaoke nights and Spotify playlists today. From smooth, soulful voices like Karen Carpenter’s and Linda Ronstadt’s to the bittersweet ballads of Billy Joel, this book unpacks the craftsmanship, cultural backlash, and surprising influence of the music that critics, and sometimes the culture, loved to hate. Easy is a witty, revealing, and meticulously researched exploration of the soft sounds that shaped generations and continue to entrance music aficionados today.”—Karen Tongson, author, Why Karen Carpenter Matters

“This exuberant account of an underappreciated decade of music and popular culture tracks not only the hits and artists, but social history and the impact of sexism and racism on 1970s music scenes. Easy is a juggernaut of research and critique, juiced with startling facts and memorable quotations (check the pithy venom from Dylan). In the slew of shifting, merging genres making up easy listening’s landscape, female musicians never got a fair shake. Yet Gray’s feminist impulse showcases their achievements, along with successes such as Charlie Pride’s in diversifying the county chart. This book opens minds and ears to a trove of Pop, Country, Soul, and Rock gems that found a way to cross over between genres and communities, even as the nation struggled to escape its deeply chiseled divisions.”—Kathleen Winter, author, Transformer

“In 1971, a fan of Led Zeppelin would not be caught dead listening to the Carpenters or the Osmonds. ‘Serious’ rock music listeners ruthlessly dismissed Soft Rock or any Soft Pop. Yet, by the end of the decade, soft music had influenced the Rolling Stones, the Allman Brothers, and Woodstock acid rockers. In Easy, Timothy Gray traces the rise of soft music—its pervasive influence across genres and its chart flexibility and durability. Easy is often surprising, as when Gray reveals Karen Carpenter and Janis Joplin or Charlie Rich and Dickey Betts to be more similar than dissimilar. A warning to the reader: Easy might cause you to reevaluate some of your edicts on your favorite and least favorite musicians.”—Thomas M. Kitts, author, Keep on Believin’: The Life and Music of Richie Furay “Yacht rockers, crate diggers, retromaniacs, and radio fanatics will relish this deep dive into the soft seventies. Chronicling an oft-overlooked era’s overlapping genre worlds, Timothy Gray reconstructs the complexity of Pop’s past while revising enduring presumptions about sonic classification and social identity. At one level a critical listening guide to a discounted taste formation, Easy recasts Soft Rock as a pale palimpsest of an entire decade’s musical mainstream. Gray unearths historical continuities and unexpected generic congruencies that upend received wisdom. Yet even as strange bedfellows and crossover dreams bump up against enduring differences and divisions, the sounds remain soft and the writing smooth.”—Keir Keightley, University of Western Ontario

“This excellent book explores music people love but are embarrassed to admit they love. . . . Easy is fast paced and richly detailed. . . . giving what might have been a straightforward account of hard rock becoming soft rock becoming mush a rounder, cleverer construction.”—Rock Music Studies