Liner Note #14

Mirrored from the latest entry in Daron's Guitar Chronicles.

Cecilia here, but Daron’s coming by a little later.

The tour has taken us a lot of places and brought up a lot of history I figure I should fill you guys in on.

AOR. I use the term “AOR” (pronounced “ay-oh-arrr”) in a recent chapter. It stands for “Album Oriented Rock.” It’s kind of a dead format now, but in the 90s it was the dominant rock format, pulling in fewer listeners than Top 40 pop, but more than “classic rock” (which grew out of AOR in the first place). AOR typically mixed brand new rock hits with the classics, Beatles, Stones Led Zep.

What AOR did NOT play was the “alternative rock” stuff. Punk, new wave, goth, industrial, forget it, no matter how many records they sold. You had a few stations in the country (like WFNX in Boston, WLIR in NYC, and 91X in San Diego) doing an alternative format, and otherwise bands like the Red Hot Chili Peppers were simply NOT HEARD ON ROCK RADIO. Even bands like Jane’s Addiction had trouble. For goodness sake, even REM were shunned until they started hitting the Top 40 and could no longer be ignored by AOR programmers. Even U2 were suspect to some rock programmers.

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