It’s been almost 45 years since the release of Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, 40 years since the Allman Brothers’ Eat A Peach, about 31 or 32 years since the heyday of The Pretenders and 20 to 30 years since the peak days of The Police and Sting. And yet each and every Starbucks you walk into these days insists on playing little else besides classic Beatles, Pretenders, Police/Sting and Allman Brothers cuts, over and over and over and over.

The over-50 people who run companies and corporations just won’t play anything recorded within the last 20 or 25 years, certainly not the last 15. Unless it’s some kind of soft country-folkie-acoustic stuff from whomever. Okay, I’ve heard a couple of Beck cuts. Well, I guess I just mean “Loser.”

Will we still be hearing ’70s music in malls and cafes ten years from now? 20? 50? I like the old stuff as much as anyone else, but can you imagine walking into a cafe in 1972, say, and listening to little else except ’30s jazz and ’40s Glenn Miller music? When and/or how will the classic rock stranglehold on our communal music-groove consciousness come to an end?