Columbia Records placed a provocative ad in the Berkeley Barb promoting experimental classical albums, including Terry Riley's In C, using countercultural imagery and language. Underground outlets and critics like Ralph J. Gleason condemned the campaign as corporate co-optation, prompting threats of sit-ins and calls to remove LPs from stores, after which Columbia ceased advertising in the underground press. Despite the backlash, In C became a major-label crossover success that helped launch the minimalist movement emerging in New York and San Francisco, and received high praise from publications such as High Fidelity.
The advertiser was Columbia Records, and, surprisingly, its attempt to cash in on the youth movement hinged on selling not "The White Album" or "Electric Ladyland" but experimental classical fare, such as Charles Ives's "Concord" Sonata, Karlheinz Stockhausen's "Mikrophonies," and an album titled "In C," by a then unknown figure named Terry Riley. "They're ear stretching," the ad copy enthused. "And The Man can't stop you from listening."
The counterculture did not take kindly to Columbia's astroturfing. The music critic Ralph J. Gleason wrote, in a denunciatory column in the anarchist paper Fifth Estate, "The name of the game, seen from one point of view, is steal the rhetoric of the revolution like the poverty program stole the organizers." Radical outlets considered a sit-in at Columbia's headquarters and "liberating" the label's LPs from record stores. Following the backlash, Columbia stopped advertising in the underground press.
Thankfully, the controversy did not drown out the visionary sound of Riley's "In C." As ham-fisted and patronizing as Columbia's tagline-"The only legal trip you can take"-may have been, the album did indeed become a generation-defining crossover hit, marking the major-label arrival of a pulse-based musical revolution, now known as minimalism, that had been simmering in New York lofts and San Francisco studios.
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