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A Short History of Rock’n’Roll
By Rolling Stone Rock Historian Abner Doubletwit
The 1950s Rock'n'Roll first came to much of America's attention on a Sunday evening in 1956 when Elvin Jones performed on the popular Ed Sullivan television show. It was a turning point in our popular culture, for up until that time most white Americans didn’t know that black Americans could play rock’n’roll. The powerful drummer’s fierce facial expressions, focused energy, and the multi-rhythmic forcefulness of his arms were so overwhelming in his first Ed Sullivan engagement that censors required Elvin be filmed only from the waist down in subsequent appearances.
Of course rock’n’roll existed before Elvin. Scholars differ on what constitutes the first rock’n’roll song, though many think that a vellum manuscript showing the Venerable Bede playing “Get Your Kicks in 1066” was the first recorded instance.
Beside Elvin Jones, other famous early rock’n’rollers of the 50s era were:
Sheri Lee Lewis, who outraged purists by playing piano while wearing sock puppets,
Little Richard Nixon, who upon finding he had been given nothing useful to do in the office of the Vice Presidency, would perform outrageously, shrieking about long tall missiles and topping the charts with his 1956 hit “Good Golly, He’s A Commie”.
Dave “Crazy Legs” Barry, who wrote warm humorous vignettes in song about young girls who wanted his autograph, troubles with the then new “safety belts,” and cars he had known in the biblical sense.
Fats Domino and Carl Perkins, two performers who shortly went back to their food industry careers, the former in delivery pizza and the latter in breakfast-anytime restaurants.
By the end of the 50s, Elvin Jones was disgruntled by being forced to play with another drummer by his bandleader, portly British comic Robbie Coltrane, Sheri Lee was enmeshed in a notorious plushy scandal, and Little Richard Nixon had been rejected by the voters in the 1960 Presidential election, causing him to become a Quaker minister. Little Richard’s sense of rejection was subsequently compounded when he was informed that the Quaker church did not actually recognize the concept of ministers as such. Dave Berry continued to have his fans, but by then he was better known as a newspaper columnist where he used the same witty little stores he had used in his songs to good effect.
By the winter of 1959 when a small plane crashed in Iowa killing Richie Havens, Buddy Ebsen, and the Big Bopper (Charlie Parker) some fans thought it was the end of the era. Even when the CBS television network created a documentary series "The Beverly Hillbilly" about the gaunt Ebsen's meteoric rise from southern poverty to fame, it only stood to remind fans of what now seemed to be a spent musical movement.
The 1960s In place of these vigorous 1950s stars, the hit parade as the 60s dawned featured acts like Fabio, Mark Rydell, and Richard Avedon, all pretty-boy pop idols more concerned with looks than musical talent. Avedon, originally a photographer before his singing career, quickly moved on to making a series of “Dickie and Ornette” movies with Ornette Coleman, each based on the thin premise that it was impossible for Avedon to photograph Ornette properly until he could find a plain white background somewhere on a California beach.
However over in England a group of young men saw something vital in Avedon’s rival Fabio. Mistakenly thinking his stage name was a tribute to Britain’s Fabian socialists (Fabio’s actual name was Carl Franzoni, and he was more of syndico-anarchist ), they took to putting gritty working class fervor back into rock’n’roll by performing shirtless and showing off their well developed chest musculature. This group was of course The Pectorals, a quartet soon known informally to their millions of fans as the “Fabio 4.”
In 1964, in the wake of the assassination of President Kennedy, The Pectorals appeared on the still popular Ed Sullivan show. Performing shirtless as usual, they changed male fashions forever as everywhere in the country boys and young men started to appear in public with their shirts off. Tradition, school regulations, and even military rules were not enough to turn back this cultural tidal wave of bare-chestedness.
Throughout the Sixties The Pectorals led a revolution in rock’n’roll music, taking it to new heights of artistic accomplishment. Along with the surrealistic, poetic lyrics of Bob Paladin and the complex inverted harmonies of Southern California’s Breach Boys they produced such album-long masterpieces as “Fresh Ground Pepper’s Honey Mustard Brand” and “Have Gun to Travel Highway 61” and “Sound Pets”.
Although the hugely popular British Pectorals changed the way bands looked, a good case can be made that America’s Bob Paladin had a greater impact than The Pectorals in the growing sophistication of 1960s music.
Paladin, (real name Robert Zimmerperson) was born non-magnetic in Minnesota’s Iron Range. In his school days he found himself an outsider unable to attach to friends because he was not bipolar. After High School, he moved to Minneapolis’ bohemian district Dinkytown (named for the obsessive collectors of British toy cars that gathered in coffeehouses there) and was introduced to the music of Woody Herman. Soon he began playing guitar and clarinet, with the later held in a neck holder so that he could play both instruments at the same time. Now all but worshiping Herman, he took off for New York to find his idol who he had heard was confined to an institution because he couldn’t stand free jazz. There in Greenwich Village (New York’s grander version of Dinkytown) he appeared in coffeehouses playing his versions of “Woodchoppers Ball”, “Northwest Passage”, and “Blue Flame”, each tune practically reduced to arrangements for guitar and his neck-rack clarinet. He was well on his way to establishing the “jazz-rock” musical genre when in 1965 at the Newport Jazz Festival he opened his mouth and started to sing. This alone would have shocked jazz purists, who associated singers with commercialization of the music, but Paladin’s voice was a controversy in itself. Rough, bawling, and far from pretty, it alienated both the anti-vocal jazz purists and the commercial vocal jazz fans equally. This soon drove Bob Palidin completely into the rock’n’roll camp. Adventuresome jazz musicians soon followed him by cutting their own vocals fronting the new vocalist-driven jazz-rock sound.
One of the most successful jazz-rock pioneers was Miles Davis, whose coarse voice made Paladin’s howling singing sound like Ella Fitzgerald. Davis’1968 landmark recording "Bitches Brew", written during his relationship with actress Virginia Christine, featured Miles croaking the famous chorus:
Bitches Brew, man! you just gotta find. Bitches Brew, puts you in a Columbian mind. It’s mountain grown, the richest kind.
As the 60s ended rock’n’roll music was certainly growing more audacious. Besides jazz-rock there was another progressive genre starting up called art rock, a musical style which tried to present paintings programmatically as musical works. This quixotic notion led to widely mixed results as you might imagine. One group, Yes, made records attempting to musically portray the album’s cover illustrations of Roger Dean. Another, the colorfully named King Crimson, became enamored of Rembrandt’s “The Night Watch” and later issued albums called “Red”, “Magenta” and “A Greenish Yellow, but with a hint of Purple”. King Crimson also commented on the persistence of now middle-aged and graying followers of The Pectorals with their sardonic “Shirtless and Bottle Black”.
The 1970s All this sometimes pretentious striving naturally created its antithesis. Contemporaneously with art rock and jazz rock there was the Singer-Sewing-Machine movement. Here musicians were celebrating moving back to the land, taking care of themselves and making and mending their own clothes. One Singer-Sewing-Machine “super group” was Crosby Sills and Nash, made up of crooner Bing Crosby, opera singer Beverly Sills and some guy from England who drove a Nash. Later joined by Austrian psychoanalyst and zither player Carl Jung, the resulting Crosby Sills Nash and Jung were one of the stars of 1969’s Wood-Stock Festival where Singer-Sewing-Machine artists played alongside those who made furniture and framed their own homes.
Other successful Singer-Sewing-Machine artists of the early 70s were James Tailor, Joni Stitchell and Albert King. Like some of the members of Crosby Sills and Nash, Albert King had had a musical carrier before becoming a Singer-Sewing-Machine, working successfully as a blues songwriter in New York’s Brill Building, a famous New York office complex that was home to many commercial songwriters. One of the other acts to break out of the Wood-Stock Festival and its resulting movie were the aptly named Carpenters, a brother-sister act with singing drummer Karen Carpenter who belted out King’s song “Crosscut Saw” to the huge tool-belted and Morris-dancing Wood-Stock audience. In 1971 the Brill Building was destroyed by angry music fans tired of too many formulaic blues songs (an event that Albert’s father BB King soon immortalized in his hit song “The Brill is Gone”). Out of work and evicted from his woodshop, Albert King decided to take up fabric arts and recorded the multi-platinum “Tapestry” album.
As the 70s progressed the dialectic of gentle rustic simplicity and complex art and jazz rock was in turn supplanted by a new trades-based rebellion--Plumber Rock. Angry that many of the self-built homes of the Wood-Stock generation had frozen pipes and insufficient gradients in their horizontal pipe runs, and frustrated by those that criticized anyone with uneven stitch-work, they first coalesced around a rogue plumbing supply outlet in the Bowery section of New York, CPGD’s (Contractors & Plumbers General Depot). CPGD’s soon put up a small stage and walled off a requisite dirty bathroom to present the new Plumber Rock acts such as The RotoRooters, The Thread Dopes, Black Pipe Nipples and the Sillcocks.
New York’s RotoRooters formalized this style at the beginning. Although they secretly admired The Pectorals pop music charms, they purposefully undeveloped their upper bodies and popularized the sunken chest look. They further rebelled by refusing to perform bare-chested, preferring instead to wear old T shirts and leather jackets. Their one concession to the rock tradition of showing some skin while performing was to wear pants cut low enough that the top of their buttocks could be seen rising above the beltline, something which became a Plumber Rock fashion trademark.
The 1980s Although influential with critics and a small but devoted fan-base, Plumber Rock did not initially make much impact on the popular record charts. Instead in the later 70s and early 80s some of the bands that played the same circuit as the Plumbers began to develop a style of Rock that did take over the charts: “New Vague”. New Vague differed from Plumber Rock because it was, well, vaguely newer. Many wore jackets that had padded shoulders that made them the natural halfway point between the well developed Pectorals and the always jacketed, but emaciated RotoRooters. Musically, many of the New Vague bands used keyboard synthesizers, which were expensive computerized instruments that could be made to sound like the sighs and squeals of a dying electric guitar amp without the embarrassing phallic implications of guitar playing.
Many of the New Vague bands found their audiences by taking pictures of themselves playing music. The resulting videos were entirely silent, but still they showed the sharp outfits, extensive makeup and creative haircuts of the bands. To present these short promotional films, an entire cable channel, EmptyTV was created in 1981.
The 1990s In the 1990s, something very much like Plumber Rock did become popular, though the bands came out of a different part of the country and weren’t called Plumbers. Instead of New York, the new hard edged sound was associated with the Northwest, particularly Seattle. The songs usually featured some barely articulated complaint, often about the rainy weather or inability of the Seattle Supersonics Basketball team to go far in the NBA playoffs despite an obviously talented roster. This was so unfair, and the singer usually reminded the listener that he would remember these injustices forever. It was this stance that logically lead the movement to be named “Grudge rock”.
A leading Grudge Rocker showed his allegiance to the earlier Plumbers by taking his stage name “Cobain” from the French word for a two-basin sink. Hurt Cobain was born Moehn Kohler-Pfister II, the son of a successful dentist. Early in his life Cobain heard the constant keening sound of his father’s drill and this was thought to have been a formative influence on his guitar playing. In 1990 he formed his band Ipana (named for the puppy that his father took away from him at age 7 and donated to medical research) and with the release of their second album “Never Mend” they became hugely famous and successful. Never Mend contained the hit single “Sounds Like A Seam Ripper”, and it sounded like nothing more than a Plumber Rock record, renewing the Plumber’s beef with the effete Singer-Sewing-Machine artists.
During the height of his success, Hurt began a famous relationship with a Chaucerian scholar and stripper named Courtly Love. However he had become so successful that it was difficult to remain begrudged enough to continue recording and performing in his field. At first the concerned Courtly Love tried to help him stay unhappy, but in the end she determined that only killing him would help keep the music valid and commercially viable. Later, some conspiracy theorists were to link Courtly with the deaths of Janis Joplin, John Lennon, Nick Drake, Jimmy Hoffa, as well as Jeff, Tim and William Buckley.
The Present and Future Now 50 years after Elvin’s landmark appearance on Ed Sullivan, many experts believe that Rock’n’Roll has finally run out of innovation. Other musical strains consistently dominate the popular record charts. Some of these insurgent musical styles are:
Rap, where real or make-believe felons recite a list of their arrests and convictions over an insistent beat.
Hip Hop, a music and musical culture based around a dance style where the dancers try to wiggle or jump out of their pants.
Acid Hoarse, music made by suffers of gastric reflux with chronic inflamed throats.
Techno, short for “Tech Notes”, a field of music inspired by reading the owner’s manuals of sequencer software.
Country, rock’n’roll played by people who wear hats and can at least fake a southern accent from having watched Hee Haw and The Dukes of Hazard as children.
Americana, country music played by indi-rockers who can’t afford hats but remember how to fake a southern accent from being in a college production of The Glass Menagerie.
Teen-Idle Pop, records aimed at young people with nothing better to do.
Who can say, but it’s possible the experts are wrong, just as they have been wrong so many times in the past. We would do well to remember the wise words of the old song:
Rock’n’roll is here to stay It will never die It was meant to be that way ‘Cause it ate our brains away I don’t care what people yell Rock’n’roll will always sell
Rock’n’roll will go down in history Just you wait my friend Rock’n’roll will always be ‘Cause it’s made by mad zombies I don’t care what people yell Rock’n’Roll will always sell
If you don't like rock‘n’roll, Think what you've been missin' If you like to bop at the Concertgebouw, Come on down and listen I don’t care what people yell Rock’n’roll will always sell
This story is part of the collection of fiction by Frank Hudson tentatively called “Silent Music” and is copyright Frank Hudson 2003 and 2004 all rights reserved by the author. Of course all the people that I mention above are fictional creations living in another universe that doesn’t exist outside my imagination. To the actual musicians who practiced and created, suffered the business, and humped amps and drum kits into the early a.m. doorways, they have only my gratitude. |