I recently (4/30/07) had the great honor to lecture on “A Brief History of Rock & Roll” from my book, Puzzling Evidence, to a couple of Music Appreciation classes at the University of Oklahoma. Some very bright kids…Go Sooners! The future of America is bright. Below is their reading assignment:
In this class we will cover Roots, First Golden Age of R & R (1954 to 1959), Age of Teen Idols (1960 to 1964), Second Golden Age of R & R (1964 to 1969)
“What is Rock & Roll?”
In 1956 Meredith Wilson, playwright and composer of The Music Man, called Rock “Simpleminded and stale; the music of idiots. It’s dull, amateurish, immature, trite, banal. It glorifies the mediocre, the nasty, the bawdy, the cheap and the tasteless.”
When Mick Jagger and Keith Richards began to write their own songs their manager Andrew Loog Oldham offer this advice: “Drive parents up a bloody wall.”
An old Baby Boomer hippie once wrote, “R & R is fun, excitement…a simple primitive music in a secret language that parents cannot understand. It must include angst and defiance of authority. Power Freaks have no sense of humor, so Rock should include irony and satire and, of course, a raw backbeat with echoes of tribal drums played at maximum volume. (No synthesizers, pitch-benders or echo chambers, please)”.
Please be prepared to share your definition of Rock & Roll. READ MORE
Puzzling Evidence index
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ROOTS: The roots of Rock & Roll can be traced to the work songs and gospel music of African-Americans in early slave days. The sound became even closer to modern Rock in the 1920’s, when rural bluesmen moved to urban centers and the rhythms became heavier, more insistent, and the tempo, faster… conforming to the pace of city living.
Two-man guitar teams became popular, with one man playing bass notes and chords, while the other played the lead or melody line. In 1929 the Graves Brothers of Hattiesburg, Mississippi, recorded some spirituals for Paramount, which critics described as “Rocking and reeling”. The music aimed exclusively at the “race music” market, but in 1932 two white folklorists, John Lomax and his son, Alan, turned on to the sound. They recorded Afro-American folk, blues and gospel at Black churches, revival meetings, bars and out in the fields. The Lomax’s were thrilled by “The hard-driving beat, the bluesy melody, the rhythmic singing which contained improvised, and stream-of-consciousness type lyrics”.
On AM Radio: Rock & Roll found its Johnny Appleseed in 1950, in the form of disc jockey Alan Freed. At this point in his career, Freed had been turned down by most of the major radio stations in the country, so he jumped with joy when offered a job at WJW in Cleveland. Soon after, he met Leo Mintz, the largest local record dealer, who told him that kids of every race often bought a type of Rhythm and Blues, commonly referred to as “Rockin’ & Reelin’, a metaphor for what happens after the lights go out.
Freed loved the sound and tried out a couple of those records on his show. The kids dug the tunes, and soon R & R dominated his time slot. Alan developed a style of “manic patter” between and over songs that captured and complimented the music. He began to call it Rock & Roll and his “Moondog Show” soared in the ratings.
Alan sponsored the “Moondog Ball” in 1952 in Cleveland. 25,000 kids, half of them White and half African American, showed up at a hall that only held 10,000… a slight problem in segregated Cleveland. Parents flipped out and Freed was forced to cancel the show… but not before the message had leaked out: “Regardless of race, kids just want to have fun and rock!”
The timing for Rock & Roll to emerge was perfect… television had badly wounded radio, and AM stations desperately scrambled for anything that would draw new listeners and sponsors. Other DJ’s on mainstream (white) AM stations followed Freed’s lead and started playing R & R. Teens turned on to the Black sound, but their WASP parents still dug “Your Hit Parade” and the “Perry Como Show” on television.
The First Golden Age of Rock & Roll
1954 to 1959
Freed moved to New York in 1954 and made WINS one of the biggest AM stations in the USA. The energetic DJ also began producing live Rock & Roll shows at Brooklyn’s Paramount Theatre, and kids of all races turned up in droves. With Alan’s help Blacks crossed over from the Rhythm & Blues charts (where a sale of 10,000 was considered a hit record) to the much bigger, lily-white pop charts. Guys like Fats Domino, Sam Cooke, Chuck Berry and Little Richard finally reached the ears of Middle America.
Bill Haley and the Comets struggled as just another smalltime Country and Western band until they decided to cover some R&B songs by Black artists. The group took hard rocking, but poor-selling classics, such as Joe Turner’s “Shake, Rattle and Roll”, and toned them down a bit, and whitened them up a lot to make the tunes more palatable to not-yet-enlightened WASP audience. A Tsumani of white covers followed.
1956 And then there was Elvis. About the time that Little Richard’s lovely image and voice shocked WASP parents across America, Presley auditioned for, and was rejected by Arthur Godfrey’s Talent Scouts (the American Idol of its day). Colonel Tom Parker entered the picture and managed to get the young singer signed with RCA Records (November 22, 1955). On January 10, 1956, Presley entered their Nashville studio and recorded “Heartbreak Hotel”. On January 28, Elvis performed a hip-churning version of “Blue Suede Shoes” during his network television debut on CBS’s “Stage Show” (ironically, playing opposite “The Perry Como Show” and “Grand Ole’ Opry” on Saturday night.) Elvis was on his way. During 1956 Presley had fourteen consecutive million-selling singles, a total of 17 songs on the pop charts, two number one albums (Ever since the first LP had been pressed in 1948, that distinction had usually been won by soundtracks from movie or stage musicals), plus, two starring movie roles.
Presley not only covered the Black sound (such as Big Mama Thorton’s “Hound Dog”), but also developed his own style which nearly matched the original. Blacks laughed when they first saw Elvis strut his stuff… a little tame by the high standard of performances that they were accustomed to on the Chitlin’ Circuit. White parents weren’t laughing. They considered Presley’s gyrations as suggestive and immoral with his Wild One / Rebel Without a Cause/ JD image with his greaser hairstyle, black leather jacket and the obscene way he shook his hips. On the other hand, in interviews between songs, Elvis sounded like a God-fearing, well-mannered young man and he could sing the old hymns.
Ed Sullivan grabbed more than 80% of TV viewers with two appearances by Elvis that fall. But, CBS received pressure from thousands of “concerned citizens”, and thus, when Elvis returned for his third and final Sullivan show, Ed instructed cameramen to film the singer from the waist up, only. Wrong! Major mistake. Every Baby Boomer knows the secret of Hitchcock thrillers… what the audience sees is never as scary as off-screen, imagined horror. The moves that adult America imagined Elvis made that night set off the Great Rock & Roll Civil War of 1956.
1957 Rock & Roll proved to be more than a passing fad and the American mass-media industry volunteered to tame the beast. TV saturated teens with American Bandstand and numerous cheap, local clones. Tod Storz and Gordon McLendon started a Top Forty AM radio format, and soon only a few DJs in the country still had the freedom of selecting their own music. Parents encouraged their kids to buy only the records of clean-cut young men and women.
The Forces of Good chose Pat Boone as its young champion to smite the insurgent rebels of Rock & Roll. The Establishment suggested that Pat represented Heaven, and Elvis, Hell, and the two warriors locked in a fierce, holy battle to control the youth of America. Pat later commented, “I acted as a sort of catalyst, making Rock more acceptable and allaying fears that parents and ministers had about this revolutionary new music. Elvis and I were compared because we were successful at the same time. In fact, a media feud was even created between us. He was the rebel, breaking the rules and winning; while I was the conformist, playing by the rules and still winning.”
Real Rock got down to serious business. The beat became stronger and the lyrics bolder, as the pace accelerated toward the climax of the First Golden Age of Rock & Roll. Little Richard exclaimed, “Good, Golly, Miss Molly” (“You sure like to ball”), Elvis became “All Shook Up” (30 weeks on the charts; Eight at #1), and Jerry Lee Lewis confirmed that there was, indeed, a “Whole Lot of Shakin’ Going on.” Jerry Lee’s first big hit earned him shot on the “Steve Allen Show”. Mid tune the nervous rocker jumped up and accidentally kicked the piano bench across the stage. Jerry Lee remained on his feet, pounding the hell out of the keyboard, with the microphone stand rising up between his legs. Allen joined in the fun by picking up his desk chair and tossing it across the set. The Who later topped Lewis by destroying amps and guitars as a routine part of their show, but the Killer struck first.
1958 Rockin’ Rebels suffered heavy casualties. Little Richard’s plane nearly crashed in January, and during the ordeal he made a pact with God. Richard soon after enrolled at Oakwood College… a Seventh Day Adventist School in Huntsville, Alabama, for training to become a preacher. In an interview, Brother Richard promised to “stop singing the devil’s music forever.” Jerry Lee Lewis rode the crest of his popularity at the time, but desperately sought recognition as Elvis’s successor as the King of Rock & Roll. The Killer set out to conquer England in May, and advanced concert ticket sales indicated that European teens offered a crown. A crowd of reporters mobbed King Jerry on his arrival in London. One of them spotted a young girl in the entourage, and since he couldn’t reach Lewis, the newshound decided to find out the identity of the child. She answered, “I’m Myra….Jerry’s wife”…and 13-year-old cousin.
1959 Parents considered Buddy Holly extremely dangerous, but couldn’t define his crimes. Buddy appeared to be a clean-cut, goofy-looking kid with thick glasses. The Texas boy looked more like the class nerd than a rebellious sex symbol, and the lyrics of his songs could hardly be called vulgar. But, my, oh my, Buddy could rock. Music fundamentalists couldn’t even accuse him of amateurism, because Holly was an accomplished musician and innovator. He formed the first three-piece, White band to feature a lead/rhythm guitar, bass and drums line up (Buddy Holly and the Crickets) and this became the basic formula for Rock & Roll bands ever since (often with a second guitar or keyboard added). Holly also popularized the Fender Stratocaster, later to become the favorite tool of superstars like Hendrix and Clapton. No other musician before him understood the possibilities of a recording studio like Buddy. He was the first to double-track both vocals and guitar, and the first rocker to add strings to a song in postproduction. His ingenious studio work in the Fifties can only be matched by the new directions in which the Beatles took Rock in the late Sixties. Crickets begat Beatles. The younger generation proudly acknowledged their parentage. The Fab Four worshipped Buddy and emulated his style, honored the Crickets with their name.
Buddy, only 22, with seven Top 40 hits to his credit, took off to headline the first big Rock & Roll tour of 1959. On February 3rd, Holly, Ritchie Valens and the Big Bopper decided to charter a private plane and fly ahead of the others to the next stop in Fargo, North Dakota to get some rest and to do laundry. The plane went down just minutes after departure from Mason City, Iowa, and the last Great White Hope of the First Golden Age of Rock & Roll suddenly disappeared.
The government knew that Chuck Berry would slip up sooner or later, and they waited… ready to pounce. Chuck met a young, Spanish-speaking, Apache prostitute while on tour in El Paso, Texas, and felt sorry for the girl. He offered her a job checking hats and coats at his nite club in St. Louis. The government indicted Berry under the Mann Act: transporting a minor over state lines for immoral purposes. Imagine, that sly Black devil, sweet-talking that poor innocent child into leaving the stability of the world’s oldest profession, and then forcing her to handle those filthy hats! The jury, of course, found Chuck guilty; although the first trial was so blatantly racist that he received a second one on appeal. But, the court convicted Berry again, and awarded him two years in prison for his generosity. The Army owned Elvis, the Church owned Little Richard, the Music Industry disowned Jerry Lee and Buddy was dead and Chuck was in jail.
Don McLean later recalled first hearing of the Buddy’s accident, and described it as “The day the music died” in “American Pie”. Was that an exaggeration? Perhaps, but consider the fact that the Big R & R Show did go on in Fargo that night, and Bobby (“the-boy-next-door”) Vee (unknown at the time) stood in Buddy’s spotlight on the stage. The next day, Frankie Avalon, another clean-teen idol, became Holly’s permanent replacement as headliner for the rest of the tour.
Indeed, a wonderful era of music had come to an abrupt end. But, Rock didn’t die in that plane crash with Buddy, the beat just quietly slipped out of America and fled to England. Teens who would later become the Beatles, Stones and Yardbirds became the official guardians of the Backbeat, until the time came to return the precious gift to its rightful owners back in the States.
THE AGE OF TEEN IDOLS 1960 to 1964
Kids do grow up. The oldest Baby Boomer became 14 in 1960 and realized that their heroes, the original Mouseketeers now looked silly in their Mickey ears. Annette had developed as a young lady to the point that the letters on her T-shirt read “NNTT”. Disney could have replaced the over-the-hill kids with younger ones on The Mickey Mouse Club, but instead cancelled the program and created Vista Records. Annette immediately morphed into the role of Teen Idolette, with eight big hits in 1959-60. Other Mouseketeers also scored minor hits on the label. This impressed Warner Brothers, who started their own label to cash in on the fad. The Bros figured that the singing ability of their network stars couldn’t be any worse than their acting. Connie Stevens, Edd “Kookie” Byrnes, Roger Smith (“Hawaiian Eye” and “77 Sunset Strip”), Shelly Fabares and Paul Petersen (“Donna Reed Show”), Vince Edwards (“Ben Casey”), Johnny Crawford (“The Rifleman”) and James Darren (Gidget movies), all scored hits on the new WB label.
On the East Coast, Al Nevins and Don Kirshner formed Aldon Music, in an attempt to “bridge the gap between Tin Pan Alley and Rock & Roll”. This Teen-Dream, factory sound became known as “Brill Building Pop” (although the studio was actually located across the street from Brill). Kirshner gathered together the best of NYC’s young composers, including Carole King, Gerry Goffin, Barry Mann, Cynthia Weil, Bobby Darrin, Neil Diamond and Neil Sedaka, and cranked out about 200 hits per year (1959-64) for major labels like RCA, Columbia and Atlantic. Everything had been mass-produced for Boomers during their childhood. Now, as adolescents, even their music flowed off an assembly line. As usual, the result was mediocrity… the total elimination of anything exciting, unique or special.
Detroit had Motown… homogenized pop by Black artists, and Philly had Bandstand. But, whether it be Mickey Mouse Rock, Brill Building Pop, Bandstand or Motown, this music wasn’t Rock & Roll and these songs remain Golden Oldies only by default. Black Rhythm & Blues retreated back onto its own chart and closed the door behind. White artists recorded half of the hits on the R & B chart in 1958, but in 1959, that number decreased dramatically, and WASP adults called it “race music” again.
1962 Teen Dreams became the hottest commodity in pop music in the early Sixties, and one young man had his finger on the pulse of the market. In 1958 Phil Spector, a high school senior, produced a hit single with “To Know Him Is to Love Him” (The words on his father’s tombstone). By the time Phil reached voting age in 1962, he was a multi-millionaire and considered as one of the top geniuses in pop music.
Spector’s famous “Wall of Sound” changed the recording industry (for better or worse is another question) forever. Instead of employing the usual three or four-piece Rock & Roll combo (in the Buddy Holly mold), Phil added extra guitarists, backup singers, strings, brass, reed, percussion and keyboard players, in fact, just as many musicians as could fit into the largest recording studio available. This gave the music dramatic new dimensions at first, but after a while, the songs became the “Wall of sounds-a-lot-like-Spector’s-last-record” music.
The Second Golden Age of Rock & Roll
1964 to 1970
Baby Boomer teens wanted something new, exciting and fun, and station managers desperately searched everywhere for a different sound. They noticed faint rumblings from one group, far away across the Atlantic, whose joyful noise dominated the British charts for all of 1963, but remained virtually unknown in the USA. Capitol Records had recently rejected the band: “You just don’t have the new American sound, boys.” (Thank God for that.) Now, a few weeks later, radio stations scrambled to smuggle in some 45s of the Fab Four. The Beatles had just the right sound at the right time: loud, a real backbeat, and pure fun.
Capitol rushed to get legitimate copies pressed and into the stores. The single, “I Want to Hold Your Hand” finally became available in January of 1964, and by Feb. 1st, topped the charts in America. The Beatles made their first of three appearances on the Ed Sullivan Show on February 9th, which turned out to be the highest rated episode in the show’s history. Crime in New York City stopped dead in its tracks for twenty minutes. Boomer girls went nuts and fell hopelessly in love. Boomer boys dug the beat, but laughed at those silly haircuts. After a couple of weeks, the girls continued to scream and the boys grew long hair and bought electric guitars.
The Beatles ruled the charts by April 1st, claiming the top five positions with several other Lennon/McCartney tunes on the way up. Parents prayed that those Liverpool boys would fade away, or at least be deported, but instead, the Beatles became legitimate as their film, A Hard Day’s Night opened to critical, as well as popular good favor. Many skeptics had to at last admit that the boys possessed a bit of talent, and were fun to watch… much more than a fad… Just ask the casualties:
Bam! The Beatles shot down the Beach Boys and the Suburban Myth. Boomers grew tired of “driving up and down that same old strip”, and now, they turned to a group who could harmonize with a real beat.
Bam! They shot down Phil Spector and his Wall of Sound. Boomers suddenly realized that the “wall” separated us from the backbeat. These four guys, ala Buddy Holly, made more and better sound than Phil and a whole studio full of musicians…so much for Spector’s bigger-is-better concept of Rock & Roll.
Bam! They shot down the Brill Building hit factory. Lennon/McCartney wrote most of their songs, and assembly-line music sounded shallow and dull by comparison. Boomers realized that artists should create their own authentic sound.
Bam! They shot down Dick Clark and the world of American Teen Idols. The Fab Four had the look and talent, the latter quality honed in marathon gigs in Hamburg, Germany (8 hours a night/ 7 night a week).
Bam! Folk Music took a direct hit. Too serious. Boomers weren’t in the mood.
The Beatles had that certain something, just like Elvis in his day… But, what was “it” exactly? Real R & R was suppressed in the United States after the First Golden Age, but, the beat continued in Britain; in fact it flourished and developed during our awful Teen Idol Era. In 1964 The Beatles brought it all back home to the USA, right where it belonged.
1965 Rock & Roll became more than just entertainment for young people… the music transformed into a secret language in 1965, and Boomers only trusted leaders who spoke it fluently.
Bob Dylan and the Beatles, the two most important musical forces of the day, met in 1965 and each influenced the other. Dylan morphed into a poet with an electric backbeat, and the Beatles realized that there was more to life and lyrics than just holding hands.
The Beatles released two albums (Help and Rubber Soul) that year and each showed a metamorphosis from their earlier upbeat, puppy-love lyrics to a thoughtful statement about the world around them.
Bob Dylan played the role of angry young poet to a limited audience of War Baby Folk purists until he released the album Bringing It All Back Home. Dylan’s lyrics remained Folk Protest, but the music sounded suspiciously like Rock & Roll. Bob played his usual acoustic, but now an electric lead guitar was added and a rhythm section of drums and bass pushed the beat behind him. Dylan explained, “I may look like Robert Frost, but I feel just like Jesse James.”
Dylan announced the birth of Folk Rock when he walked onto the stage at the Newport Folk Festival on July 25th with an electric guitar in his hand. Accompanied by the Butterfield Blues Band, Bob blasted the sedate audience out of their seats with a rocking version of “It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue” (Was he talking about acoustic music?). Folk purists (War Babies) hated it. Their Bob Dylan had defected to the Boomer Camp, and he smirked, “Don’t Look Back”.
1966 “Who could imagine that they would freak out in Minnesota, mina-mina-mina-Minnesota?” mocked Frank Zappa in the title cut of his first album, Freak Out, in late 1966. It was true… Boomers all over the United States rapidly converted to hippism.
1967 Ironically, the Beatles’ last live concert took place in San Francisco’s Candlestick Park in August of 1966, just as a wave of psychedelia overwhelmed the music industry. Instead of fighting the trend, and attempting to pull the Boomer audience back to a safer ground of good-time Rock, (where the band ruled as heavyweight champ) the Beatles decided to go with the flow. They created a sound more psychedelic than anything originating out of San Francisco. The lads spent more than 700 hours recording Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band (as opposed to only twelve hours on their first album), and all of their hard word produced what many critics consider as the most important LP of our generation. The album is without question the most accurate reflection of the era and it revolutionized the music industry. Sgt. Pepper stunned their fans. Kids stopped dancing and then sat down to listen. Many Top 40 AM stations interrupted their normal programming, and, for the first time ever, played an album in its entirety over and over again. Radio stations had no choice. Teens insisted. No singles could be pulled for release because the album presented a cohesive opus with a theme. None of the cuts fit Top 40 formulas, and the songs confused AM stations and record companies. Music critics finally admitted that Rock & Roll might indeed be a legitimate art form.
American teens still craved their own arena… one specific place and time where all the tribes could gather to show their force to the world. In mid-June 50,000 hippies and freaks (most of them without money for tickets) showed up for the 3-day music festival at the Monterey County Fairgrounds (capacity- 7,100). A low-budget film crew cranked away as the kids turned on to sitar music from Ravi Shankar, Funk from Booker T & the MGs, Motown (Detroit) Soul from Otis Redding, Chicago Blues from the Butterfield Blues Band, Pure Folk from Laura Nero and Simon and Garfunkel, Folk Rock from the Byrds and the Mamas and Papas, SF Psychedelic from Big Brother (with Janis), the Grateful Dead and the Airplane, Hard Rock and Boogie from LA, the Buffalo Springfield and Canned Heat, and from Britain, the Who and Eric Burton’s New Animals. Tens of thousands of WASP teens heard for the first time a wonderful blend of world music that had never played on Top 40 radio. To hell with the established Music Industry… Boomers chose their own music from this day forward.
As a climax to the event, America discovered Jimi Hendrix. He could do it all. Jimi played roots Rock with Little Richard, funky R&B with the Isley Brothers, and lots of Soul and Blues on the “Chitlin’ Circuit”. He dug Dylan, and if Bob had the nerve to sing with that terrible voice, then so could Jimi. Hendrix didn’t have much initial success as he fronted a group at little clubs like the Café Wha? in Greenwich Village for $25 a night. But, Chas Chandler of the Animals spotted Hendrix and convinced him to come to England, where he teamed Jimi up with Noel Redding and Mitch Mitchell to form the Jimi Hendrix Experience. The band burned up all of Europe. The Experience remained a rumor here in America, and hadn’t even been asked to play at Monterey until Paul McCartney recommended the group.
The Experience managed to grab the closing spot on the bill, but they would have to follow two tough acts. The Who climaxed their set with “My Generation”. Townshend leaped all over the stage and smashed his guitar to bits, as Daltrey swung his microphone over his head and then crashed it on the cymbals as smoke bombs exploded. Next up, Jerry Garcia of the Dead wasted no time in winning over the crowd: “Folding chairs are for folding up and dancing on.” The audience obeyed. Finally, the unknown Experience took the stage and the crowd sat dumbfounded through the first couple of numbers. They had never seen or heard anything like Jimi. Hendrix plowed into a heavy-duty version of Dylan’s “Like a Rolling Stone” and the audience snapped out of its trance and leaped to their feet. Jimi played his guitar with his teeth, behind his back, over his head and between his legs. He humped one of the amplifiers as he continued on with “Wild Thing”. Jimi made tender love to his Stratocaster, caressing the strings, and then gently laying it down. But, instead of climbing on top as the crowd now expected, Hendrix squirted lighter fluid on his guitar and set it aflame. The screaming feedback from the Strat pierced the air with a terrible death moan. This was obviously a mercy killing of his dearest love, with thousands of witnesses in attendance. The Experience lived up to their name.
Like Jackie Robinson in baseball, Hendrix broke the color barrier in Rock. Before Jimi, even superstars like Chuck Berry and Little Richard played with all-Black backup bands, restricted to R&B, Funk, Soul and, more recently Motown… the Negro League of Rock & Roll. White covers usually outsold the originals. But, with Hendrix, color became irrelevant… Jimi translated Blues, R&B, R&R, Funk, Folk, Jazz and Psychedelia into a tongue that any teenager could understand. In Hendrix’s large, gifted hands a guitar became the blast of a machine gun, the roar of fighter jet, the fury of hell, the flutter of angel’s wings, soft rain or cross-town traffic. Young guitarists today still try to analyze the work of the master. Jimi made Monterey, which in turn led to Woodstock.
The Death of AM Top 40:Tom “Big Daddy” Donahue and a couple of friends decided to buy the 6 PM-to-midnight spot on a dumpy little foreign language FM radio station, bring down an armful of their favorite albums and give them a spin. Did Big Daddy invent underground FM radio? Impossible to say, because lots of little maverick stations popped up all over the country in 1967. We do know that Donahue was the first to broadcast from the heart of the counterculture (San Francisco). AM Top 40 formulas didn’t work on FM radio. No-budget operations didn’t hassle with two-and-a-half minute pop singles. FM jockeys had no playlists or charts and preferred to put on an spacey album and let it play: Black or hybrid White R&B, sitar music, Jug Band music, Folk or Folk Rock, LA or SF Psychedelic and even tapes from local garage bands. This, of course, exposed the Teen market to the likes of Big Brother, the Dead, Quicksilver, Country Joe and the Fish, the Doors, Zappa, the Fugs and Phil Ochs.
Within a year, nearly every Boomer teen in America lived within range of at least one underground FM station. They handed down their AM transistor radios to younger siblings and bought albums, rather than singles. LPs became the Boomer standard, and this new, more expensive taste had an immediate impact… the record industry topped the billion dollar mark for the first time in 1967.
1969 Woodstock served as a summary and a climax of an era. The peaceful coexistence of nearly half a million stoned-out, sex-crazed longhairs amazed the world. The White House heard a thunderous echo as the huge crowd joined in as Country Joe McDonald prompted, “Give me an F…
Fate chose Jimi Hendrix to deliver the key sermon on the final night of the holy ceremony, but the show lagged far behind schedule, and dawn loomed on the horizon as he appeared. Sleepy heads and exhausted bodies snapped to attention as they listened to a familiar tune. The crowd heard menacing choppers circling overhead and semi-automatic and machine gun fire on the ground… bodies ripped apart from the blasts and women and children screamed in horror. The bombs burst in air among other violent explosions in Hendrix’s new interpretation of the Star Spangled Banner. No Rocker ever made a guitar speak the way that Jimi did in the dawn’s early light at Woodstock. Teens heard a perfect reflection of how they felt at the time: they loved America, but to call it the “land of the free” was just a lie as long as we remained in Vietnam. The Woodstock Nation already boasted an official flag, and now Jimi offered an updated, more realistic Anthem.
PLAYLIST for Brief History of R&R lecture:
Roots: Rural:
1. Linin’ the Track by Taj Mahal - Slave railroad work song CD
2. Warming by the Devil’s Fire - 1920s Gospel and sermon CD
3. Crossroads by Robert Johnson- 1920s early rebel CD
4. Crossroads by Cream (1966)- 2nd Age- DVD
Roots: Urban (1920s to Mid 1950s)
5. Spoonful by Howlin’ Wolf (1954) CD
6. Spoonful by Cream (1966) - 2nd Golden Age- DVD
First Golden Age of R&R (1954 TO 1959)
7. Shake, Rattle and Roll by Big Joe Turner- (1952) Urban Roots- CD
8. ” by Bill Haley (1955) -white cover CD
9. Hound Dog by Big Mama Thorton- (1954) CD
10. ” by Elvis- cover- (1956) CD
11. Tutti Fruitti by Little Richard- (1956) CD
12. ” by Pat Boone- Lily white cover (1957) CD
13. Peggy Sue by Buddy Holly (1958)- CD
14. ” by John Lennon (1975) 2nd Age- CD
Teen Idols (1960 to 1964)
15. He’s a Rebel- the Crystals Phil Spector/ Wall of Sound (1962) CD
16. You Keep Me Hanging On by the Supremes - Motown CD
17. ” by Vanilla Fudge (1968) - 2nd Age/ Psychedlia
Second Golden Age (1964 to 1970)
18. Rock and Roll Music (1957) by Chuck Berry-
19. ” by the Beatles (1964)
20. Satisfaction (1965) by the Rolling Stones-
21. ” by Devo (1978) - Post Disco Nerd Punk- DVD
22. Feel-like-I’m-fixin-to-die-rag by Country Joe at Woodstock (1969)- DVD 3
23. National Anthem by Jimi at Woodstock (1969) - DVD 3
Published by Greg at 08:04 PM on March 5, 2005