Electric Shock

by Peter Doggett

  Contents

  Cover

  About the Book

  About the Author

  Also by Peter Doggett

  Dedication

  Title Page

  Introduction

  1. The Voice of the Dead

  2. Ev’rybody’s Doin’ It Now

  3. Take Me to the Land of Jazz

  4. Dance-O-Mania

  5. Wizard of the Microphone

  6. Blues in the Night

  7. Bugle-Call Rag

  8. Millions Like Us

  9. Let’s Get Straight

  10. Music for Gracious Living

  11. Real Rock Drive

  12. Bad Motorcycle

  13. Soul Food

  14. Music for Moderns

  15. Revolution in Reverse

  16. Sorry, Parents

  17. Highlife

  18. Freak out People

  19. Flying through the Air

  20. The New Prophets

  21. The Devil’s Interval

  22. Push-Button Rock

  23. Union of Bodies

  24. Be Disrespectful

  25. Dance Stance

  26. Presenting the Fantasy

  27. That Scream

  28. Audio Time Warp

  29. The Murder of Music?

  30. Blurred Lines

  Picture Credits

  Acknowledgements

  Source Notes

  Select Bibliography

  Index

  Copyright

  About the Book

  Popular music changed the world.

  Its rhythms have influenced how we walk down the street, how we face ourselves in the mirror, and how we handle our daily conversations and encounters. It has shaped our morals and social mores; it has transformed our attitudes towards race and gender, religion and politics.

  Electric Shock tells the panoramic story of popular music, from the arrival of ragtime in the 1980s to the present day. From the beginning of recording, when a musical performance could be preserved for the first time, to the digital age, when all of recorded music is only a mouse-click away; from the straight-laced ballads of the Victorian era and the ‘coon songs’ that shocked America in the early twentieth century to gangsta rap, death metal and the multiple strands of modern dance music: Peter Doggett takes us on a rollercoaster ride through the history of music.

  Within a narrative full of anecdotes and characters, Electric Shock mixes musical critique with wider social and cultural history and shows how revolutionary changes in technology have turned popular music into the lifeblood of the modern world.

  About the Author

  At the age of six, Peter Doggett’s ambition was to be the drummer in the Dave Clark 5. Since then, he has been an avid consumer of popular music of all kinds. He began writing professionally in 1980, and is the author of numerous books about music and cultural history, most recently The Man Who Sold the World: David Bowie and the 1970s. His other works include You Never Give Me Your Money, chronicling the break-up of the Beatles and its personal and financial aftermath; There’s a Riot Going On, a history of the collision between rock music and revolutionary politics in the 1960s; and studies of John Lennon and Lou Reed. He also edited and contributed to Seperate Cinema, a history of African American film, and collections by several leading twentieth-century photographers. Peter lives in London, with the artist and illustrator Rachel Baylis.

  www.peterdoggett.org

  Also by Peter Doggett

  The Man Who Sold the World:

  David Bowie and the 1970s

  You Never Give Me Your Money:

  The Battle for the Soul of the Beatles

  There’s a Riot Going On:

  Revolutionaries, Rock Stars and the

  Rise and Fall of ’60s Counter-culture

  The Art and Music of John Lennon

  Are You Ready for the Country:

  Elvis, Dylan, Parsons and the Roots of Country Rock

  Abbey Road/Let It Be

  Lou Reed: Growing Up in Public

  As Rufus Lodge

  F**k: An Irreverent History of the F-Word

  As contributor

  The 1960s Photographed by David Hurn

  Art Kane

  Separate Cinema: The First 100 Years of Black Poster Art

  Tom Kelley’s Studio

  Mario Casilli

  Hollywood Bound

  For Rachel

  Electric Shock

  From the Gramophone to the iPhone –

  125 Years of Pop Music

  Peter Doggett

  Introduction

  I

  If, in 1973, you mailed a postal order for £2.50 to a box number on Merseyside, you might receive a record in an unmarked sleeve, processed-egg yellow or smoked-salmon pink. Or your money might vanish, all subsequent letters ignored.

  Two times out of three, my parcel arrived; poor odds for an impecunious schoolboy, except that the prize justified the risk. It was illicit, occult, an experience unavailable from the ill-stocked record shop in my home town, where some of my schoolmates pilfered singles from the half-price box at lunchtime. Although I was too moral, or scared, to join them, I was still prepared to steal from corporations and millionaires. So I wrote to the mysterious people who made their living from selling illegal LPs – bootlegs, as they were known – via obliquely worded ads in the back pages of the London music papers.

  That was how, at the age of 16, I first heard a recording of Bob Dylan and the future members of the Band, performing at the Royal Albert Hall in 1966. Or so it said on the yellow photocopy tucked inside the cover, the only validation of its contents.

  By purchasing Royal Albert Hall, against the wishes of the artist and his record company, I was buying my way into a secret society: insider trading, if you like, in the mythology of rock ’n’ roll. I was already aware that this recording was regarded by many as the artistic pinnacle of Dylan’s career, and its aesthetic worth was multiplied for me by its exclusivity. What I hadn’t anticipated was its sonic force, delivered with the fury and contempt of a man who sounded as if he were staring an apocalypse in the eye.

  The album’s climax has become a piece of 1960s folklore. It documents a confrontation between audience members who had convinced themselves, against all aural evidence, that Dylan was only valid with an acoustic guitar; and a man who had staked his sanity on living with extremes, among them the crushing volume of an electric band. ‘Judas’, someone called from the stalls. Dylan drawled a contemptuous response, before leading his musicians into ‘Like a Rolling Stone’.

  Adjectives wouldn’t begin to convey the effect of immersing myself in that moment, and that music, over the months ahead. As I slid towards a teenage nervous breakdown, it offered me not salvation, exactly, because my fate was sealed; not transcendence, because when it was over I still had to face my own existence; but recognition, the hint that I might not be entering the darkness alone; that one could go down into the pit defiantly, self-righteously; that someone else had been there before. Later, after the apocalypse, bemused to have survived, I gathered from that same performance the hope of renewal, just as Dylan had weathered the storm (in another mythological tale) to find respite in a Woodstock basement.

  Thirty years later, returned to the scene of my adolescent collapse by a surreal sequence of romantic circumstances, I wandered through the air-conditioned limbo of my home town’s shopping centre, digesting impressions old and new. Amidst the echoing chatter was the distant sound of music: intended to ease our consumerist footsteps into chain stores or fast-food merchants; to smooth our passage, without being heard. But I can never register the presence of music without wanting to recognise it; and as I concentrated, I realised I had heard this sound before. For the con
traband of 1973 was now legal tender: remixed, remastered, repackaged (and relocated in the interests of historical accuracy from London to Manchester’s Free Trade Hall). It was offered by a multinational corporation as an authentic and fully authorised slice of rock history – still transcendent, but robbed of its underground lustre. The soundtrack for my own descent into the inferno was now being piped at almost subliminal volume through a soulless mall. Music which I would once have chosen to represent my identity, by an artist at the end of his own fraying rope, at war with his psyche and his society, had been rendered in perfect sound quality, at last, so it could serve as background for the sale of burgers and jeans. The music was the same, but its status had changed as radically as the now middle-aged man who was struggling to comprehend what it might all signify.

  If the soundtrack of psychological decay and clinical depression could become muzak, then surely nothing was immune to a metamorphosis as shocking and, perhaps, comic as the fate of Kafka’s Gregor Samsa. Another scene came to mind. London’s Dominion Theatre, in 1991: a bill promising three 1960s hitmakers, the Merseybeats, Herman’s Hermits and the Byrds. Or, to be precise, half of the original Merseybeats; some vintage Hermits, but no Herman; and a Byrds line-up assembled by their first drummer, alongside two men who must have been in short trousers when the group had made their initial visit to Britain in 1965.

  They were merely the backdrop for a bizarre clash of cultures. The musicians masqueraded unconvincingly as the elite of 1965, in front of an audience dominated by teenagers clad in recreations of the Carnaby Street fashions once worn by their parents. The youngsters responded to this ersatz nostalgia by throwing themselves into a display of hippie dancing which they can only have learned from vintage newsreels. The collage was surreal: music, motion and clothing utterly out of sync. It signalled a vain quest for a golden age, from a generation who had been bottle-fed on the superiority of the 1960s to any other era of human history.

  Or, again, an incident repeated daily: I’m queuing to pay for petrol, and over the loudspeakers comes ‘The Game of Love’ by Wayne Fontana and the Mindbenders. I relax into its familiarity, sing along in my head, and suddenly awaken to what’s happening. In 2015, music that is almost fifty years old provides a constant soundtrack to our financial transactions and consumerist obsessions. Above our heads, it is always 1958, or 1965, or 1972, and the music of the rock ’n’ roll revolution – two decades of radio hits, from Bill Haley to Fleetwood Mac – is universal currency so stripped of its value that it signifies nothing, evokes no surprise, triggers nothing more than a sense of belonging, whether or not we are old enough to remember when it was new and stood for something. Now it is culturally empty, but familiar to children and parents alike: as constant and faithful an ingredient of our daily lives as the logos of McDonald’s or Tesco’s. In 1965, ‘The Game of Love’ was a No. 1 hit. In 1966, it was forgotten, swept away by relentless waves of novelty. In the early 1970s, friends thought I was strange – and I was – because I supplemented my diet of new music with battered 1960s hits from junkshops. I was keeping the past alive, but I needn’t have bothered: it was never going to die. It’s easy to imagine returning to whatever will serve as a collective space in the twenty-second century, and still hearing ‘Walk On By’, ‘Lola’ and, yes, even ‘The Game of Love’ in the air, just loud enough to calm the fears and aid the impulse-buying of our great-grandchildren.

  II

  Somewhere amidst those eerie encounters with the musical past lie the seeds of this book. For most of the last half-century, I have been an active consumer of popular music, in increasingly varied forms. For perhaps 70% of that time, I have been writing about the same subject; or, at least, a blinkered representation of it. Fortunate enough to have been paid to investigate pop history for several decades, I have been compelled to experience music that lay far beyond my personal aesthetic.

  But I have still imposed that aesthetic judgement on everything I’ve heard; defined myself as someone who, for example, loves Bob Dylan but not Tom Waits; Crosby, Stills & Nash but not Emerson, Lake & Palmer; Sonic Youth but not the Smiths; soul but not metal; some MOR but not most AOR – a vast Venn diagram of choices and prejudices, at the interlocking heart of which stands just one man, constructed upon the music he loves.

  As my experience in the local garage suggests, we live in a world where people like me have created an approved canon of popular music which is open to constant minor revision, as the latest issue of your favourite heritage rock magazine offers ‘The Greatest Albums You’ve Never Heard’ or slips a choice obscurity into the ‘Best 100 Punk Singles of All Time’. There is an authorised list of momentous events in musical history, which we all agree to recognise, from Elvis Presley at Sun Studios in 1954 to, yes, Bob Dylan and ‘Judas’ in 1966 and on and on; a gallery of classic albums, life-changing singles, vital genres, halcyon eras, eternally fresh, eternally ripe for discovery.

  Yet this is also an age in which all sense of a critical consensus and a carefully curated heritage has been demolished, almost at a stroke, by the catch-all expansiveness of the Internet. Anyone with a broadband connection can access almost every recording made since the invention of recorded sound. True, Beyoncé’s music enjoys a higher profile on YouTube, iTunes and Spotify than her early twentieth-century equivalents, such as Mamie Smith or Marion Harris. But all that separates us from the music of 1920 is the same click of the mouse, or swipe across the tablet, which brings us Beyoncé. The choice is entirely ours.

  So this is a unique moment: for the first time, modern technology allows us to construct our own route through documented history. But it also strips that history of its context. Streaming and download sites offer you the music, but no hint of when or why it was made; and who it was made for. Also missing is any sense of why we enjoy the music we choose; how we have learned, down the generations, to react as we do when the hailstorm of contemporary media fires jazz or hip hop or punk in our direction.

  III

  The invention of recorded sound transformed music from an experience into an artefact, with physical and psychological consequences which reverberate to this day. It imposed a distance between the moment when the music was made and when it was heard. It allowed for endless repetitions of what would once have been a unique performance. And it facilitated the creation of an entire industry, now global in its span, devoted to the making, selling and disseminating of recordings, and the invention of technology to carry that music around the world.

  This revolution in the nature of music-making has altered everyone and everything touched by it – the performer, the audience, and the music itself. The nature of that change has been far-reaching: it has left its mark on the way we think, the way we feel and even the way we move. (It’s even loosened our underwear, or so the horrified commentators of the 1920s recounted, as young women unfastened their corsets to dance the Charleston.) The most powerful changes have been those which involve a change in the rhythms that govern our lives, from the syncopation of ragtime and jazz to today’s unrelenting computerised dance beat. They have altered the way we deal with each other; the language of love, the rhetoric of hate. They have enabled races to communicate and assimilate more easily; and provided the fuel that could engulf those relationships in flames.

  At each step of the way, music has represented modernity, at odds with convention and tradition: the new world perpetually bullying and hectoring the young. But one of the qualities of music, regardless of its origins, is that its delights are inexhaustible. Each musical revolution has altered the soundtrack of the age, but left all its predecessors intact. Yesterday’s mainstream becomes tomorrow’s carefully guarded memory, reviving our individual and collective past every time that the listener pulls a favourite record off the shelf (or opens the appropriate download).

  Technology and music have altered in tandem: revolutions in one field spurring changes in the other, backwards and forwards, to the point where it is difficult to tell Pavlov from his
dogs. The development of new recording techniques in the 1920s allowed crooners to whisper their sweet nothings into our ears, raising the stakes for any mere mortal who wasn’t Bing Crosby, but found himself with a girl in his arms. The invention of the Walkman and the iPod allowed us to become living enactments of the music we loved, parading down the road to the glorious rebel-rousing of metal, punk or hip hop. Before the advent of modern technology, music was made in the home, or witnessed in the concert hall or theatre. Now it can be omnipresent to the extent that we barely recognise its existence. It is literally the soundtrack of our lives – both the badge of our identity, and a background wash of noise whenever we turn on the TV, or walk through a supermarket. And that is one of the dominant themes of this book: what has changed is not just the music, and the technology, but the role that the combination of those two unstable elements plays in our lives.

  This is also the tale of how a world devoted to the lusty pleasures of the Victorian music hall and vaudeville was captivated by the African-American rhythms of ragtime, the first in a long line of musical genres which have entered our lives as if from outer space. Each arrival has been greeted as an outrageous threat to the sanity and sanctity of innocent women and children, while being instantly accepted by the young as a symbol of joyous independence from parental and adult authority. The invader is gradually accepted and tamed, just in time for the cycle to begin again. One generation’s revolutionary becomes the conservative of the next; every musical innovation is both the death of civilisation as we know it, and the dawning of a multidimensional new world.

  IV

  The era of universal accessibility to the past and the present deserves a history that is open, not blinkered. In the arts as in politics, there is nothing more dangerous and deceptive than unanimity, which can easily become tyrannical. There is tyranny, too, in listening only to the masses, as anyone condemned to a world where music was defined by TV talent contests might agree. But it pales alongside the arrogance of a coterie of critics pronouncing that only they are capable of deciding what is worthy of everyone else’s attention. As someone who has been part of that coterie, I know the seductiveness of offering up one’s own artistic tastes for universal acceptance.