Electric Shock

by Peter Doggett

  While Billboard, America’s music-trade journal, was chronicling the surprising revival of rock ’n’ roll that season (it made a ‘Very Lively Corpse7’), it began to note the success of British groups unknown to its readers. ‘From Liverpool8? You’re a Hit!’, it trumpeted in June 1963. The prime movers were the group it insisted on calling Gerri & the Pacemakers, the year’s hottest new act in Australia, and (with equal disregard for detail) ‘the Beetles’. By November, both acts had been booked to follow Cliff Richard and Frank Ifield on The Ed Sullivan Show. And then, without any warning, Billboard provided strange Christmas cheer for Britain: ‘Beatlemania seems to have taken9 off in the United States’, it announced. This was three weeks before the proposed release date of Capitol Records’ first Beatles single, ‘I Want to Hold Your Hand’, when hardly any American citizens had been exposed to their music. Billboard’s explanation was that ‘the publicity ruckus10 stirred so far is of major proportions’. Their record company had already decided that the Beatles were going to become American stars, or they would bankrupt themselves trying. They arranged lavish advertising spreads and a campaign suggesting that Hollywood star Janet Leigh, of Psycho fame, would adopt the Beatles’ trademark haircut. (Leigh preferred not to play along, and her place was taken by ‘starlet Gail Stevens11’, who after being spotlighted in a Beatles fan magazine was rarely seen again.)

  Although the New York Times declared that America was unlikely to fall for the ‘dated stuff’ being offered by the Beatles, ‘I Want to Hold Your Hand’ quickly reached No. 1. By late spring 1964, the group occupied the top five places on the US singles chart. ‘Great Britain hasn’t been so influential12 in American affairs since 1775’, the first year of the Revolution, wrote columnist Jack Maher. Even adults were cueing up Beatles records on jukeboxes, so they could try to understand why their children were so excited. Soundtrack composer Henry Mancini predicted that the Beatles ‘would never last13. How can they? How can anyone sustain the sort of meteoric rise that shot them to stardom?’ American reviewer Edward Jablonski claimed that the group had ‘left no lasting impress14 upon our culture … Their style is an English parody (although possibly not so intended) of our popular country style, plus a dash of the blues … they seem to be pleasant enough chaps. That they cannot sing or as much as carry one good note is immaterial.’ The Beatles’ most bemused critic, however, was R&B singer Ben E. King. ‘These boys, however good15 they may be, are playing the same music the Drifters and half a dozen other American groups were producing six or seven years ago’, he noted with a slight air of grievance. This was a revolution in reverse; a bold step towards the past.

  In 1961, when the Beatles had not yet met their manager, Brian Epstein, or recruited drummer Ringo Starr, the disc jockey at Liverpool’s Cavern Club, Bob Wooler, had already examined the group’s stunning local popularity. They were, he said, ‘the biggest thing to have hit16 the Liverpool rock ’n’ roll set-up in years … because they resurrected original-style rock ’n’ roll music … To those people on the verge of quitting teendom – those who had experienced during their most impressionable years the impact of rhythm ’n’ blues music (raw rock ’n’ roll) – this was an experience, a process of regaining and reliving a style of sounds and associated feelings identifiable with their era … Here was the excitement – both physical and aural – that symbolised the rebellion of youth in the ennuied mid-1950s.’ Wooler concluded: ‘I don’t think anything like them will happen again.’

  There were countless rock ’n’ roll bands – teen-beat groups, in the modern parlance – keeping the faith across Britain in the early 1960s. What enabled the Beatles and the other Merseybeat groups to gain such momentum was the island culture of Liverpool. Though London determined the mood of the nation, Liverpool had declared silent independence, maintaining its own heroes and obsessions. Other cities strived to attract London’s attention, but in Liverpool, fame on Merseyside was enough. London’s teenagers regarded themselves as a national elite, and saw no kudos in resurrecting an exhausted fad. So while Liverpool’s musicians stoked the damp embers of rock ’n’ roll, throwing the latest American soul and girl-group hits into the fire, London’s young bands pursued something more self-consciously elitist: US R&B and jazz – music which marked out its followers as modernists, not traditionalists.

  Out goes the Rock17, in comes Trad.

  Melody Maker, January 1961

  Uniforms – Has Trad Gone Mad18?

  Melody Maker, August 1961

  Like the Dixieland revivalists who vowed to expel bebop from American jazz in the late 1940s, the doyens of Britain’s traditional jazz movement wanted to retrieve a golden age, and comfort themselves in its glow. The ‘trad’ boom of the early 1960s coincided with a culture-wide nostalgia for a romanticised version of the 1920s: all flappers and gangsters, bobs and bowlers. In the hands of Kenny Ball’s Jazzmen and the Temperance Seven, trad was family entertainment, as harmless as the greasepaint and canes of The Black and White Minstrels or the car chases and gunplay of TV’s The Roaring 20’s.

  Yet trad was born in deadly earnest, as observer Jim Godbolt noted, by people ‘obsessed with the concept19 of instrumental purity’. It traced its British heritage back to George Webb’s Dixielanders in 1943, eschewed the evil saxophone, and prided itself on its intimate knowledge of obscure recordings by a select pantheon of 1920s instrumentalists. Godbolt astutely recognised that this was ‘the first ever example20 of a musical culture to be absorbed from gramophone records’. Attaining its musical peak in the early 1950s, with bands led by Chris Barber and Ken Colyer, and accidentally spawning the skiffle craze, trad attracted a loyal audience of students, dancers and drinkers. Their arch-enemies were those who followed the credo of ‘modern’ jazz, and this bitter rivalry ensured that by the early 1960s, British festivals could boast pitched battles among their attractions – each side blaming the other for besmirching the good name of jazz. (These incidents paled alongside the virtual ransacking of the Olympia theatre in Paris in 1955, by teenage ‘trad’ fans of jazz saxophonist Sidney Bechet.)

  The Daily Mirror helpfully provided a guide to the warring parties. ‘Trad fans are usually21 younger than Mods’, it revealed in March 1963, by which time trad had already been ousted from the best-sellers charts. ‘They may be school-children, students – or sometimes an earnest 40-year-old with a beard. Mod enthusiasts are usually in their 20s and do a job of some kind. Trads mostly look on Mods as a lot of slickly dressed phoneys pretending to get intellectual pleasure where none exists. Mods mostly consider Trads to be a lot of kids who like dressing up and don’t recognise a cheap, commercial sound when they hear one.’

  Until 1960, there had been virtually no territory over which to squabble. Aside from cartoonish music-hall revivals by the likes of Billy Cotton’s orchestra and the Big Ben Banjo Band, British jazz made little commercial impression in the 1950s. The exceptions were Johnny Dankworth’s satirical ‘Experiments with Mice’, on which he parodied America’s leading modernist bands, and Chris Barber’s 1959 instrumental ‘Petite Fleur’ (on which Barber did not actually perform). Then, as the likes of Emile Ford and Joe Brown – and, in America, the Everly Brothers and Clarence Henry – translated the hits of the 1920s into teen-beat style, the public indulged a brief passion for clarinet solos, which trad bandleader Acker Bilk was ideally placed to satisfy. As Humphrey Lyttleton reflected when it was all over, ‘The worst thing that happened22 to jazz was when it suddenly invaded the pop field. It was like a rabbit invading a python.’

  At least the rabbit was well dressed. Acker Bilk was subjected to perhaps the most sophisticated marketing campaign yet employed by any pop performer. His publicist, Peter Leslie, suggested that he wear a bowler hat and a striped waistcoat, an unmistakeable visual identity. The clarinettist was billed as ‘Mr Acker Bilk’, clad in a variety of period costumes for his The Seven Ages of Acker LP, and gifted with such contemporary advertising slogans as ‘There IS no substitute for Bilk’ and ‘An Acker a
Day Keeps the Bopper Away’. Leslie described his fans as being under the shadow of the atomic bomb: ‘since Today is so bloody awful23, ergo anything to do with Yesterday must of necessity be better’. Ironically, Bilk’s most lucrative record, ‘Stranger on the Shore’, a lusciously intimate setting of clarinet against strings, had nothing to do with jazz and was a conscious effort to echo the US easy-listening success of the 101 Strings. It was selected as the theme for a children’s TV series, and surpassed Dave Brubeck’s ‘Take Five’ as the world’s best-selling ‘jazz’ record of the era. It also assured Bilk of a lifelong audience for his stage shows, where he ranged from ‘pure’ trad to something verging dangerously close to rhythm and blues.

  Inevitably, there was a movie, It’s Trad Dad (filled with cameos from pop stars); a TV series called The Trad Fad; a pastiche from a BBC disc jockey, Brian Matthew, entitled ‘Trad Mad’; a trad-themed episode of the TV comedy Hugh and I; and a virtual monopoly of the British Jazz LP chart by Messrs Bilk, Barber and Ball (interrupted only by Brubeck). Trad even conquered Europe, with the million-selling ‘Schlafe mein Prinzchen’ by Papa Bue’s Viking Jazz Band.

  At its moment of commercial triumph, trad was ambushed by a younger, rowdier rival. As late as November 1962, pundits predicted that the New Year would be dominated by jazz. Within a matter of weeks, trad had vanished from the UK charts, leaving scarcely a trace beyond the packed houses who loyally attended Bilk, Barber and Ball performances for the next fifty years. Otherwise, the clubs which had once comprised the trad circuit were now bastions of beat music – or, in Newcastle, Birmingham and especially London, something altogether rougher and, to its devotees, decidedly more ‘authentic’.

  The music which is currently24 drawing the biggest crowds in London clubs these days is plain, unadulterated rhythm-and-blues.

  Melody Maker, November 1962

  All the loud, death-dealing25 groups are going to ruin the entire movement unless audiences become more discriminating.

  R’nB Scene magazine, September 1964

  In March 1962, Mississippi-born bluesman Howlin’ Wolf, his voice as jagged as a broken beer bottle, his songs steeped in sexuality and voodoo, was booked to appear in front of the Staffordshire Society of Jazz Music, before taking his place at the Hammersmith Palais International Jazz Band Ball. Illness prevented him from flying to England, and his place was taken by Scottish folksingers Robin Hall and Jimmie MacGregor, creators of the novelty song ‘Football Crazy’.

  Wolf’s brand of music was virtually unknown in Britain, where a band led by Alexis Korner and Cyril Davies, who called themselves Blues Incorporated, could bill themselves at London’s Marquee as ‘Britain’s only Rhythm & Blues Group’. Pop star Mike Sarne was one of those who questioned the very notion of British blues: ‘It’s very dangerous26 to play in other people’s playgrounds … I could find 300 Negro kids in Harlem who could sing the blues with reason and a thousand times better than anyone here. So why do they try in this country?’

  By September 1962, despite Sarne’s warning, R&B clubs were opening all over London. Georgie Fame offered a blend of modern jazz and blues at Rik Gunnell’s All-Nighter at the Flamingo; Blues By Six were at Studio 51; the Rolling Stones at the Woodstock Hotel in Cheam; the Manfred Manne Mike Hug (sic) Quartet mixed jazz and blues at the Greenford Hotel; while Dave Hunt’s R&B Band, about to recruit a guitarist named Ray Davies, were at the Chinese Twist Club (motto: ‘Chop Chop, Velly Velly Good’). Blues Incorporated continued to set the pace: 800 ‘fervent fans27’ packed out their Marquee appearances, where the band recorded a live album, delivering music ‘to twist to, to jive to, jump to, swing with and get with’, or so Melody Maker declared. (The paper also asked: is Blues Incorporated the loudest band in Britain?)

  ‘I’m a purist28’, said the group’s co-leader Cyril Davies, preparing for a struggle with those who wanted to meld R&B with mainstream pop. ‘I don’t like to see the music messed about. It would be great to use acoustic instruments. I’d much prefer string bass and ordinary guitar. But what can you do in a fair-sized club?’ There was an additional pressure, soon faced by every blues band in the country: the lemming-like flood of musicians and fans alike towards the teen-beat and rock ’n’ roll hybrid of the Beatles. Melody Maker noted with disapproval in June 1963 that ‘One of the more established29 and more respectable R&B groups has suddenly turned up in Beatles haircuts and dark sweaters, and recorded a roll-along Chuck Berry number named “Come On”.’ The culprits were the Rolling Stones. Pop balladeer Craig Douglas pronounced their single ‘very very ordinary30. Can’t hear a word they are saying … definitely not a hit’. But at the Station Hotel in Richmond, they were attracting a crowd which ‘in its fervour was like31 a revivalist meeting in America’s Deep South’. They were, said the ever-watchful Melody Maker, ‘five young men who see themselves32 as pioneers of authentic beat music on the dangerous fringe of pop and R&B’.

  The notion of authenticity shadowed the entire British R&B scene (eventually being parodied by the Bonzo Dog Band, with their musical question: ‘Can Blue Men Sing the Whites?’). Though most British buffs paid lip service to any American veteran who could be linked to the blues, the flourishing outfits ignored the successful jump blues and proto-rock ’n’ roll stars of the late 1940s in favour of ‘real’ blues from the South, via the Chess studios in Chicago. Even at Chess, the roster was divided between artists who targeted youth (Chuck Berry and Bo Diddley) and those whose age and eerie atmospherics required a more mature and world-weary audience (Muddy Waters and Howlin’ Wolf). Bands such as the Rolling Stones, who stuffed their repertoire with the rock stylings of Berry and Diddley, were disparaged by those with more ‘pure’ tastes.

  The ultimate badge of authenticity amongst white bluesmen, however, was reserved for those who adhered to the cult of a singer who had died some twenty-five years earlier. ‘At first the music repelled me33,’ Eric Clapton recalled of his indoctrination, ‘it was so intense, and there was no attempt being made by this man to sugar-coat what he was trying to say, or play. It was hardcore, more than anything I had ever heard. After a few listenings, I realised that, on some level, I had found the master, and that following this man’s example would be my life’s work.’

  Clapton’s master, who echoed through the young Englishman’s work from the Yardbirds through John Mayall’s Bluesbreakers to Cream and into a new century, was Robert Johnson: delivered posthumous and pure to Clapton, and a generation of wide-eyed aficionados, as (in the title of a 1962 LP) King of the Delta Blues Singers. This anthology of his 1936–7 recordings, none of which had matched the sales of Blind Lemon Jefferson or Skip James, let alone Leroy Carr or Lonnie Johnson, left its mark on everyone from Bob Dylan to Keith Richards. Packaged with academic care, it described Johnson’s uncanny art and life in mythological terms: ‘He seemed constantly trapped34 … He was tormented by phantoms, and weird, threatening monsters … Robert Johnson appeared and disappeared, in much the same fashion as a sheet of newspaper twisting and twirling down a dark and windy midnight street.’ Unphotographed (as it seemed at the time), vague even in the memories of those who knew him, gripped by existential dread (‘Hellhound on My Trail’) and insuperable obstacles (‘Stones in My Passway’), Johnson was accepted without question as the godhead of blues lore. Only more recently have scholars such as Elijah Wald unpicked the myths to reveal a more human Johnson: one who, like all his peers, stole lines from the repertoire of those around him; who made his living from pop hits and even polkas amidst his blues; who, despite the cinematic splendour of the scene, never sold his soul at a crossroads or walked hand in hand with Satan. As a historical document, however, the Johnson album was and is remarkable. It demonstrates his carefree attitude towards time-keeping (bequeathing his legacy of the eleven-and-a-half-bar blues to John Lee Hooker and then Bob Dylan); his early mastery of the boogie rhythm; the repeated guitar riff he used to stamp his identity on the blues; his command of several diffuse blues traditions, as if he’d been raise
d in them all; and the way in which, on his first Columbia disc, ‘Terraplane Blues’, he sounded as if he were sketching out parts for an electric band, when he probably never heard (or imagined) an electric guitar in his lifetime.

  It’s intriguing to imagine how Johnson would be viewed had he lived long enough to tour Europe like Big Bill Broonzy, or indeed Muddy Waters, who supposedly scandalised British blues fans in 1958 by touring with an electric band, and disappointed them on his return in 1963 by playing acoustic. (Recordings from the first visit dispel this myth, incidentally.) Johnson’s absence allowed Eric Clapton to seize upon the image of ‘one man and his guitar35 versus the world … one guy who was completely alone and had no options, no alternatives other than just to sing and play to ease his pains’: a vision of the ideal bluesman which had more to do with Clapton’s psychological needs than with what a blues singer actually represented in his own milieu.

  Schooled in such fact and legend, a generation of white blues musicians, critics and prophets felt qualified to judge the worth and authenticity of the music being made in Britain. ‘All over London clubs36 are springing up with claim to feature R&B and many new groups are being formed to make R&B noises’, wrote Jazzbeat editor Pat Richards in 1964. ‘That does not mean the sound they make is R&B.’ Whereas Blues Incorporated were, by his reckoning, ‘legitimate and honest’, the work of their copyists ‘is often dishonest, shallow and worthless’.

  One man’s dishonesty was another’s authenticity. As Eric Clapton admitted later, ‘I was very pompous37 towards white blues groups … my ego made me regard it as being all right in my case, but not in anybody else’s.’ Some believed that you could only play the blues if you were black; some if you were white but suffering; some if you were white, and had devoted yourself to forensic study of black artists and their records, ‘tempering enthusiasm with a degree38 of critical appreciation of the music’, as journalist Roger Eagle insisted. While purists abhorred the Rolling Stones, some R&B fanzines preferring not even to mention their names, they deserved credit for persuading the networked American pop programme Shindig! to showcase Howlin’ Wolf; for promoting John Lee Hooker to the point that he could score British hit singles; and for topping the UK charts with arguably their least commercial single, a cover of Willie Dixon’s ‘Little Red Rooster’ soaked in bottleneck guitar and animal sexuality. A few months earlier, another British blues band, the Animals, had achieved the same feat with ‘House of the Rising Sun’, a tense and guttural traditional ballad about life in a brothel.