Electric Shock

by Peter Doggett

  As Brian Jones of the Rolling Stones noted, ‘We seem to rouse some sort73 of personal anxiety in people. They think we are getting away with things they never could. It’s a sort of frustration.’ For a generation that had endured war, the expending of emotional energy on such apparently undeserving targets as the Beatles and the Stones seemed both appalling and indecent. Husband-and-wife social commentators Grace and Fred Hechinger saw rock ’n’ roll as ‘an indication of the adult failure74 to offer a better focus for the adolescents’ creative interests’. More deplorable still, the Hechingers proclaimed, was the trend towards ‘creeping adult adolescence75’: the willingness of adults to share the same banal pleasures as their children, rather than encouraging their kids towards more substantial artistic experiences.

  The three-way relationship between performer, fan and parent could be complex. Fifteen-year-old Anne Hungerford of San Diego had been trying to convert her parents to the Beatles in 1964, when she learned that the unmarried members of the group had taken their girlfriends away on holiday, without chaperons. ‘I feel I’ve been betrayed76’, she admitted. ‘We convinced the older people that the Beatles were really nice, clean-cut young men. Then they go travelling around the world like that with girls, and you feel like the whole world has come down on your head. After all, how can you be loyal to boys who do things like that, even if they are the Beatles?’ But overt adult acceptance might damn an act in the eyes of their teenage followers: sociologist Peter Laurie noted rather prematurely in 1965, ‘Now only the socially inept77 teenager reveres the Beatles. The establishment has absorbed them.’ The Rolling Stones, by contrast, were assured of parental disapproval: ‘If the Rolling Stones need78 to seem almost obscene [to achieve this], they will. They know they are not and the kids know it is only an act; the only people taken in are the grown-ups.’ As if to prove that the Stones’ fans saw sweet boys beneath their boorish masks, girls well below the age of consent wrote romantic love letters to the group: ‘You are Mr Wonderful79, Mick, gorgeous, and I want to marry you. I have blonde hair (which is going brown). I am growing it long. I have grey eyes and I’m nearly 14. If you wait another year we can go to Southern Ireland and get married.’

  While fans viewed their idols as potential sexual or romantic partners, psychologists pondered over the significance of the long hair worn by the Beatles and their successors. Did this give the group a glow of femininity which made them less threatening to pubescent or prepubescent girls? Did their flowing locks allow their male fans to view them with the same mixture of lust and longing that they would have harboured for young women? Were the hirsute groups expressing their own latent homosexuality? Or, in contrast, so confident a grasp of their own heterosexuality that they could afford to disguise it behind the veneer of androgyny? Were both musicians and fans locked into a mutual display of narcissism, concealing a vacuum of self-doubt? Such intriguing debates preoccupied academics for years to come, as if teenagers and their idols were aliens beyond our ken.

  Although nobody reported the fact, pop stars such as the Beatles could take their pick from a procession of willing fans, to the point that they became disgusted by the simplicity of their conquests. By 1966, indeed, the Beatles had become so exhausted by the constant adulation, the relentless horror of grasping hands and shrieking voices, the imprisonment in hotel rooms and airport lounges, the music drowned by noise and delivered without a modicum of care – so bored, in short – that they opted never to tour again. The trappings of Beatlemania seemed irrelevant and anachronistic when the music and its lyrical content had altered so profoundly and so quickly. The new pop demanded to be heard; now it needed an audience who were prepared to listen.

  Everybody concerned has got80 to learn that to saturate the disc world with hundreds of tunes sounding the same is to court disaster.

  Record producer Joe Meek, 1963

  On one point, the record makers81 are unanimous. By Christmas, the public will have tired of background sounds created by three guitars and a drumbeat.

  Daily Mirror, September 1963

  Had their producer George Martin not backed down, the Beatles’ second single would have been a song by Mitch Murray, ‘How Do You Do It’. Instead, the song was inherited by their Liverpool friends Gerry & the Pacemakers, and topped the British charts. So did a second Murray song, ‘I Like It’, while a third, ‘I’m Telling You Now’, was an American No. 1 for Manchester’s Freddie & the Dreamers. Murray was therefore ideally placed to publish a pamphlet entitled How to Write a Hit Song. Like Charles Harris half a century earlier, his advice exposed the limitations of the style that had made him famous.

  ‘I normally try to start82 a song with a catchy title’, he declared, preferably located at both the beginning and end of each verse. ‘Each song is, or should be, a story, and the story should be told in simple and direct stages from the very beginning to the death.’ He posited a promising pop scenario: ‘boy meets girl83, boy loses girl, boy wins girl back again’. The conclusion had to be happy, or at least hopeful: ‘It is very rarely, these days84, that a miserable song will sell.’ His final instruction put paid to any notions of originality or novelty. ‘If you really study your market85,’ he told his readers, ‘you will get to know what particular tempo and beat-style is in vogue at the present time. Use this beat, because, simply, this is what is selling.’ And would presumably always do so.

  Murray’s book inspired at least one highly successful songwriter: Gordon Sumner, alias Sting, who read it when he was 13. But the advice reinforced the stereotype that every beat-group hit sounded the same. Instrumentation might vary: Gerry & the Pacemakers boasted a keyboard player instead of a second guitarist; other Liverpool bands used a saxophone. But there was an instantly recognisable and generic ‘beat-group sound’, based on the Everly Brothers and Buddy Holly, popularised by the Beatles, and so dominant for the remainder of 1963 that between 30% and 50% of the songs in the Top 30 would squeeze within its narrow boundaries. In retrospect, you can find stirrings of this sound in pre-Beatles British pop – the smooth teen-beat of Cliff Richard’s ‘Please Don’t Tease’, Shane Fenton’s ‘I’m a Moody Guy’ and Joe Brown’s ‘A Picture of You’. The Beatles’ debut, ‘Love Me Do’, with its maudlin, soul-inspired harmonies, stood out from the forced breeziness of its contemporaries. But ‘Please Please Me’ in January 1963 was the real birth of the new: more driven than any previous British pop record, with John Lennon’s almost frighteningly intense vocal supported by an instantly fresh harmonic blend. Most of all, the Beatles sounded like a gang: forceful, persuasive and sexually potent. That sense of self-belief stoked the otherwise banal ‘She Loves You’, and was redoubled on ‘I Want to Hold Your Hand’, where the lyrics promised tame romance, while the rhythmic thrust of the music delivered something altogether more phallic.fn3 By the summer of 1964, when the Beatles were capable of filling an album with their own compositions, their sound had become plumper yet more streamlined, Lennon’s voice more cynical (his vocals between 1964 and 1966 seemed to carry their own subtitles, which read: ‘If you think I believe a word of this romantic nonsense, you must be an idiot’). Thereafter, they were ready to fulfil the prediction of the Daily Mirror’s Judith Simons, who astutely suggested in autumn 1963 that ‘when they have passed through86 their present phase of just-beyond-the-amateur, the potentially brilliant team of songwriters, John Lennon and Paul McCartney, will come up with some modern folk music of lasting worth’. And that was precisely what they did, once the definition of folk had been broadened sufficiently by their American friend Bob Dylan.

  On their first album, recorded in February 1963, the Beatles had already explored, in simplistic fashion, the notion of solipsism and/or daydreaming, in ‘There’s a Place’. (The Beach Boys’ Brian Wilson would revisit the same scenario in a slightly more disturbing way, with ‘In My Room’.) Yet even when their lyrics offered nothing more outré than combinations of personal pronouns and the word ‘love’, the Beatles almost always sounded committed
to what they were singing. Cliff Richard’s ‘Summer Holiday’ was sung without any hint of involvement, so that fans could sketch in their own fantasies. The Beatles left the listener no choice but to succumb to their power.

  Their sound was now being reproduced not only by optimistic amateurs, but also by existing stars such as Johnny Kidd & the Pirates, Adam Faith & the Roulettes – even Cliff Richard & the Shadows, who had vowed to remain above the fray. Few dared to buck the trend. Arguably the bravest pop decision of 1963 was Gerry & the Pacemakers’ choice of Rodgers and Hammerstein’s ballad from the musical Carousel, ‘You’ll Never Walk Alone’, as a single: orchestrated, epic, their third No. 1 hit. ‘I knew it would happen87’, crowed the UK trade paper Record Retailer. ‘After all the whoa-whoa-whoa’s and yay-yay-yers, all the frantic guitars misplayed, and see-you-at-the-Palais type songs, we’re turning slowly back to the oldies.’ But that was as forlorn a hope as the constant refrain that the big-band days were about to return. When even the Salvation Army was promoting its own beat group (the Joystrings), the battle was already lost.

  Many of the beat groups, from the Beatles downwards, were prepared to accept that they might need to broaden their audience by mixing ballads and even an occasional Broadway standard into their repertoire. It was a way of safeguarding their future, in a business which appeared to offer no enduring career prospects beyond light entertainment: pantomime, seaside variety shows, comedy films, eventually (sporting a bow tie and ruffed shirt) cabaret. Every previous British act had been guided down that path: the Beatles weren’t joking when they assumed they would only have two, or three, or at most five years at the top.

  At least Lennon and McCartney had the option of making a career as professional songwriters, and perhaps even composing a West End musical. ‘They are the only two88 with enough talent to do something new’, their Liverpool friend Bob Wooler said. ‘I don’t think any of these r-and-b groups’ – he was including the Beatles – ‘will produce a song about Liverpool; they would find it embarrassing. They don’t see anything romantic here.’ Paul McCartney revealed in 1964 that they had begun to sketch out a musical based on their home town, but abandoned the project when Lionel Bart beat them to it, with Maggie May.

  McCartney’s throwaway remark hinted at a different Beatles, led by a student of English literature and a former art student, who had befriended a bunch of ‘exis’ (existentialists) in Hamburg. During 1964, newly settled in London, the two songwriting Beatles were inundated with social invitations by members of the British establishment, eager to view the latest additions to the human zoo. Lennon and McCartney gravitated naturally towards those who were young, and could widen their horizons: photographers such as Robert Freeman and Bob Whittaker, film-maker Dick Lester (who directed their pop-art feature films A Hard Day’s Night and Help!), publisher Tom Maschler, beat poets, hip comedians, bedsitter novelists, fringe actors and directors, journalists and television pundits. Lennon published books of his semi-satirical, semi-nonsensical, semi-surreal writings and drawings. McCartney (especially after he began a relationship with actress Jane Asher) explored theatrical first nights and Soho art exhibitions.

  This was new territory for pop, which threatened to undermine the certainties of the British class system. It involved the Beatles (and later the leaders of the Who and the Kinks) stepping out of the classic working-class pop milieu, into an arty middle-class environment which, by 1964, also boasted teenage chanteuse Marianne Faithfull and Peter & Gordon (Peter being Jane Asher’s elder brother, and a vital link between McCartney and the fledgling British underground). As if to balance the Beatles’ invasion of London society, well-bred middle-class stars such as Mick Jagger began to fake a backstreet drawl to enhance their credibility as working-class heroes. Generations of social etiquette were overturned in a matter of months.

  * * *

  fn1 The so-called ‘mod revival’ which began around 1979 was the antithesis: a static cult devoted to being eternally like their predecessors in 1964.

  fn2 In the same book, young girls were helpfully advised to learn the waltz, the foxtrot and the cha-cha, as they would be guaranteed to need them when they grew up and started attending formal ballroom dances.

  fn3 When Gerry Marsden sang ‘I like the way you tickle my chin’ on Mitch Murray’s ‘I Like It’, it was hard to imagine that the tickling stopped there. The Liverpool bands had, after all, paid their dues in the red-light district of Hamburg.

  1, 2

  WHEN JOHN F. Kennedy was assassinated, the best-selling album in America was In the Wind, by a folk trio named Peter, Paul & Mary. It featured sleeve notes by the man who had written the trio’s No. 2 hit single, ‘Blowin’ in the Wind’ (described as ‘a sailor’s lament3’ in one contemporary review). 22-year-old Bob Dylan was, Billboard magazine noted, ‘the ultimate influence4 in the current movement’ because of his ‘absolute commitment to what he believes in’; he had ‘brought on an intensity in the folk world bordering on worship’. He had also written a song commercial enough to top the US Middle-Road Singles chart.

  So lucrative was folk in the months before America succumbed to the Beatles that ‘hootenanny’ became a popular radio format, mixing live performances with records such as ‘Walk Right In’ by the Rooftop Singers, and the already inevitable ‘Blowin’ in the Wind’. ‘Hootenanny’ denoted a gathering of folk performers in a spirit of collectivism. But Hootenanny was also a scene-dividing ABC-TV show, which required singer Pete Seeger to sign a ‘loyalty oath affidavit’ before he could perform. (He refused, and was blacklisted from US TV for the next two years.)

  Almost anything could be classified as folk, as long as it didn’t feature electric instruments: glee-club choirs, nightclub singers, barbershop quartets, even a group called the Topsiders, who strummed rock ’n’ roll hits such as ‘Heartbreak Hotel’ and ‘Ain’t That a Shame’. But increasingly folk was being associated with protest,fn1 which in Dylan’s work alone could stretch from the vague (‘Blowin’ in the Wind’) to the viciously pointed (‘Let Me Die in My Footsteps’). At a time when the Beatles (with ‘She Loves You’) were being accused by a friend (the BBC’s Brian Matthew) for having carried their lyrical simplicity ‘to the idiotic’, Bob Dylan’s finger-pointing, coruscating, elemental songs threatened to capsize the romantic banality of the pop industry. As Paul & Mary’s colleague, Peter Yarrow, said: ‘The vast teenage population6 has become fed up with the pseudo – the rocking, the surfing, and everything. We give them meat, a message in a song, and find that young people are getting keen on intelligent songs.’

  Yarrow’s judgement was premature. The audience for the folk boom in 1962–3 paled alongside others which were masterfully exploited by the record industry. The eternal sunshine of southern California provided the backdrop for the boom in surfing. Its catalyst was Gidget, a teen novel translated into a Hollywood movie in 1959, starring Bobby Darin’s future wife, Sandra Dee. A cult sport once centred around Hawaii was served up as a universal teen culture. The guitarist Dick Dale – himself a practised surfer – began a residency at the Rendezvous Ballroom in Balboa, where he fixed the sound of instrumental surf music for posterity: cavernous reverb, staccato picking, a thick and incisive tone, and a rock ’n’ roll rhythm section. ‘Let’s Go Trippin’’ established his brand, before the Beach Boys’ debut single, ‘Surfin’’, a throwback to the garage rock ’n’ roll of 1959, staked a lyrical claim to wave-catching, woodies and hanging ten.

  The Beach Boys weren’t the first American vocal group to exploit the vogue: an outfit called the Surfers had issued a 1959 album of harmonised Hawaiian songs. Nor did they create the first sports-themed LP with 1962’s Surfin’ Safari, as folksinger Bob Gibson had already released a set of novelty tunes entitled Ski Party. But the Beach Boys seemed to inhabit surf culture with a naïve enthusiasm that immediately chimed with their peers. So naïve were they, in fact, that leader Brian Wilson imagined they would be able to rewrite the lyrics for Chuck Berry’s ‘Sweet Little Sixteen�
� as ‘Surfin’ USA’ without legal retribution. (Again, someone else was first: the Stompers’ spring 1962 hit ‘Quarter to Four Stomp’ was simply Gary Bonds’s ‘Quarter to Three’ with new beach-culture words.) Within a year, Wilson and the Beach Boys were at the heart of a surf-music industry that was even enticing Lawrence Welk (‘Breakwater’) and Bobby Darin (in disguise, as the City Surfers).

  Brian Wilson had inadvertently launched a parallel but rival trend in 1962 with ‘409’, inspired by a Chevrolet ‘Big Block’ sports engine. It took nearly a year for the industry to recognise ‘what looks like the next7 big teen-age fad – hot rod music’, with Capitol Records’ Voyle Gilmore claiming that ‘drag racing is practically8 the national pastime of American teenagers’. Or perhaps it was motorbikes (chronicled by the Beach Boys in ‘Little Honda’) or skateboards (the subject of Jan & Dean’s ‘Sidewalk Surfin’’, itself a rewrite of the Beach Boys’ surf anthem, ‘Catch a Wave’).

  What distinguished surf as a form of cultural tourism was its popularity in places where surfing was either unlikely (Sweden) or simply unrealistic – such as Chicago, where it was reported that teenagers were donning surf costumes, carrying around boards they would never use, and dancing ‘the surf’. Where there was a dance craze, Chubby Checker was sure to follow: he rushed out the Beach Party LP in 1963, which climaxed with the inevitable ‘Let’s Surf Again’.

  There was no shortage of dance phenomena for Checker to exploit in the early 1960s: the slop, the turkey trot, the stomp, the method, the Popeye, the monkey and many more. (The comedian Charlie Drake invented the tanglefoot, which he guaranteed would injure anyone who attempted it.) Gradually all these dances and teen obsessions, all these musical expressions of being young and alive in the America of 1963, collided and coalesced into a style which would comprise the US equivalent to Merseybeat: frat rock. Its name implied the involvement of college students, but anyone with a garage and an electric guitar could participate. Across America, local kids made their two-minute throws at rock immortality – rarely reaching anyone but their classmates, but sometimes exploding from some far-flung corner of the nation into the national charts.