by Simon Warner
Rock and rock ’n’ roll: A short note to the reader
The terms rock and rock ’n’ roll2 inevitably appear many times in the pages of this volume and I would just like to share some thoughts on the use of these terms in this collection. Applying these descriptions of a musical style with accuracy is complicated by a number of factors: rock has been an abbreviation for rock ’n’ roll from the earliest days of this form; rock as a stand-alone term began to mean something distinctive from the mid-1960s; and the ways in which UK and US journalists – and indeed fans – use the phrase rock ’n’ roll require some differentiation. I would argue that a quite separate title, dedicated to this very subject, is overdue. Here, however, I will have to be necessarily brief and as economic as possible, as I share some remarks on the matter.
From a British standpoint, I would propose that the full phrase rock ’n’ roll refers essentially to a brand of US-derived popular music, a hybrid marrying of white country and black blues, that emerged in the mid-1950s and survived as a commercial force into the early 1960s. For a range of personal, cultural and industrial reasons,3 the original musical sound of Elvis Presley and Bill Haley, Little Richard and Chuck Berry, lost impetus as the new decade commenced.
In the UK, as the Beatles – a one-time rock ’n’ roll group – began their meteoric ascent from 1962, the new popular music attracted adjectives such as pop and beat.4 As the Beatles’ self-composed work then grew in range and sophistication, and particularly after Bob Dylan’s decision to amplify his formerly acoustic folk repertoire in 1965, the term rock was used more widely to define the latest stage in a sonic revolution centred on the electric guitar. We might also claim that the term rock became ideologically loaded with information that transcended mere music, exhibiting social and political signs that extended well beyond teenage concerns with the best-selling singles of the Top 40. As I have suggested myself, post-British Invasion, and certainly in the wake of Dylan’s Newport transformation, ‘rock underwent a profound change as it became more involved in the headline issues of the times: the US Civil Rights movement, anti-Vietnam War protests, the counterculture and drugs’.5
In the US, however, while the term rock definitely existed with this fresh sense of invigorated meaning, the older version from which it was derived – rock ’n’ roll – survived, and almost interchangeably. For reasons possibly linked to nostalgia or connected to notions of a natural artistic continuum, rock ’n’ roll continued to be utilised generally as an umbrella term for post-mid-1950s, group-oriented, popular music – and it remains an appellation that is used quite sweepingly and often with little precise discrimination in its American homeland, even today.
Thus, this potent, yet sliding, signifier – possessing different transatlantic nuances – creates a small difficulty for a book like this, one that is attempting to cross the oceanic divide and consider both US and UK responses to developments in half a century and more of popular music evolution. The issue is further complicated by those Americans interviewed here who quite legitimately use the language with which they are familiar – and, if rock ’n’ roll means to them what rock may mean to a British reader, I have decided to bypass the debate by simply adopting the terminology the interviewer has personally applied in our conversation and hope that context will tend to reveal meaning.
I have even permitted myself a little creative licence, too. While this book is entitled Text and Drugs and Rock ’n’ Roll, its contents focus predominantly on what I, as a UK-based commentator, would certainly describe as rock rather than rock ’n’ roll (though the latter in its original form is not entirely absent from these pages). I hope you will allow my non-doctrinaire choice of title and that drawing on a phrase made most famous by Ian Dury’s memorable post-punk anthem ‘Sex & Drugs & Rock & Roll’ from 1977 is, under the circumstances, excusable!
Notes
1Texts that have explored this field include Delia da Sousa Correa (ed.), Phrase and Subject: Studies in Literature and Music (Oxford: Legenda, 2006) and Michael Allis, British Music and Literary Context: Artistic Connections in the Long Nineteenth Century (Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 2012). The UK’s Open University also has a Literature and Music Research Group which considers this inter-section. See http://www.open.ac.uk/Arts/literature-and-music/index.shtml [Accessed 16 December 2012].
2Even rock ’n’ roll itself has multiple forms, e.g. Rock ’n’ roll, rock and roll, rock & roll, rock + roll.
3Presley’s entry into the army, Little Richard’s religious conversion, Buddy Holly’s death and Berry’s jailing are often cited as reasons for early rock ’n’ roll’s decline.
4There is no evident, or at least direct, connection between beat – as in beat music, beat group or Merseybeat and a common adjective in UK popular music between c.1961 and 1965 – and Beat – as in the Beat Generation and Beat writing in the 1950s US. Apart from the connotation of musical rhythm that informs, to a greater or lesser extent, both uses of the term, it seems that these applications were independent and perhaps merely an example of the Zeitgeist at work on both sides of the Atlantic and in slightly different time frames.
5Simon Warner, ‘Rock’, Rockspeak!: The Language of Rock and Pop (London: Blandford, 1996), p. 266.
INTRODUCTION
i) How the Beats met rock: Some history and some context
Close to the end of 1965, a key event, bridging two cultural movements, occurred in the city of San Francisco, that great coastal frontier of radical thinking, novel politics and adventurous art. There in California, above the Bay, in the heart of the established bohemian enclave at North Beach, the poets and novelists of an earlier era came face to face with an icon of a new age: representatives of the Beat Generation, like disciples welcoming a young prophet, gathered around a critical figurehead of the arriving rock generation, a guitar-wielding wordsmith with the power to reach a mass audience. In doing so, those writers appeared to pass the baton of possibility from the 1950s to the 1960s. The poems and prose that had challenged the stultifying air of an anxious, perhaps paranoid, America, in the decade or so after the Second World War had concluded, had loosened the latch of the door to fresh opportunity of expression. But it would take a wave of literate rock ’n’ rollers, plugged-in folkies and hallucinogenic mavericks to push that portal fully open and discover, beyond, a garden of mysteries, a palace of delights beckoning, and lead the West – certainly its maturing young – into a mind-stretching moment, casting off the confines of conformity along the way. That December summit meeting at City Lights bookshop, which saw Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Allen Ginsberg, Peter Orlovsky, Richard Brautigan, Michael McClure and other luminaries of the pen spend time with Bob Dylan, has sometimes been dubbed ‘the Last Gathering of the Beats’. But, if it was a symbolic swansong for an extraordinary concentration of literary talent,1 it also represented a seal of approval from an established generation to a folk singer whose vision now lay beyond the acoustic excursions of Woody Guthrie and Ramblin’ Jack Elliott and looked towards a new – if controversial – electric era.
The friendly and informal convention on the sidewalk of Columbus was wonderfully captured by a young photographer called Larry Keenan and, if the most famous shot from this session, a massed throng outside Ferlinghetti’s bookstore, did not include Dylan – he declined the invitation to join the main group – other pictures from the day confirmed that the one-time Minnesota troubadour now turned global pop guru was there or thereabouts. The other photographs that Keenan snapped – Dylan plus his guitarist Robbie Robertson, Ginsberg and McClure in an adjacent alley which divides City Lights from its next-door-neighbour, the renowned bar Vesuvio’s, and later re-christened Jack Kerouac Street in 1988 – appeared to frame the transfer of countercultural power from the Beat realm to its transgressive, if more carnivalesque, successor, the peace and love terrain of the hippies, even if, it must be said, Dylan would have a distinctly ambivalent relationship with that rising psychedelic creed. The singer had originally intended to use
the City Lights images as the cover for a forthcoming album, rock’s first double set, called Blonde on Blonde which would eventually appear in the following June. In the end, the singer-songwriter, ever enigmatic, decided not to utilise the pictures that were generated that day on his forthcoming record sleeve and so deny a worldwide audience a pictorial record of a significant meeting.2
But the frozen moments that Keenan captured assumed an enduring subterranean power: evidence that the ethos of the protesting poets shared something in common with the resisting rock stars who were rapidly becoming the most famous faces on the planet as the Swinging Sixties evolved from a site of flighty fashion and teenage kicks into a seat of political punch, rallying an increasingly sophisticated community of adolescents to struggle for a new sheaf of rights – social and racial, sexual and narcotic. If Dylan would spend the later 1960s in a somewhat ambiguous relationship with the electric wave of change – cultural and political – that would follow, on that December day in San Francisco he seemed the king-elect of a movement with liberal, even radical, perspectives at its heart and the power of amplified rock music at its back.
But, whatever hopes and dreams were driving the former Robert Zimmerman at the fulcrum of a momentous decade – and the singer’s mind and soul had been stretched and strained, bashed and beaten, in the previous months by inner and outer pressures, ranging from self-induced drug forays to widespread fan disenchantment at his shifting artistic strategy3 – to present himself as the thinking man’s popular musician or merely as a capricious rebel, constantly out of step with the expectations of both a demanding media and his swelling flotilla of follower-fanatics, the influence of Beat culture had been a shaping force in the years leading up to the City Lights gathering. Work by Kerouac and Ginsberg, Corso and Ferlinghetti, had already had a permeating effect on his life by the time he shook hands and exchanged smiles with a number of these now maturing poets, a gang who had, around ten years before, initially, and severely, rattled mainstream US sensibilities, from coast to coast, through their words and actions, their taboo-breaking verse and unconventional prose, their society-challenging doctrines and behaviour.
Where was the appeal? What was the connection? On what foundations were these associations based? Why, at a time when the young of the First World were so fervently looking forward, did one of their shining lights seem so capable of looking back? What could an older generation of writers, all close to, or well past, that age that baby-boomer rock ’n’ rollers appeared to fear most – the onset of the dreaded 30 – impart to this open-minded, loose-limbed, long-haired superstar who had caught the attention of a billion disciples. What could the crusty, curling leaves of a book of verse, the thumb-eased, dog-eared pages of a well-turned novel, teach this freewheeling, folk-strumming general at the head of much younger battalions raised on the television’s magic eye, the arrival of the space age and the mesmerising cacophony of a new music that promised dreams of love, of life, of liberty. How could the grey 1950s, broadcast in monochrome and cowering in the Cold War shadows, lend any energising spark to the glowing 1960s, shot in Technicolor and screened in Cinemascope? And why would Dylan’s attachment to this antecedent crowd soon be echoed by other key individuals for whom rock was their first language?
There are a number of responses we might offer to such questions and the aim of the heart of this account, the tentacles of which stretch from a time some way prior to Dylan’s regal pomp and on to subsequent eras when his crown would be tilted at by several waves of up and coming young pretenders, is to explore the reasons why this most dominating of late twentieth-century performers, as singer and composer, was so taken with the style and spirit of those boho writers and why others would join him to also warm themselves in the Beat slipstream. What was it that attracted, even entranced, in a variety of manners and fashions, those other undisputed giants of this domain, John Lennon and Paul McCartney, not to mention a string of other major players in popular music’s widening and unfolding drama – from folkies to psychedelic rockers, then punks and new wavers, industrial innovators and adherents of grunge to rappers, new country stars and riot grrrls – particularly from the mid-1960s, through the succeeding decades and on to the start of the next century? Why, in the years that followed, did bands and performers as diverse and as important as the Grateful Dead and the Velvet Underground, Tom Waits and David Bowie, Patti Smith and Joe Strummer, U2 and REM, Sonic Youth, Kurt Cobain and Death Cab for Cutie, all tip their hats in some way to this literary line? How did Beat writers and their ideology manage to speak to a series of musical generations, a range of subcultures – some of which, like the hippies and the punks, appeared to share a deep antipathy – and even cross racial and gender boundaries with their literary messages, their artistic philosophies?
These associations of ground-breaking literary style and multifarious forms of popular musical expression in the post-war, babyboom rush and after, represent a fascinating, if rather paradoxical, theme. Why paradoxical? Well, in these relationships we appear to witness an intersection of creative practices that had been traditionally divided by a long-evolving and essentially solidified arts hierarchy: that established code that saw certain artistic activities as the preserve of the elite and learned and a distinctive brand of pursuits that were regarded as strictly for the proletarian and less-educated masses. Thus orchestral music, opera, the theatre, fine art and literature were considered the stuff of finer minds, patronised over many epochs by the aristocracy and the church, and enjoyed by a narrow segment of the population. Meanwhile, the wider populace – the agricultural workers then the factory toilers of the Industrial Revolution – had their own entertainments and distractions, ones regarded as less substantial and certainly less important by society’s upper-tiers. Thus from the folk songs and dances of the rustic scene, with their roots in the Medieval, even pre-Medieval period, to later urban forms that arose from industrialisation and new social formations – the on-stage presentations of vaudeville and music hall, brass band concerts and public house singalongs, for instance – popular expression was deemed fleeting and insignificant by those elevated tastemakers who had set the art standards in a pre-modern age and whose worldview persisted even as the Western world began to change fundamentally and rapidly. There were some disruptions to this seamless divide – Shakespeare’s plays were attended by ordinary theatregoers in the late sixteenth century and opera in seventeenth century Italy was a style enjoyed by the all strata of that society. But, even by the mid-twentieth century, older codes largely held sway – there were clear splits between art perceived to be serious and enduring and those superficial fripperies of the proletariat, pleasures considered to be ephemeral and of minimal worth by establishment commentators, a separation perhaps underpinned, reinforced even, by those profound transformations wrought by a surging, swelling industrial society.
The relentless rise of cities during the nineteenth century, in Western Europe and the US particularly, and the spread of technology were key here: urban communities, premised on the need to concentrate workers in places where burgeoning manufacture was centred, provided a possibility for the masses to gather and forge an entertainment programme that was for them, by them and of them, and major new inventions in this area meant that those forms of pleasure the public desired, craved even, could be disseminated, consumed and enjoyed more widely than ever. First cinema and sound recording from the 1890s, then later radio in the 1920s and television from the 1940s, provided new means of production and presentation, new frameworks of control that often circumvented those older institutions which had both controlled arts distribution – through concert halls and traditional theatres – and sustained and defended long-standing ideas about what art – good art – might be. The new outlets challenged the controlling hand of the establishment – the powerful in both secular and religious circles – to designate what was worthwhile and what was not. The first half of the twentieth century saw these processes intensify in the US as radio stat
ions proliferated, records and gramophone players became commonplace, and Hollywood became a talking medium and quickly a key platform for music, too, after 1927. In the UK, the wheels of change turned more slowly as broadcasting was a monopoly held by the BBC, an independent body from its earliest days but one that relied on government funding. Yet even in Britain, gradual shifts in society’s weft and weave were underway.
The Second World War would disrupt these processes in many ways, assist it in others – for example, the appearance of vinyl records, which would boost the phonographic business massively at the end of the 1940s, was linked to war-time research into plastics – but once the industrial West had staggered from the devastating effects of that global conflict, mass entertainment would return to continue its challenge to the long-standing cultural order. Disputes in the American radio industry in the early 1940s would allow doors to open to marginalised musical forms – from jazz to blues, R&B and country – and the speedy post-war rise of television in the US would see hundreds of radio licences cheaply sold off to new broadcasters, often at the ethnic margins, which would spread so-called ‘race’ music to new audiences. The deep divisions in US society drawn by history, geography and skin colour could not be upheld as easily once the airwaves promiscuously spread sounds that could reach almost anyone, anywhere, with suitable transmitters, which became increasingly powerful, and receivers, which by the early 1950s became increasingly portable, as transistor radios released adolescent consumers from the family wireless and the living room and allowed them to make their own listening choices, in their bedrooms or even in the street.