Awopbopaloobop Alopbamboom: The Golden Age of Rock by Nik Cohn

 

Awopbopaloobop Alopbamboom: The Golden Age of Rock by Nik Cohn 

MODERN pop began with rock ’n’ roll in the middle fifties and, basically, it was a mixture of two traditions - Negro rhythm ’n’ blues and white romantic crooning, colored beat and white sentiment. Mostly, pop boiled down to electric guitars.

Pre-pop, from the thirties on, dance music had got bogged down in the Palais age - the golden era of the big bands, when everything was soft, warm, sentimental when everything was make-believe. Always, that’s the kind of situation that Tin Pan Alley thrives on and songs about moonlight, stardust, roses, and bleeding hearts were duly churned out by the truckload. All this time, the music industry was controlled by middle-aged businessmen, uninterested in a change of any kind, and they were making money as things were, so they made no effort to find anything very new. 

There was no such thing as teenage music then, nothing that kids could possibly identify with. The nearest thing to an exception was Frank Sinatra. In the early forties, when he first happened, Sinatra was still in his middle twenties, a novice by the standards of that time, and he was the first heart-throb.

He was hardly a teen idol - he was a conventional balladeer, he was backed by an ordinary big band, he sang the same songs as everyone else. But he was also good looking, he had soulful eyes, and almost all of his fans were women. They swooned for him, rioted for him, even screamed for him, and this was something new. Of course, film stars had always been treated like that. Sinatra was the first singer to join them, that’s all.

Elvis Presley

If Elvis Presley was the great pop messiah, Ray played John the Baptist. Anyhow, he caused riots, real live ones - he had his clothes ripped off, his flesh torn, his hair rumpled, and the police kept having to rescue him. He was underrating himself. He couldn’t sing, true enough, but he generated more intensity than any performer I ever saw in my life, Judy Garland excepted, and it was impossible not to feel involved with him.

All the time that moonglow ballads were dominating the white market, colored music, as always, was bossed by the blues. The old country blues, raw and ragged and often wildly emotional, had been increasingly replaced by rowdy big city blues, by electric guitars and saxes and, right through the forties and early fifties, the movement had been towards more noise, more excitement. Beat came in, passion went out and, somewhere along the line, the new style became known as rhythm ’n’ blues, R&B.

So these were the musical ingredients that made pop happen - the white ballad tradition, the exhibitionism introduced by Johnnie Ray, the elaborate sentimentality of C&W, the amplified gut-beat of R&B. Between them, they would have been enough to produce a major craze and what made rock ’n’ roll more than a craze, what turned it into a small social revolution, was nothing to do with music.

Basically, it all came down to the fact that with fuller employment, teenagers now had money to waste. For thirty years back, in both America and Britain, most working-class kids had come out of schools with a built-in sense of defeat. They might be headed for some dead-end job, they might be sent off to win wars, they might wind up in dole queues. Whatever happened, they weren’t going to have much fun. They had no music of their own, no clothes or clubs, no tribal identity. Everything had to be shared with adults.

In music, the one snag was that the record companies had no idea what teenagers really wanted. In April 1954, an aging Country ’n’ Western singer called Bill Haley made a record called Rock Around The Clock. By 195$ it was a hit in America and then it was a hit in Britain and then it was a hit all over the world. And it just kept on selling, it wouldn’t quit. It stayed in the charts for one year solid. By the time it was finished, it had sold fifteen million copies. It had also started pop.

First, he listened hard to the biggest-selling colored blues of the time, Louis Jordan and Wynonie Harris, and copied the beat. Second, he watered down the lyrics, the sexuality of the original and made it acceptable to white audiences. Third, he changed his group’s name to the Comets (‘It sounded kind of far-out, wild’) and worked out some acrobatic stage routines. Then he got moving. Above all, it cemented the fiction of a uniquely teenage way of life with Bill Haley as its leader.  Through 1955 and on into 1956, he held complete control.

Elvis is where pop begins and ends. He’s the great original and, even now, he’s the image that makes all others seem shoddy, the boss. For once, the fan club spiel is justified: Elvis is King. And his first record, That’s All Right, was quite marvelous. Elvis had been exposed to a lot of different musics - colored R&B, fundamentalist preachers, country ballads - and his singing was a mixture of all of them, an improbable stew to which he added sex. His voice sounded edgy, nervous, and it cut like a scythe, it exploded all over the place. It was anguished, immature, raw. But, above all, it was the sexiest thing that anyone had ever heard.

When the music started, he’d begin wriggling and he wriggled so hard that quite a few cities banned him for obscenity. ‘Elvis Presley is morally insane,’ shrieked a Baptist pastor in Des Moines, and that just about summed it up. With pop, though, it’s all been down to mainline sexual fantasy. Sitting in concert halls, schoolgirls have screamed, rioted, brawled, and fainted. They’ve wet themselves and they’ve masturbated. 

In this way, it’s all been sex in a vacuum - the girls have freaked themselves out, emptied themselves, and then they’ve gone back home with their boy-friends and played virgin again. As rituals go, it’s not been beautiful but it’s been healthy, it’s acted as a safety valve. At the same time, off-stage, Elvis read the Bible, loved his mother. ‘He’s just like a paperback book,’ one of his girl fans explained. ‘Real sexy pictures on the cover. Only when you get inside, it’s just a good story.’ He looked dangerous but ultimately was safe and clean. This is what young girls have always wanted from their idols, an illusion of danger, and Elvis brought a new thrill of semi-reality to the game

ROCK ’n’ roll was very simple music. All that mattered was the noise it made, its drive, its aggression, its newness. The lyrics were mostly non-existent, simple slogans one step away from gibberish. In other words, if you weren’t sure about rock, you couldn’t cling to its lyrics. You either had to accept its noise at face value or you had to drop out completely

Most of the best early rockers came out of the South - Elvis from Mississippi, Little Richard from Georgia, Buddy Holly from Texas, Jerry Lee Lewis from Louisiana, Gene Vincent from Virginia. These were the states where the living had always been meanest, where teenagers had been least catered for and, where, therefore, the pop kickback was now most frantic.  Anyhow, the South was by far the most music-conscious section in America. It always had been. It had huge traditions in R&B, country, trad, and gospel, and its music was in every way more direct, less pretentious than up North. Mostly, it had a sledgehammer beat and pulled no punches. Down here, rock was an obvious natural.

SOUTHERN rock was hard rock, Northern rock was high-school. Where Southern rock introduced something new to popular music - noise, violence, the mixing of R&B and country, gibberish, semi-anarchy - high school was basically a continuation of existing white traditions. The solo singers were pretty boys, very much in the tradition of Sinatra, Eddie Fisher or Vice Damone,

Another big difference was that Southern rockers, by and large, had been their own bosses. They had business managers but they conceived their records, worked out their stage acts, built their image all by themselves. Highschool rockers were almost always puppets. High School is where the middle-aged businessman happened. He was a manager, agent, producer, disc jockey or general hustler. He found the act he wanted and also made a record. This record was then released and it either sold or it was hyped.

Beatles

The Beatles were the Quarry-men, and then they were the Silver Beatles, and there were five of them - John Lennon, Stuart Sutcliffe, Paul McCartney, George Harrison, and Pete Best. All of them came from working-class or lower-middle-class backgrounds in Liverpool and the only ones with any pretensions to anything were Paul McCartney, who had racked up five ‘O’-levels, and Stuart Sutcliffe, who painted. The heavies at this time were Sutcliffe and John Lennon, who were at art school together. The music they played then was souped-up rock, much influenced by Eddie Cochran and Buddy Holly, not notably original, and they were less than an explosion. In 1960, they managed a tour of Scotland with Johnny Gentle, one of the lesser figures in the Larry Parnes stable, but mostly they alternated between random gigs in Liverpool and seasons at the Star Club in Hamburg, where they played murderous hours each night and half-starved to death. By spring of 1963, they had taken over from Cliff Richard here and, by autumn, they were a national obsession. 

Completeness, in fact, was what the Beatles were all about. They were always perfectly self-contained, independent as if the world was split cleanly into two races, the Beatles and everyone else, and they seemed to live off nobody but themselves. They answer politely, they make jokes, they’re most charming but they’re never remotely involved, they’re private. They have their own club going and, really, they aren’t reachable. They are, after all, the Beatles. Between them, the four of them being so complementary, they managed to appeal to almost everyone.

And when all the Beatles went meditating in India with the Maharishi. My own feeling is that Lennon has the heavy talent and that McCartney really hasn’t. He’s melodic, pleasant, inventive but he’s too much syrup. Still, they do make a partnership: Lennon’s toughness plays off well against McCartney’s romanticism, Lennon’s verbal flair is complemented by McCartney’s knack of knocking out instantly attractive melody lines. They add up. Harrison was stung and he began chasing. He went on a heavy intellectual streak himself.

First up, he got interested in Indian music and took lessons on sitar from Ravi Shankar. Second, he was to be seen flitting in and out of London Airport wearing beads and baggy white trousers. Third, he started writing Indian-style songs, all curry powder and souvenirs from the Taj Mahal, very solemn. And finally, he went up a mountain with the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, guru to the stars, and came down again a convinced mystic. From here on, he was a philosopher, a sage, and his interviews were stuffed full of dicta, parables, and eternal paradoxes. Sitting cross-legged in Virginia Water, he hid his face behind a beard, a mustache, two Rasputin eyes and he was almost unrecognizable as George Harrison, guitar-picker.

Rolling Stones

The Stones were being ritually vicious to everyone, fans and journalists and hangers-on regardless. the small girls had screamed too hard and wet themselves. Not just one or two of them but many, so that the floor was sodden and the stench was overwhelming (piss). The best thing about the Stones, the most important, was their huge sense of independence, uncompromised. Elvis was its first great leader. Well, compared to Elvis, the Stones were an entirely different class: they were as far ahead of him as Elvis himself had been ahead of the young Sinatra. Really, the Stones were major liberators: they stirred up a whole new mood of teen arrogance 

Certainly, the Beatles were the bigger group but, until they turned to Love in 1967, they never greatly changed the way that anyone thought. They were self-assured, cocky, and they took no shit but they were always full of compromise and they appealed as much to adults as to kids. They weren’t committed. The Stones were. In this way, then, the Stones were the final group of the sixties and their image was the final image, Jagger was the final face and their records were the final records. More than anyone, more even than Bob Dylan, they became their time.  Apart from anything else, they made marvelous music.

Bob Dylan

Bob Dylan was born Bob Zimmerman in Minnesota, 1941.  He came out of a Midwest Jewish background, quite straight and, through his teens, he ran away seven times from home and high school and college and, according to the legend, which may well be true, he was on the road at eighteen, a hobo in the romantic Beat tradition, a teenage Sal Paradise. He played guitar, he wrote poems, he traveled. When he changed his name, for instance, he called himself after Dylan Thomas.  He was a folk singer by trade and when he came East in 1961, he sat by the bedside of the dying Woody Guthrie. Then he went down inside Greenwich Village and joined the circuit.

As for his songs, they started out immensely worthy - they were anti-war and anti-establishment and anti-mammon, full of easy answers and, stylistically, they were a mingling of very many things, folk/blues and Beat and Dada, Woody Guthrie and Robert Johnson and Allen Ginsberg, Big Joe Williams and Rimbaud. ‘Open your ears,’ said Dylan, ‘and you’re influenced. He was young and pretty, very cool, and he wasn’t manufactured, he was no part of any system. Instead, he came on like a Dharma Bum, most romantic, and his songs were filled with all the right kinds of dissent. Above all, he used words, his lyrics went way beyond the slogans of rock ’n’ roll (Awopbopaloobop). For the first time, he fed kids with songs that actually meant something, that expressed revolt through something more complex than a big cock, and, many of them, the kids liked this.

In the end, he hasn’t so much changed rock as he’s killed off one kind and substituted another. And if the kind he killed was also the kind I love, well, that was hardly his fault.

Afterthoughts

In England, the fashion has swung towards solo performers, preferably songwriters as well as singers. Elton John, Cat Stevens, Labi Siffre - all have been highly praised but I have found them to be posturing and banal in much the same way as the Flower Power seers of four years ago, full of pre-packaged profundity and mock-sensitivities.

In America, the singer/songwriter fashion has caught on as well, led by James Taylor, Randy Newman, Melanie, John Sebastian, and Joni Mitchell; they have been neither better nor worse than their English equivalents, although Newman has had at least a certain wit and oddity to help excuse him.