Copyright 1998 Jack Madani. All rights reserved.
Published by permission of the author.

The Roots of Rock 'n' Roll:

In 1945, World War II ended. By 1946, American servicemen began returning home to start up the families they had had to put on hold for 4 years. Thus began the unusually large bubble in the population curve of America known as the Baby Boom, as gazillions of babies were born all of a sudden in the span of five to ten years. Remember that all those babies born in 1946-1947 would be 18 in 1964-1965 (and eventually 22 and out of college, and into the marketplace in the early '70's, to kick off the Me Decade). What that means is that American society would suddenly find itself catering to a generation of young people in a way that had never occurred before.

Sixties rock finds its roots in several places, starting as far back as the big swing bands of the pre-war era that the 60's kids' parents listened to as youngsters: Glenn Miller, Benny Goodman, Count Basie, Tommy and Jimmy Dorsey, and Duke Ellington's bands are some of the most famous. Except for Duke Ellington, all those bands were primarily dance bands, with big swinging backbeats. You can still hear some of their greatest hits today in such unusual places as the Chips Ahoy commercial (1,000 chips in every bag).

There were also the smaller, "rhythm combo" groups, usually of only four or five players. Their tunes were popular on the jukeboxes of the day, but were not considered artistically important which is why we have mostly forgotten them today. The recent Broadway show "Five Guys Named Moe," which highlights the career of Louis Jordan, tells about one of the most popular rhythm combos of the day. Nat King Cole also had a small jazz combo that had popular success, before he became a Sinatra-style pop ballad singer in the '50's.

Then there was Country & Western--especially what was called "Texas Swing," of which Bob Wills & the Texas Playboys was the king. Hank Williams Sr. was another important singer/songwriter of that era and genre.

Over in Memphis there was Sam Phillips and his Sun Studios, where rockabilly and Elvis Presley were born. Besides Presley, Jerry Lee Lewis, Carl Perkins, Johnny Cash and Roy Orbison all began their recording careers at Sun Studios.

Two other sources of modern rock'n'roll, absolutely essential to the sound we think of as 60's rock, were, first, the Blues. Blues began as the music of black sharecroppers in the poor cotton-farming region of the Mississippi Delta, and traveled north to Chicago with the sharecroppers as thousands of them moved north in search of a better life. It was in Chicago that the blues went from acoustic solo guitar music to electric guitar-electric bass-drums combos. Muddy Waters, Little Milton, B.B. King, and Howlin' Wolf were just a few of these important Chicago blues artists.

The last source of modern rock'n'roll is actually a single man. Les Paul was a studio whiz and guitar player who designed the Gibson Les Paul electric guitar, and pioneered the technique of overdubbing, allowing one person to play more than one part on a recording. Working with his wife Mary Ford, who sang the vocal parts, Les Paul created a series of two-person recordings that sounded like an entire band was playing--and the music was all guitar-based.

The 1960's Begin:

As the late fifties gave way to the early sixties, the rockabilly stars of the previous decade (the Everlys, Elvis, Roy Orbison) were still having hits, but the older pop-music stars were fading away as they struggled to find material that would click with this new and energetic generation of kids. Pop music gradually became controlled by new young "vocal"-groups, taking their power from a combination of the performer's charisma along with the songwriting talents of the production team, who operated behind the scenes. Eventually rock artists came to be expected to write and even produce their own songs, becoming responsible for everything about how their records sounded--but that would have to wait for Marvin Gaye, Brian Wilson and Lennon & McCartney.

In general there were four main pockets of early 60's pop:

the East Coast DooWop and girl groups were singers and groups whose origins are in the streetcorner a cappella groups found in many urban centers. With very rare exceptions, these groups did not write their own songs, but relied on their handlers to set up the recording sessions, pick the material, and produce the records. In fact, many of these behind-the-scenes people eventually became stars in their own right in the seventies.

The R&B and Soul scene included many talented people who often didn't receive the popularity of less-talented white groups, because of barriers and prejudices against buying "race" records. Later in the decade, after the British groups acknowledged their debt to soul music, and as the civil rights movement inspired black pride, the general American public rediscovered these performers.

the California scene was first dominated by instrumental surf groups like the Surfaris, the Crossfires, and Dick Dale & the Del-tones. Dale, the "King of Surf Guitar," in particular helped define how modern rock guitar solos would sound. Then the Beach Boys added vocal harmonies to the surf sound. This surf-&-drag, fun-in-the-sun sound was so popular that the style showed up all over the place, even in tv theme songs such as the Munsters and Hawaii Five-O. But the real important stuff was happening in the recording studios, where young studio wizards like Brian Wilson, Phil Spector, and the team of Sloan & Barri began turning the studio itself into their instrument, looking for new sounds in a quest not for records but for productions. There were studio svengalis back east, too, including Bob Crewe and the team of Burt Bacharach & Hal David. Modern artists like Prince, Lindsey Buckingham, and Jimmy Jam & Terry Lewis who use synths and samplings, are rather like the spiritual descendants of those white suburban teenagers, taking their distinctive sound with them regardless of the particular artist they happen to be working with.

The Motown record label in Detroit was founded by Berry Gordy Jr., and while its recording stars were all black, still you couldn't necessarily call this totally black or "soul" music. Instead, Gordy controlled the performing styles, clothes, even hairdos of his artists, grooming them for success in the wider mainstream (read white) American audiences. The label's slogan, "the sound of young America," and their nickname, "Hitsville USA" point to the wide net that Motown attempted to cast. Among the many successful performers who recorded for Motown, one ought to mention Marvin Gaye, who was first to take control of his own career and insist on artistic control over his recordings. Later Stevie Wonder and Smokey Robinson would also prove to be outstanding writers and producers, but Marvin Gaye was the first at Motown.

The British Invade:

With 1963 comes the end of rock'n'roll and the beginnings of "rock." Of course, in 1963 John Kennedy was assassinated, and his vice president Lyndon Johnson was sworn in as president. Soon LBJ escalated the United States' involvement in Viet Nam and declared war on poverty as part of his Great Society program, a systematic widening of the government's powers that required higher taxes and spurred ruinous inflation. Meanwhile, the televised police beatings of members of Martin Luther King's nonviolent Civil Rights movement made it plain to many people that the powers that be were not necessarily interested in protecting people's human and constitutional rights. Thus it wasn't long before the youth of America was finding itself deeply questioning its country's leaders. A large part of the innocence went out of pop music. And then came the British.... The Beatles were merely the most visible of the many British music acts that found success in America in the mid-60's. Many people count the Fab Four's landing at La Guardia airport on February 7, 1964, and their performance on the Ed Sullivan Show a week later, as the official beginning of what came to be called the "British Invasion." The Beatles were hugely popular; at one point they had the top five records on the Billboard Hot 100 list. Their sound and attitudes influenced everything that came afterwards--even today, when kids sing along with pop tunes on the radio and sing soft Britty "r's", they're unconsciously mimicking the English sound. Like the killer meteor that caused mass extinctions 65 million years ago, clearing the way for a whole new evolutionary path based on mammals instead of reptiles, the British Invasion killed off almost all the existing American groups (only the Beach Boys, Four Seasons, and the biggest Motown acts managed to survive). In their place rose up all sorts of American groups who dressed and sounded just like the Brits, as for instance the Knickerbockers, Beau Brummels, Buckinghams, Sir Douglas Quintet, and Turtles--before the Turtles became famous they used to hang out at bowling alleys and order tea with plenty of milk, speaking in fake English accents and trying to pass themselves off as Gerry and the Pacemakers. Then the folkies went electric. For this the great turning point was 1965, at the Newport Folk Festival. Bob Dylan turned up to perform with an electric guitar, and was practically booed off the stage, but he had shown the new path for folk music. And the Byrds had their first big hit with Dylan's "Mr. Tambourine Man," using that record to show how folkie songs could be built on a Beatle-esque sound (the first time group founder Roger McGuinn saw the Beatles on tv, he went right out to buy a Rickenbacker 12-string guitar just like George Harrison's). From Songs to Productions: Rock'n'Roll's death and the Birth of "Art Rock": The next two years, from 1965 to 1967, saw the most amazing experiments and changes in rock music ever. The simplest way to watch those changes is to review the back and forth record releases by the Beatles and the Beach Boys, perhaps the two most innovative recording groups of the mid 60's. Back in 1964, these groups produced such fun energetic pop as:

Copyright 1998 Jack Madani. All rights reserved. Reprinted with permission of the author.