History of Rock N Roll

It all starts somewhere…

With the American Dream as the big payoff for WWII dads across America just back from saving the world in Europe, life certainly wasn’t Leave it Beaver.

The New Deal wasn’t exposing itself on front lawn. Commies and the Cold War weren’t what the neighborhood in America served up. While the FBI was searching in vain for the reds, the music world was discovering the blues. The working class spawned artists looking for blind faith.

Mainstream America was bland, and found identity in pop culture. Woolworths’s was where the Baby boomer’s parents shopped and became consumers like never before. Teens found freedom and solace in the back seats of cars. With the backdrop of Vietnam and I Love Lucy, young teenagers got their first guitars and started to strum them and learn how to play.

The American Dream atomic family wasn’t available for the abandoned youth. Race in the South was separate but equal, but music had no prejudice. James Dean and Joe Dimaggio played the big screen while the teenagers played the pool halls and cruised the streets with their newly pubescent muscle cars. Driving and dreaming to word play from beat poets describing the proverbial pursuit of happiness down Route 66.

Music had a mix of New Orleans jazz, Delta blues, Nashville country, Texas swing, and Northern folk. The roads and small towns had hamburger stands and soda jerks and cruise ins, a place where kids could listen to the radio with out Dad banging on the wall telling them to turn down the record player.

Blacks had been rolling along with ragtime, which was an evolved boogie woogie and jump blues. The whites had country, and down home blue grass, the ferver getting shaky from the influence of jazz from the southern regions and the blues infiltrating from the delta. Swing and Creole rhythms were an added ingredient in what was to come out of honky tonks and juke boxes across the nation.

Teens learned about rebellion from the likes of Marlin Brando and Hugh Hefner, the media becoming more of an influence on young popular culture. Marilyn Monroe swayed in more so overcoming the Ladies Home Journal of yesterday.

There was confusion and separation between social groups and races, and with that came musical friction. Interesting thing, though, everything that was different came together to form a common bond.

Some can say that rock n roll was invented when Elvis, Carl Perkins, James Brown, Hank Williams, Little Richard, Chuck Berry, BB King, and Bill Haley, Muddy Waters, Sam Phillips, Robert Johnson, Bo Diddley, Buddy Holly, Johnny Cash, Fats Domino, Eddie Cochran, Gene Vincent, Ray Charles, Chubby Checker, and Roy Orbison were coming alive along side Alan Freed’s Moondog Coronation Ball in Cleveland.

But a piece of innocence died with Buddy Holly and Richie Valens, Elvis in the army, Jerry Lee Lewis with his cousin, and Lawrence Welk on the TV, nothing was left but folk music and t.v. dinners.

While Dion and the Spector girl groups played with more sophisticated recording techniques, the radio streamed Peter Paul and Mary, and the Kingston Trio on the guitar. The California Surfin USA sound came from the west, and the rest of the American kids could relate to the beach party fun.

In 1964, the Beatles had five top ten songs on the radio, bringing behind them from England the Rolling Stones, the Kinks, the Animals, and the Zombies. Things were ecstatic in music, as this new juice from across the waters woke up the candy balladeers and bubble gum softening of the record label top forty., the English boys paying homage to the roots of rock in America with blues rock covers.

Bob Dylan went electric, forcing the folk scene to break their britches. Drugs induced Rock N Roll, and Sgt. Pepper taught the bands to play. Brian Wilson had to find himself and the surfer boys were no more. The times, they were a changing.

John Wayne was out, and the college campus rallies turn riots were in. Bands like Herman’s Hermits and the Byrds were light and airy, when the Motown got on the groove. The dancing teenagers never left their funk with James Brown and Spencer Davis Group. Simon & Garfunkel folk broke through the Rascals and the Lovin spoonful New York sound at the time when sounds were beginning to blend.

The emergence of the hippie culture stirred the pot. After psychedelia found garage Pop music fruitless, the revolution evident in music in the late 60’s opened a can of worms on top 40 limitations.

The Byrds were eight miles high, Dylan had Rainy Day Women, and the Sexual Revolution infiltrated the virtues of the lingering moral codes of the 50’s. After all, the baby boomers grew up with a tinge of anti establishment reverie, and the rebellions were manifested in the break up of the proverbial family unit.

And what went with it was when divorced women got more power, and that didn’t usually happen.. more women were going to work. Carol King, Santana, and the Rolling stones kept the beat moving and slurring through the mud.

Experimental ideals forced upon us through women’s lib made it more difficult for the family unit to stay together visa vi the pill and the sexual revolution. High ambitions turned dark in the next few years. Power Rock and Southern Fried R& B provided work to fill in those cavernous spaces. Heavily amplified blues based boogie replaced the teeny bopper traditional material, and jam based psychedelic soul substituted folk pop as a genre.

With acts like Jimmy Hendrix, The Who, Janis Joplin, Jefferson Airplane, and the Grateful Dead, the radio waves were into a different vibration. While the Frisco music scene of the west permeated the colleges across America, down in the South, the stomping boogie power rock carried on with the likes of the Allman Brothers, Lynyrd Skynyrd, and the Outlaws.

Things were different now: the 60’s were a time of letting go of inhibitions, whereas in the “Me Generation” of the 70’s, a midstream motto to pursue was to “look out for number one.” Vietnam and Nixon discolored the youth of the late sixties. The Kennedy and King killings were still foremost on America’s mind, the turmoil acting as the catalyst for the culture to begin stewing in cynicism.

The new Beat journalism brought politics into the social order, and with Watergate, unsighted positivism was gone. It wasn’t that the record industry was getting old, the flavor of pop and conventional wisdom turned sweet and sour. Led Zeppelin laid down blues on steroids, while FM radio came of age with the long play. Neil Young, Jackson Browne, James Taylor, and Elton John sang softer ballads, while bands like Fleetwood Mac and Steely Dan mellowed out Rock for a while. The Rolling Stones dug in dirty blues leaned more towards punk and pop guitar rock, ushering out folk for more evolved and layered tunes. This was the yin of the yang of excess from the likes of Kiss and Alice Cooper.

Chicago, the Doors, ELO, Steve Miller, and Eric Clapton brought color and complexity while the Eagles song arrangements steered others acoustically leading country and rock to further define the American songbook.

A punk scene opened in New York to follow up with what was happening in London at the time with the the New York Dolls, the Ramones, Stooges, the Sex Pistols, Zappa, the Dead Kennedys, Black Flag, and David Bowie. Aerosmith and Pink Floyd further divided the plains in their own categories rock, with Genesis, Jethro Tull, and Queen on the other end of their own spectrum.

Disco came and went but in the mean time captured our imaginations and our dance steps. And imagination is what we needed, not violins, to step through that wave of ego and excess. Thanks to Bruce Springsteen and Bob Seger for keeping it real and Elvis Costello for keeping his head at that time. Of course, commercial radio was then held up by Foreigner, Boston, AC/DC and Styx.

The eighties brought in Rap and Hip Hop which further added to the Rock N Roll soup. But Run DMC could not find a place on MTV alongside pop icon Michael Jackson for some time, quirky New Wave acts began to show up anchored by the Clash and Blondie, and Devo, and of course, the Buggles, who proclaimed the end of yet another era: “Video Killed the Radio Star.”

Is this how Prince and Madonna got their start? Sting certainly wouldn’t gravitate their lyrics to the likes of Dylan, but U2 kept the rock dignity alive.

We were then swept up from the lime green pile carpet by Heavy Metal’s Van Halen babies and regressed to Hair Bands such as Motley Crue and their followers.  A relief set in when Kurt Cobain killed them with his painful Nirvana.

Gangster Rap made a point while an ode to Classic Rock appeared in the Black Crowes, Lenny Kravits, and the Spin Doctors/Blues Travelers. Seattle Washington became a hub for the music style Grunge and Pearl Jam rocked the North while LA cropped up bands like the Chili Peppers and Guns and Roses.

What’s changed? Not much, really.  The old adage of “The more things change, the more things stay the same” rings true still today.  The past decade or so seemed melancholy at times, with mild surprises, and gentle twists, but mostly predictable and commercialized.  Do you remember any great band besides U2?

Is there any room for rap and non terrestrial radio? What happened to the cheap gatherings in a local garage with a couple of guitars and some angry teenagers singing about a lost girlfriend?

Music has just spiraled into itself, really.  It has blended and converged, separated, and stirred. It is self aggrandizing, and getting in its own way. Rock N Roll has been golden and inspiring, only dying on an episode of VH1 Behind the Music.

Until a little spark comes along, like Greta Van Fleet, Dirty Honey, White Reaper, GoodBye June, Dorothy, and Tyler Bryant and the Shakedown.

The Answer is No: Rock N Roll is not dead.

Because Rock N Roll is based in rebellion, the music has to re-invent itself every few years or so. There has to be a sense of danger attached, some young angst, which cannot be captured and hawked like some cheap swill by a corporate record label. That is why the music does and always will be created from some garage somewhere, from some small place in the backstreets of America.