"El mundo antes del rock and roll (1900-1955)"

El papel de Tin Pan Alley en la corriente principal del pop, la formación de una audiencia
nacional a través de la radio y el auge de la televisión, el pop anterior al rock de Frank
Sinatra, Patti Page y Les Paul and Mary Ford; el rhythm and blues en los años anteriores al
rock and roll; el country y el western y el auge de Nashville. [Lea la introducción y el capítulo
1, junto con las guías de escucha de cada uno de ellos]

"El nacimiento y primer florecimiento del rock and roll

(1955-59)"
El cruce de listas y las versiones, los primeros éxitos de Bill Haley, Chuck Berry, Fats
Domino y Little Richard, el ascenso de Elvis Presley, la música de Jerry Lee Lewis y Buddy
Holly, el auge de American Bandstand, el escándalo de la payola y la "muerte del rock and
roll" [Lea el capítulo 2 y trabaje con las guías de escucha de dicho capítulo]
**Cuestionario para los módulos 1 y 2**

"La desaparición del rock y la promesa del soul (1959-

63)"
¿Fue esta época la edad oscura para la música rock o fue una era dorada truncada por la
invasión británica? La música de los ídolos adolescentes, el renacimiento del folk, la primera
música surf, el soul dulce, el pop rockabilly y los grupos de chicas. Los compositores del
Brill Building y el auge del productor. Playlets y splatter platters. [Lea el capítulo 3 y trabaje
con las guías de escucha de ese capítulo]

"Los Beatles y la invasión británica (1964-66)"

Los Beatles transforman la escena musical del Reino Unido y luego invaden América. Otras
bandas británicas afines a los Beatles. La escena londinense del blues y los Rolling Stones.
Otras bandas del tipo de los Stones. The Who y los Kinks. [Lea el capítulo 4 y trabaje con
las guías de escucha de dicho capítulo]
**Cuestionario para los módulos 3 y 4**

"Respuestas americanas (1965-67)"

Dylan, los Byrds y el folk-rock. Bandas de garaje en el noroeste. Sonny y Cher y el legado
de Phil Spector. El rock televisivo, Paul Revere y los Raiders, y los Monkees. La música en
Nueva York y Los Ángeles. [Lea el capítulo 5 y trabaje con las guías de escucha de ese
capítulo]

"Motown Pop y Southern Soul (1960-69)"

Berry Gordy y el auge y primer florecimiento de Motown. Atlantic, Stax y el soul sureño
(Memphis, Muscle Shoals, Nueva York). Paralelismos entre Motown y Stax. James Brown y
las raíces del funk. [Lea el capítulo 6 y trabaje con las guías de escucha de dicho capítulo]
**Cuestionario para los módulos 5 y 6**
"Psicodelia (1966-69)"
¿Cómo puede ser psicodélica la música? Escenas psicodélicas underground en San
Francisco y Londres. La psicodelia en Los Ángeles. El Verano del Amor y el auge de la
cultura hippie. El nacimiento del rock FM y las revistas de rock. Woodstock y Altamont. [Lea
el capítulo 7 y trabaje con las guías de escucha de ese capítulo]
**Examen final**

https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLeBbhpV63deV6JSk_bFLmqM8k6lbKIGDk
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLeBbhpV63deUmTmUkYCGxhUjuXRjEYVdT

El negocio de la música en la primera

mitad del siglo XX
This week we'll turn our attention to the world of popular music in America, before rock and roll
really broke in 1955. That's the date that we're going to give for the beginning of rock and roll,
though as we continue into the course, you'll see that exactly fixing an exact date is pretty tough
to do. But let's say it's 1955 so we'll want to know what was the world like before 1955. I'll give a
little bit away of what I'm going to say when we get to next week when we talk about the birth of
rock and roll, and say that most scholars will say that rock and roll was the result of blending
together of three styles that had been prominent in popular music up to 1955. And those styles
are mainstream pop, country & western music, and rhythm & blues music. And those styles were
thought to be very different from each other, not only in sound but in terms of the kinds of people
who would buy that music. So mainstream pop music was mostly purchased and consumed by
the average middle class white consumer. Rhythm and blues was thought of as music for mostly
urban African American consumers. And country and western music was thought of as music for
mostly rural white farming communities this kind of thing. And so these really thought of as three
separate markets. Even though stylistically there were some real differences. So the way we'll
proceed is this week we'll work in three parts. We'll first start talking about Mainstream Pop. And
then we'll move to a discussion of the development of Country & Western in this period before
1955 and then the development of Rhythm & Blues in this period before 1955. So let's dive right
in with mainstream pop here. One of the first things we have to understand about popular music
before rock and roll, is the song is the primary thing, not any particular performance of it. The
basic idea, if you were in the music business, was to write songs, to publish songs, and try to get
as many different people to sing those songs as possible. That's very different from the way we
think about rock and roll today, right, the way we think about it even in the '60s. Who wants a
version of Sgt Pepper that isn't done by The Beatles? Who wants a version of Sgt Pepper that
isn't the one The Beatles released and sanctioned for release when they did it? Nobody, really.
You want that particular recording. But back in these days, it wasn't that way at all. The song was
the important thing. And so, in many ways, the music business before, the mainstream pop
business before 1955 was really driven by music publishers. Music publishers job were to get
songwriters to write songs and then for them to publish them. Now yes, record them, yes, get
them on the radio, yes, but the main way in which they sold these songs was through sheet
music. Now this business of selling sheet music, this is something that has really disappeared in
our current life almost completely. When was the last time you went into some kind of a music
store and saw sheet music on the wall? Even when I was a kid in the 70s you could still buy tons
of sheet music, but not so much anymore. Maybe you go into Guitar Center, you see all the
guitar instruction books on the wall in one corner of the store, but other than that sheet music is
really sort of way out of our picture. It certainly is not the booming business it was but in the first
half of the twentieth century, the last half of the nineteenth century, it was the primary thing that
people were interested in selling, if you were a publisher.

And so the idea with sheet music would be you would buy this sheet music so you could play it at
home. And back in those days, a lot of people had pianos in their living room. It was like having a
stereo or a big screen TV is today and there were people in a family who can play the piano,
often multiple members of the family. And so you would go up to the local five and dime and you
would pick out the song that you wanted to buy that week, or maybe a couple of songs. They
sold so much sheet music that these stores actually had resident piano, and a resident pianist
right there in the store to play the music for you so that you could hear it before you bought it.
This is how important the sheet music business was. And so people would take this music back
to the home, and they would perform it themselves. Now when recording started to become more
and more prevalent in the first half of the century, into the 1920s, into the 1930s, people had
recordings, and recordings of course, were an important kind of thing but you probably didn't
have as many recordings in the house as you had sheet music. So recordings were that special
instance where you wanted to hear something recorded by a particular person. Maybe it was
Judy Garland or Bing Crosby or something like that. But otherwise sheet music was the big thing.
Of course, rock and roll didn't rely very much on sheet music, so this was one of the apple carts
in the rock and roll upset, when it became so popular in 1955. The other thing we have to
remember when we think about popular music in this period, is that song writers and performers
were essentially thought of as entirely different kinds of people, or different kinds of jobs. A song
writer was somebody who wrote a song. And that was, wrote songs, and that's what they did.
They didn't particularly perform them. They didn't even have to have great piano skills or great
singing voices, but they had to be able to write these songs. And they would churn out song after
song after song, sometimes in a formulaic kind of way, but also sometimes in extremely
interesting ways, if you know the songs of George and Ira Gershwin for example, Cole Porter. A
lot of these classic songwriters from the American songbook wrote fantastic and very, very clever
and interesting and sophisticated kinds of songs. But that was their job, there's no recording, or
not that I'm aware of anyway, of Cole Porter sings the music of Cole Porter. It was really not
expected that a song writer should be able to do that, that took, singing the songs, that is, took a
performer to be able to do. And what performers did is they made their mark by having their own
personal style. A performer was a song stylist. So the way it would work is that a song would
become popular in the, in a culture, and people would hear the song various kinds of ways. We'll
talk about that in just a minute. And then these performers would try to put their own special mark
on it. So you might hear a song let's think from a little bit later period. Something like My Way or
New York New York. That's a great song. I wonder what it sounds like if I heard Frank Sinatra
sang that song. I wonder what it would sound like if I heard Elvis Presley sing that song, I wonder
what it'd sound like if I heard Liza Minnelli sing that song? So the idea was, there was a song
was one entity, and the performance of it was another entity, and these people specialized. This
is something that we see change in the history of rock music where the model starts to be from
about the mid 60s that the people who write the songs are the same people who perform the
songs. So the idea of a cover version, say, in this period before 1955, it almost doesn't apply
because everybody's doing versions of everybody else's songs. So this gives us a little bit of an
idea of how the music business was structured this period before 1955. The most important thing
you could take away from this is the song's the thing not particular performances of it. So now, in
the next video, we need to move on to the idea of once we know these songs are the important,
sort of basic unit of trade, how do these songs reach people who are interested in hearing
popular music? How do they get to the songs, how do they get to know about them? That's what
we'll deal with next.
La radio y las audiencias regionales
frente a las nacionales
Alright, we continue talking about mainstream pop now. In the first video we talked about how the
song is the important thing in period, in the period before 1955. And individual performances of it
are done by performers who specialize in performance, but mostly don't write their own songs.
Frank Sinatra never wrote a song, Bing Crosby never wrote a song. But nobody held that against
them or thought they were inauthentic because that's just the way it is back in those days. A
music business dominated by music publishers. So, now the question arises. How did people
actually gain access to this music? How did they find out about it? And in order to, to think about
that, we have to start by imaging what America was like at the turn of century at about 1900. one
thing that was very different about America in those days is that it was much more regional.
where what happened in the south, or the southwest, or the west coast, or the industrial north
was very different. And you really had no way of knowing immediately what was going on in
those other parts of the country unless you actually went there and found out about it. Even
newspapers were kind of slow. Of course, there was telegraph and you could sort of find out
about things that way. But nevertheless, you kind of had to wait for news to get to you. What that
did is it, is it kept regional cultures relatively intact. So, when it comes to talking about styles.
When we talk about folk music, we talk about country music, when we talk about blues music, we
can talk about styles that are associated with certain cities. People know what Chicago blues is,
or Memphis, or Saint Louis, and the reason why those styles were able to stay distinct from each
other is because those musicians would move from place to place, but mostly the audiences
stayed the same. So we lived in a world where there were many more regional accents. But it
didn't take long, with the development of radio, for us to begin to develop what you might think of,
as a national culture, especially a national culture for entertainment. And as I gave away just a
minute ago, radio, and the development of radio, played a tremendously important role, in
establishing a kind of a national culture across America, where people in Los Angeles we're able
to hear the same kind of music that people in New York were hearing. And the people down on
the farm somewhere in Tennessee could hear the same people, the music that people in the big
city, in Detroit or Chicago, were hearing. That starts to happen with the spread of radio. So what
can we say about radio. it's hard to imagine a world before radio. Actually for most of us, it's hard
to imagine a world before the internet. Although, I know there was one, I was there. but
nevertheless, what would a world before radio be like? Well radio was initially developed by a
fellow by the name of Marconi made his first important sort of experiments to show that you could
do this thing of sending voices through the air in 1895 the, the, benefit of radio early on Was
thought to be, two things, like so many technologies, one of the benefits was thought to be
military. Alright, there's a great benefit in being able to sort of reach your troops out on the
battlefield, and be able to talk to them instantaneously without having to send messengers back
and forth, right? So that's a real that it's amazing how many of the technologies that were
developed in the 20th century, were first developed as military technologies, or space
technologies. putting a man on the moon, we gained a lot of microchip technology that would
have, that, that made the Internet possible. The other thing that it was handy for, radio was, that
is talking to ships at sea. So if you've got a ship that's way out at sea and you want to be able to
communicate with it, radio is a very, very handy way of being able to do that. in fact, radio really
started to make its first big impact in 1912 when the Titanic sank, and it was possible to send
radio transmissions of what was happening on the Titanic, back to New York via a kind of radio
telegraph system. You know, that dit-dit-ta-dit, dit-dit, dit-ta-dit, that kind of thing. And the guy
sitting Right at the desk, taking down that information, was a fellow by the name of David Sarnoff.
David Sarnoff, it turns out, went on to have a career running RCA and developing the NBC radio
network. He became a very, very important figure and was right there from the beginning of this.
People were amazed when the Titanic was going down, that they were able to read newspaper
reports. It seemed almost in real time to them, this was almost like cable news happening
immediately. They were there and it never happened before. And so radio started to get very,
very it showed a lot of promise and by 1920, radio stations were popping up around major cities.
by 19, by the end of the 1920s, radio networks had begun to pop up in this country and so NBC.
And CBS and other networks were able to do things by using telephone wires so they could
connect stations up, affiliates they called, in all kinds of different cities, and they could sh, they
could play the same programming around to everybody at the same time. So, imagine how
impressed people would have been with this, they could be sitting in their home, somewhere in
suburban Chicago, and hear the same performance that people in a, in a New York night club
were hearing, in real time, as it was actually happening, through the air, on their radio set.
Fantastic, right. So these, these networks get going by connecting up all of these stations, these
affiliate stations and then by connecting in certain stations that were called super stations. Super
stations could broadcast a very, very powerful signal, especially after the Sun went down that
could reach. Whole regions of the country. So, by putting these superstations and these, and
these these network affiliate stations connected by telephone lines together, you could reach
from coast to coast. Fantastic, who could imagine that, that, that radio could now reach a whole
country at the same time. And when you do that, when everybody's listening to the same music,
at the same time. It means that there, you're starting to break down regional differences. So what
happens in popular music is, through radio, it establishes a national audience. And what's on
radio at this time? Well, you've got soap operas. The Guiding Light was one of the early soap
operas there. Comedies, Amos and Andy. Thought it would be seen as really really politically
incorrect by today's standards. Amos and Andy was was the one of the sort of great comedy
shows of its day. Adventure shows like the Lone Ranger and Superman. Variety shows, like one
famous one that was hosted by Bing Crosby. And, of course, music, lots of music. Lots of
musicians playing music over the radio airwaves. So if you were one of these song publishers.
Who wanted to get your song heard. Get it out there so people could hear it, so then they can
then, buy the sheet music at the local 5 and dime and bring it home and play it on their home
piano. What you want to do is get that song on the radio. So the radio and the publishing
business were in a sort of were, were working hand in glove. To promote popular music in
addition to the other kinds of things that radio was doing. Now you can also say that movies help
provide a national audience because once a movie's made the wizard of oz for example
everybody in every theater across the country is seeing exactly the same movie. And of course,
people in the publishing business wanted to get their move, their songs placed in movies. Well
there was actually a bit of a debate about that because some people thought well if the song is
placed in the movie won't that kind of wear it out, won't it have the she-, same shelf life as the
movie itself, like after the movie's no longer popular, the song will no longer be popular. You don't
want that if you're in a publishing business, you want to song that's what they call an evergreen.
It just continues to be used and used and used because every time it's used you make a little bit
on money. So movies are important but they don't really happen in real time. Now the important
thing we have to think about is that this fantastic music, this fantastic radio network develops a
national audience for music. But after the second world war, David Sonanoff, who I mentioned
before, gets this idea. If people will listen to music through the air, think how much they would
like to have music in pictures through the air. So at the end of the second world war, he takes all
of R-, well, a lot of RCA's research and development money and puts it into television.
Television's going to be the next Big thing. Which leaves radio, after a few years, really as a kind
of an also ran. But we have all these fantastic radio stations that have been developed over the
course of the '30s and '40s with all kinds of equipment. What's going to happen to those
stations? Well, when we start talking about rhythm and blues, and country and western music.
We'll talk about what happens to those radio stations. After they've been, well, not really
abandoned, but at least partially abandoned by some of the big money which owes it to
television. But next, what we need to talk about is what did the music sound like during this
period? Who were some of the most important artists in this period of American pop, before
1955?

Las estrellas de la música pop antes del

rock and roll
Well, we continue our discussion of main-stream popular music in the period before 1955, the
world before rock and roll. In the first two videos, we talked about how the important thing for us
to know is that the song's the thing. Not a particular performance of it. And how a lot of songs
were marketed via sheet music. And that was one of the most important ways of making money
in the publishing business. And publishers are very, very important. They're really sort of driving
the bus here. When it comes to the popular music business in this period before 1955. we also
talked about how the important role that radio played in creating a national audience for
mainstream pop. Now not so much country western and rhythm and blues and we're going to talk
about it. In a future video here, coming just up. But for now, mainstream pop, sets up, Radio sets
up a national audience for mainstream pop. And then we said a little bit in movies to a certain
extent, too. But then we said a little bit about how that, that national audience is going to migrate
to television. And it will leave opportunities for rhythm and blues and country and western. In a
period after the second world war, after 1945. when it does. So now, what we want to talk about
is what the mainstream popular music sound like during these years? This period from say about
oh 19, the 1920's into the period leading up to 1955, so I'm going to go through a lot of names
here. And remembering that it's going to be up to you to find some of this music and listen to it
and I really encourage you to do so. It's really no fun to take a music course if you never hear
any music so you really need to go out and look for some of this music. So, I'll run through some
of these performance for you and then you can check them out and see what you think for
yourself. Plenty of other information about them. Not only in the book, but also on all kinds of
sources on the Internet so you want to check this out. Maybe the most important artist we need
to mention for the period, the first half of the twentieth century, one of the most successful, one of
the most influential, artists in the first half of the twentieth century was Bing Crosby. These days
Bing Crosby's maybe a little bit sort of Ignored or forgotten. But he was a fantastic star. A singer
who is maybe the first singer at least one of the first singers to really take advantage of the
microphone. And that the singers before Bing Crosby's day didn't have the advantage or weren't
really trained to use microphones. All their performances were done acoustically. So they have to
have voices that cut to the back of the hall. They'd cut over the orchestra, and so you got these
really big voices. Not exactly operatic voices, but you get the idea of voices that could really cut
through. With the invention of the microphone, it meant that it wasn't so important how loud you
sang. You could get the microphone right up next to your mouth. And that allowed for a certain
kind of intimacy. A certain amount of Sort of vocal technique that didn't require a big voice but
could require other out areas of the voice and Bing Crosby was one of the first crooners to really
a develop that technique and that that sense of intimacy now. In Bing Crosby's case the intimacy
was never thought of as something that was even remotely romantic in any kind of way. Bing
Crosby was more like everybody's favorite uncle. He played golf. He smoked a, smoked a little
cigar, I mean a little a little pipe. He always had a nice sort of knit, a knit sweater on. He was
absolutely non-threatening. He was he was, just seemed like a really nice old uncle, that kind of
guy. Who, you were happy to see at Thanksgiving meals and Christmas time, and when you
went on picnics in the, in the summertime. And so that was the image that he, that he fostered.
But he was enormously successful. As I said, hosting a. A coast to coast radio show for years,
was one of the number one celebrities appearing films and having a whole string of hit records
up into the 1940's and 50's. Some of those would be, songs like I've Got A Pocketful of Dreams
from 1938 Only Forever from 1940, Swinging on a Star from 1944 and his famous recording of
White Christmas which both went to number one on the charts both in 1942. And again in 1945.
So Bing Crosby, a very very important figure who characterizes much of what was going on
mainstream pop in a period before at least before the second world war. Also in mainstream pop
we have to think about the big bands. And the big bands are usually thought of, when we think
about the a the history of Jazz music because they were so important Paul White and his band
was one of the most important a early instances of that an interesting thing about the big bands
is they weren't really about the singing at all. It was about the bands it was about the playing.
This is back in the day when a, a bands job like a rock band in a club today, was really to go to a
dance and to keep people dancing, right? There job was to keep them keep them on the dance
floor. And so this guys, these big bands were often called dance bands. You had Paul Whiteman
with a band, virtuoso clarinetist Benny Goodman with a band. Other bands came from Tommy
Dorsey Jimmy Dorsey, and Glenn Miller. in the African-American community you had the Duke
Ellington Band as well as the Count Basie Band. There was some cross over there but mostly
the white bands played the white venues and the black bands played the black venues. We're
still talking about a country that's very segregated, during these years. If you want look for a
particular example of what the big band sound was like, I would recommend String of Pearls,
which is kind of the signature tune for the Glenn Miller Orchestra, was a number one hit in this
country in 1942. If you listen to String of Pearls, you'll get kind of an idea of what big band music
was about during this period. We also had a lot of singing groups. The Andrews Sisters, three,
three singing sisters from Minnesota, singing in harmony vocal with a kind of a debt, some of
their vocal, stylings, their harmony vocal stylings almost had debt to big band horn sections, in
the ways in which they would harmonize together almost sounded like saxophones or trumpets
or trombones in a, in a big band arrangement. Some of their most important tunes were In The
Mood, they took this Glenn Miller hit In The Mood and put lyrics with it, so there you really get the
connection between the vocals and,
and the big band technique and the big band horn technique. But also, from 1938 by Bei Mir bist
du Schoen and from 1943 Shoo Shoo Baby and from 1945 Rum and Coca Cola. The Andrews
sisters would often appear with Bing Crosby on his radio show and they would do. numbers
together one that I could remember particularly vividly is Don't Fancy Me, which features Bing
Crosby and the Andrew's sisters together. Another group that would sing with a a Bing Crosby
and works slightly different in a different kind of way were the Mills brothers. Four African-
American singers who came out of the, out of the black church tradition. And these guys had a
tremendous amount of crossover appeal, and by crossover appeal I mean it was relatively rare
for black artists to sell a lot of records to white listeners. So to cross over really meant. People
thought that you were somebody who was probably because of your skin color, more appropriate
to a rhythms and blues audience, and here you were singing to white audiences. But the most,
Mills Brothers had tremendous success in 1943 with Paper Doll, and 1944 with You Always Hurt
The One You Love with all these tracks as I say I really suggest you seek them out on the
Internet and have a listen to them. And if you can get video of them that's great although video's
going to be a little bit tough unless they appear in a film singing it. Especially this period before
1945. Now in the period after the second world war after 1945 in Liddington 1955 probably the
most important person we have to think about is Frank Sinatra. Even though I was talking about
Bing Crosby having a singing career as a soloist and a movie career and [UNKNOWN] and all
other kinds of things going on with him a and the Andrew's Sisters and the Mills Brothers. Mostly
during this Big Band era of the 1940s where the bands and the instrumentation was the thing.
The singers were kind of secondary. It's kind of interesting. Exactly the inverse of what we see in
rock and roll tunes. Rock and roll tune is, the songs are mostly sung, and then there'll be a guitar
solo for a minute, and the singer will come back in. But with these big band arrangements, they
would be mostly played instrumentally. The singer would come in for a minute as kind of a
special thing and then go back out again, and Frank Sinatra was one of those singers. In fact,
there was a bunch of singers who sang with big bands. And for most of the gig, the singer was
on the sideline; the singer would just come out as a kind of featured number as a kind of featured
soloist kind of thing. Frank Sinatra was one of those guys. He had sung with The Harry James
Band and with the Tommy Dorsey band but in 1943 he launched his career as a solo singer.
People thought Frank Sinatra was crazy how could a singer possibly survive if not attached to
one of these big bands. Frank Sinatra at that time was a young. attracktive and unlike Bing
Crosby who didn't really excite the ladies so much, Frank Sinatra did. The, the girls who used to
scream and faint over Frank Sinatra were called the bobby soxers and Frank Sinatra. Was
maybe we think when we look at girls sort of screaming over Elvis, or girls screaming over the
Beatles later in this course, you'll see that that was happening with Frank Sinatra back in 1943
and 1944 1945. Frank all, always gave a lot of credit to the musicians that he played with in the
big bands, saying that his vocal technique came from watching how those guys played, and
trying to do with this voice. The expressive things, the guys in the bands were doing with their
instrument. but as a star, he was, he was clearly a teen idol there for awhile and some
representative tracks from this period are Nancy With the Laughing Face from 1945. There's
actually a little story that goes with that one. All Of Me, from 1948 and I've Got a Crush on You
from 1948. Think today what would a song be like that said I've got a crush on you, honey pie.
These were much more innocent days. Actually Nancy With the Laughing Face is interesting. it
was written by some guys who. Whenever they would do a girl's birthday party, would insert
whatever the name of that girl was into the into the song to personalize the song. And they did it
at a birthday party for Frank Sinatra's daughter, Nancy and, and this is, this is they way the story
goes. Sometimes these stories are apocryphal.
they, they they insert the name Nancy with a laughing face into the song and Frank Sinatra

misunderstood. He thought they've written a song especially for his daughter, who started crying,

and said, I have to record that song. And so he did, and it became a hit for him. So, it's

interesting how sometimes these things come together. Some of the other singers that that

imitated Frank Sinatra, or tried to play on his success. And we talk about Elvis in the 50's, and

the Beatles in the 60's. We'll talk about how Elvis and the Beatles both started something going.

And once they got it going, other musicians sort of. Other singers and acts sort of came in, trying

to capitalize on the success that they had had, sort of ride their coattails in a certain kind of

sense. And some of those things happened with Frank Sinatra, too. In 1951, we get Johnny Ray,

with his emotional delivery of the song Cry. Tony Bennett in 1953 with Rags to Riches, and Eddie

Fisher In 1954 what the song called Oh My Papa. In fact there was a period there in the early

50's where Frank Sinatra was thought to sort of be on the wane and Eddie Fisher was going to

be the next teen hearthrob. Other music that was important on the charts to give you an idea of

what popular music sounded like. Before rock and roll in 1955, Patti Page's Tennessee Waltz

from 1950 was a very big hit. And Les Paul and Mary Ford, How High The Moon, 1951, maybe

their most important, maybe their most important single. We'll talk a bit about Les Paul in the next

video so just to review a little bit about what we've talked about here are some of the most

important artists that you're going to want to think about in this mainstream pop the period from

about the 1920's 1930's up to 1955. Bing Crosby the big bands the Andrew Sisters the Mills

Brothers. Frank Sinatra, Johnnie Ray, Tony Bennett, Eddie Fisher, Patti Page, Les Paul and

Mary Ford. In fact, in the next video we'll take especially close look at Les Paul and Mary Ford

and some of the great innovations by Les Paul, the guitarist, and so many other things.

and the big band technique and the big band horn technique. But also, from 1938 by Bei Mir bist
du Schoen and from 1943 Shoo Shoo Baby and from 1945 Rum and Coca Cola. The Andrews
sisters would often appear with Bing Crosby on his radio show and they would do. numbers
together one that I could remember particularly vividly is Don't Fancy Me, which features Bing
Crosby and the Andrew's sisters together. Another group that would sing with a a Bing Crosby
and works slightly different in a different kind of way were the Mills brothers. Four African-
American singers who came out of the, out of the black church tradition. And these guys had a
tremendous amount of crossover appeal, and by crossover appeal I mean it was relatively rare
for black artists to sell a lot of records to white listeners. So to cross over really meant. People
thought that you were somebody who was probably because of your skin color, more appropriate
to a rhythms and blues audience, and here you were singing to white audiences. But the most,
Mills Brothers had tremendous success in 1943 with Paper Doll, and 1944 with You Always Hurt
The One You Love with all these tracks as I say I really suggest you seek them out on the
Internet and have a listen to them. And if you can get video of them that's great although video's
going to be a little bit tough unless they appear in a film singing it. Especially this period before
1945. Now in the period after the second world war after 1945 in Liddington 1955 probably the
most important person we have to think about is Frank Sinatra. Even though I was talking about
Bing Crosby having a singing career as a soloist and a movie career and [UNKNOWN] and all
other kinds of things going on with him a and the Andrew's Sisters and the Mills Brothers. Mostly
during this Big Band era of the 1940s where the bands and the instrumentation was the thing.
The singers were kind of secondary. It's kind of interesting. Exactly the inverse of what we see in
rock and roll tunes. Rock and roll tune is, the songs are mostly sung, and then there'll be a guitar
solo for a minute, and the singer will come back in. But with these big band arrangements, they
would be mostly played instrumentally. The singer would come in for a minute as kind of a special
thing and then go back out again, and Frank Sinatra was one of those singers. In fact, there was
a bunch of singers who sang with big bands. And for most of the gig, the singer was on the
sideline; the singer would just come out as a kind of featured number as a kind of featured soloist
kind of thing. Frank Sinatra was one of those guys. He had sung with The Harry James Band and
with the Tommy Dorsey band but in 1943 he launched his career as a solo singer. People
thought Frank Sinatra was crazy how could a singer possibly survive if not attached to one of
these big bands. Frank Sinatra at that time was a young. attracktive and unlike Bing Crosby who
didn't really excite the ladies so much, Frank Sinatra did. The, the girls who used to scream and
faint over Frank Sinatra were called the bobby soxers and Frank Sinatra. Was maybe we think
when we look at girls sort of screaming over Elvis, or girls screaming over the Beatles later in this
course, you'll see that that was happening with Frank Sinatra back in 1943 and 1944 1945. Frank
all, always gave a lot of credit to the musicians that he played with in the big bands, saying that
his vocal technique came from watching how those guys played, and trying to do with this voice.
The expressive things, the guys in the bands were doing with their instrument. but as a star, he
was, he was clearly a teen idol there for awhile and some representative tracks from this period
are Nancy With the Laughing Face from 1945. There's actually a little story that goes with that
one. All Of Me, from 1948 and I've Got a Crush on You from 1948. Think today what would a
song be like that said I've got a crush on you, honey pie. These were much more innocent days.
Actually Nancy With the Laughing Face is interesting. it was written by some guys who.
Whenever they would do a girl's birthday party, would insert whatever the name of that girl was
into the into the song to personalize the song. And they did it at a birthday party for Frank
Sinatra's daughter, Nancy and, and this is, this is they way the story goes. Sometimes these
stories are apocryphal.

Les Paul, inventor - El papel de la

tecnología
I want to take just a minute to focus in on Les Paul and the act Les Paul and Mary Ford to just put
an extra bit of emphasis on mainstream pop in the period before 1955. But also to talk a bit about
the role of technology, and how the development of technology really affects in many ways, the
way that the history of rock n' roll unfolds. some of you may, some of you guitar players may be
surprised to know that there is actually a guy named Les Paul and Les Paul is not just a brand or
a model of guitar made by the Gibson Guitar Company. In fact, Les Paul as a guitarist, was one
of the top guitarists in jazz and in popular music in this period between the Second World War,
well, during the Second World War, during the 40s leading up to rock, and roll. I mean, he, he
had the best gig in, in all the business and that he was the guitarist for the Bing Crosby group.
and also recorded on the side with his jazz group. And then developed this duo with his wife,
Mary Ford. one interesting thing about these Les Paul and Mary Ford recordings, is that Les Paul
in, in, did this thing with overdubbing his, his, music, where initially, the way he would do it is,
there, there were, there were no tapes involved, the way that you recorded something was you'd
actually cut it onto a disc. But if you had two disc cutting machines like that, you could put one
thing, you could cut one thing onto a disc, and then once you had that one thing recorded, you
could play that back and while you were playing that back, you could play something else along
with it, and then cut that onto a second disc. And then, you could take that second disc, put it
back on a first machine. Put a fresh disk here. Hear those two things together. Add a third thing.
Record that onto that disk. And then keep adding, so you can add this sort of layered you can do
this layered technique of sort of creating track after track after track. Well, one of the things that
Les Paul is instrumental in doing is creating these layered arrangements where there are tons
and tons of guitar. And also tons and tons of vocal harmonies, all of it, just being Les Paul and
Mary Ford. One of the things he knew was that tape recording was going to be big, big, big in the
popular music business and that it was, it was a technology that was going to change a lot of
things. And indeed it did. You see tape recording was developed by the Germans during the
Second World War as a way of recording Hitler's voice when he would give his speeches to the
nation. The Germans were concerned that the Americans had technology that would allow them
to zero in on exactly where Hitler was when he was delivering his radio addresses to the German
nation and then they would bomb that radio station and, and perhaps kill the leader. And so, what
they decided to do was they developed this technology, whereby they could get lifelike
reproductions of his voice, send that to the radio station where Hitler could be in an entirely
different part of the country at the time. And so that if, if the station ended up getting bombed, the
worst they would do is ruin a tape recorder. Now, the, the allies didn't know anything about this
until Germany was conquered. And all of the sudden these troops wondered the first thing you
should do, of course, is take over the communications of, of, of any sit you march into. And they
go into these radio stations and what do they see? These big reel to reel recorders there. And it
turns out that this magnetic tape recording the Germans had developed this to a fantastically high
degree of fidelity. Well, Les Paul heard about this and he said, he told Bing Crosby, he said, you
know, Bing This was going to be the next best thing, the next big thing. You, you ought to think
about investing in this. So Bing Crosby took the money that he had, he was a rich man at the
time, he took a lot of the money that he had, and he invent, he, he, invested it in the Ampex Tape
Company and that ended up making him millions of dollars. He got in on the ground floor of, of
recorded tape. And one of the things he was able to do for Les Paul, that is Bing Crosby was able
to do for Les Paul, was to give him one of the first 8-track recording machines. Now we're talking
about the early 1950s here. 8-track recording didn't come in, generally in rock music until the end
of the 1960s but Les Paul had a machine. He called it the Octopus because he recorded 8-tracks,
where he could now do what he had been doing by, you know, playing things on different records
and playing them back again. He could play one, he could play one thing on track 1, one thing on
2, one thing on track 3, one on 4, one on 5. He could build these arrangements up the way he'd
been doing. So, it was fantastic. for him and it all came from his connection with Bing Crosby
there. also another thing about Les Paul that we, we mentioned earlier is that he's often referred
to as the inventor of the solid body electric guitar. Not the electric guitar, there had been electric
guitars before for Les Paul. For heaven's sake, Charlie Christian played one with Benny Good-,
Goodman's group. But the solid body electric guitar. And so, it isn't quite true that Les Paul
invented the solid body electric guitar, but he was one of the first ones to be involved in
engineering a kind of solid body electric guitar. He would, ended up going into partnership with
the Gibson Guitar Company and they produced the Les Paul model. The Les Paul guitar has
become iconic. And so these developments in technology. this, this overdubbing, this tape
technology, this overdubbing technology. the development of the solid-body guitar, solid-body
electric guitar. All these kinds of things make a big change. Now, we couldn't think about Les Paul
as being an important figure in rock music per se, because none of his music was never rock
oriented. But Les Paul as a guitarist, was a fantastic influence on a whole generation of guitarists
who came after him in rock and roll. Jimmy Page people like this, were all sort of big Les Paul
fanatics. The song are the songs they heard when they were a kid. but the technologies that he
developed will continue to influence rock and roll for many years, in fact decades to come.
Orígenes del Country & Western (antes
de la Segunda Guerra Mundial)
Well up to this point, we've talked about the development of mainstream pop music in the period
up to 1955. And at the beginning of this this series of lectures, I said we're going to think about
two other styles of music, country and western and rhythm and blues. So now we take up the
story of country and western. I don't know how many of you have seen the Blues Brothers movie,
but there's a fantastic interesting scene where John Belushi Is talking to, they go to this club.
They're looking for a gig. It's a, it's a club out in the sticks. It's a country club, and it says that the
Good Old Boys are going to be performing that night, and the Blues Brothers show up. The band,
the Good Old Boys band hasn't actually shown up, so the Blue Brothers convince themselves
they're the Good Old Blues Brothers Boys. [LAUGH] But after the gig is finished, and they're all
packed up and they're leaving, the actual Good Old Boys do show up. And John Belushi starts to
talk to the guy to kind of maybe try to worm out of it, so he doesn't have to give him the money or
anything. So what kind of music do you play? And the, the, the country music, musician says oh,
we play both kinds, country and western. And that's supposed to be a joke, because people think
this guy's so limited, that he thinks the whole world exists in country and western music. That
they're actually two kinds of music. The actual truth is, that in the period before 1945, there were
two kinds of music, country and western. And, that's what we're going to talk about, those early
days before 1945. And what was, what, what was thought of as country music. And what was
thought of as western music. Now, country and western music overall, was often referred to as
hillbilly music. It was music that was, that was thought to be of interest and, and would be
consumed by people who were relatively low income, low educated, rural listeners, mostly in the
south. we will find out that through the course of the Second World War and through migration
patterns, it turns out that a lot of these folks ended up in northern cities. But we'll get to that story
soon enough. Let's now talk about the difference between country and western for the rest of this
video. Country music is associated with the Southeast, with the Appalachian region, and it's very
much influenced by white gospel. There was a guy by the name of Ralph Peer, who went into the
south, and in the 20s, started recording up as many people as he could on a, on a portable, a
recording machine that he had, a disc, disc cutting machine and sometimes wire recorders. and
some of the people that he would get would be as close as probably we're ever going to come to
hearing what that original regional music sounded like, before anybody was, before it got sort of
on the radio, and became a little bit more affected by other cultures. And so, some of the first
people that he recorded, Ralph Peer recorded, were "Fiddlin" John Carson, and I love this group,
Gid Tanner and His Skillet Lickers, right? This is very much, sort of, indigenous, southeastern,
culture. But probably the two most important acts two most important groups from this early
country, scene, would be the Carter Family, with their Can the Circle Be Unbroken from 1935.
You get a real sense, not only of the gospel influence, of the harmony singing, but also of
Maybelle Carter's distinctive guitar solo. Where she plays the melody on the low strings, while
also sort of playing the cords above it. among the country guitar players, that's sort of a famous
solo, that a lot of them point to as being important in the development of country music. Also, Roy
Acuff was an enormously popular person among country music people. A good example of his
music is the Great Speckled Bird from 1936. Without giving too much away, he says in the lyrics
the great speckled bird is the Bible. And so again, you get this connection to the white gospel
tradition in this music. He also uses a slide guitar, there's also a slide guitar on that recording.
And we're reminded that the slide guitar in this case, comes from a craze from about the same
time of Hawaiian guitar in America. And so they were actually using, not so much a bottle neck
thing, like we're going to hear in rhythm and blues music but more like a Hawaiian guitar. There
were no pedals or anything on it, the, the guitar was just tuned open. But, it was that sort of
Hawaiian guitar thing that eventually morphed into the steel guitar playing that became so
characteristic of country music in the period after 1945. We hear that already in Roy Acuff's music
from 1936 incoming from the, from the, craze for Hawaiian, slide guitar. In juxtaposition to country
music which was from the Southeast, we can talk about western music, which was from the
Southwest. Mostly Texas and Oklahoma, and also the west coast California. Western music sort
of broke down into two possible things. You either had Western swing. And the guy, the guy who
was big in western swing was Bob Wills and his Texas Playboys. For all intents and purposes,
the western swing bands were, were a, a regular big band except that they they used fiddles, and
sometimes he would use a sort of south of the border kind of a horn section. but it was a, it was
sort of country country music meets big band. and those Bob Wills recordings, you might want to
check out New San Antonia Rose from 1940. Interestingly, that was a hit for him, him on the
country charts. It was then covered by Bing Crosby, and was a hit for Bing Crosby on the
mainstream pop charts. You never would have heard the Bob Wills record on the mainstream
pop charts. But the Bing Crosby version, no problem there. In addition to western swing. The
other style from that, from the western, part of this, is Gene Autry, Gene Autry and the cowboy
song. The idea of the, sort of, Hollywood cowboy sitting on a horse out there. sort of, you know?
on a, on a ranch somewhere, you know, with his guitar on. And singin' a song. In the case of
Gene Autry, you can hear a tune like Back In the Saddle Again, from 1939, and really get an idea
of what the cowboy song was about. That's what was western about that music. Of course, a lot
of these guys appearing in movies at the time, cowboy musicals kind of things. And important
ones were not only Gene Autry. But also, Roy Rogers. We can take just a minute to talk about
somebody who might be thought of as the first real star of country music, country and western
music, before it really came together as a kind of major industry in Nashville. We'll talk about
Nashville in the next video. That person who was the first big star of country music was a fellow
by the name of Jimmie Rodgers, who was active from about 1927 through 1923. He died at the
age of 36 from tuberculosis. But his records had a tremendous appeal. his, his now, now we have
a sense where his particular performances, not just the songs themselves, but his particular
performances made a very big difference. And he was he was. His singing style was very
influential on people like not only Gene Autry, who we talked about just a minute ago, but also
Ernest Tubb and Eddie Arnold. the thing about Jimmie Rodgers that's interesting is not only his
music itself, but the fact that already we start to see an image being constructed for Jimmie
Rodgers to portray him in a particular kind of way. So when you bought the sheet music for a
Jimmie Rodgers song, you saw him in one of two images. He was either the Blue Yodler, or he
was the Singing Brakeman. The Singing Brakeman is interesting because it would always have
him looking like he worked on a railroad, sort of wearing overalls as if he was some kind of of a
guy who, you know, worked on a rail road when he got some time he would go into one of the
cars and sing him a song. And then he would get back to firing the, the furnace on the, on the
train or whatever. but of course Jimmy Rodgers, the actual guy, would never really worked on a
railroad, or did any of those kinds of things. This was all a kind of way of marketing Jimmie
Rodgers. Constructing an image of authenticity around who he was. That's going to be really
important as we continue to tell our story. The idea that these images of authenticity are almost
always contructed, but that doesn't make them invalid. But it does mean that we're starting to see
how the machinery is beginning to work. it isn't enough that he's a country singer. We have to
construct an image of him as a kind of country singer when we see that. to get an example, to get
a representative example of what his music sounded like, I would recommend the song Blue
Yodel, from 1927, a song that was later covered by Lynyrd Skynyrd in the 70s. This song features
the the the sort of trademark Jimmie Rodgers' yodel. You might wonder what's yodeling, which
seems to be more associated with like, the Swiss Alps, or something, doing in country music in
the 19, late 1920s, and late 1930s, but there it is. And it catches hold, and a lot of people imitate
that. So Jimmie Rodgers can be thought of as the first star of country music. In the next video,
we'll talk about how country music really comes together in 1945 in Nashville, Tennessee.

El auge de Nashville
We continue our story about the growth of country and western music by considering how it is

that Nashville Tennessee became the home of country and western music after 1945. How the

popularity of we, Country and western music grew to the point where there could be one city that

brought both Country and western music together. Under one umbrella we'll, we'll think about

that in this particular video. probably the place for us to start with thinking about how country and

western came together as an industry in Nashville is to think as we do with pop music about

radio exposure. Now, radio exposure for country and western music is different from the way it

was for mainstream pop. With mainstream pop, that was exposed on the radio because it was

the music of the mainstream culture. And so, when there was music on the radio, it was

mainstream pop music or classical music. But it mostly was not country and western music. And

it almost never was rhythm and blues music. That was not thought of as music that was

particularly appropriately played much on on, on regular network radio. So, if I say country and

western music gets its exposure through radio, what can I possibly mean if I just got done telling

you that it hardly ever got on the radio? Well, what happened is as I said a little bit in one of the

previous lectures, I said something about these super stations. And the way super stations work

in early radio licensing, you know, when they're were figuring out how much territory, you could

cover with your radio station. If your, your broadcasting at this frequency, how high a power you

can broadcast at and all that kind of thing. There were certain kinds of deals that were made.
And one of the deals that were made was while the sun is still shining, stations can broadcast a

certain power level so they're not covering each other. because you've got two stations on the

same frequency. If they're not far enough away from each other, they'll start to bleed into each

other, and listeners won't be able to hear either one, or they'll go back and forth between the

other. So they had to work all this stuff out. So what they did is, they, everybody got to broadcast

during the day. But in the evening, certain stations were allowed to crank up the power. And

when they cranked up the power, the other stations that were on the same wavelength, had to

crank down their power. So, they wouldn't get in the way. So in the evening, there would be

stations in a, in a world before cellphones and satellite transmissions. When there weren't a

whole bunch of signals bouncing around through the air. You could take one of these stations

and it could broadcast, you know, up to five, 600 miles away from where it was and cover a

significant swath of the country. Well, it turned out one of those stations was WSM in Nashville,

Tennessee. And they developed a show, a music show, that was important to people who lived

in Nashville, Tennessee called the Grand Ole Opry. And that show, when it played evenings on

the weekend, could be heard all around. My father grew up in just south of, of of Pittsburgh. And

he talks about being able to get the Grand Ole Opry in from W, WSM when he was growing up

back in the the late 1930s. And so this is, this is fantastic. These super stations are able to

distribute this music all around regions of the country without having to use the network radio to

do that. Another big one of these was a, was a station called WLS in Chicago that had a show

called National Barndance. Well, it turned out this music started to get a little bit more popular.

And so, you could get a short show, maybe 30 minutes, maybe 60 minutes, on one of the big

networks. In fact, it was the Chicago show, the National Barndance, that first got onto NBC in

syndication for I think it was, 30 minutes in 19 33. So, you can actually now hear a little bit of

country music, kind of as a novelty thing maybe once a week on NBC. By 1939, NBC was

covering the Grand Ole Opry. And it wasn't too long before the Grand Ole Opry came to be

thought of as the country radio show you wanted to be on. So if you wanted to have a career in

country and western music, you had to get on the Grand Ole Opry, you had to come to Nashville,

Tennessee. So what ends up happening? You get a lot of people coming in to Nashville,

Tennessee, and so it's a convenient place to have a recording studio. If you're doing country and

western music, it's a convenient place to have a publishing house, if you're a publisher who

publishes these, these songs in country and western music. It's even a good place to have a
guitar store or to be a booking agent or any of these kinds of things. So, Nashville starts to

become headquarters for country and western music mostly because so many of the top

musicians are coming through to perform on the Grand Ole Opry. Now we pick up a story that

we, we left off from one of the other videos about how constructing, how you construct images.

And it's fairly well agreed, I think, among scholars who study the history of country and western

music. That the image of the Grand Ole Opry was pretty much constructed to represent what

people thought of country music, or country people of the day. That is, that no matter what these

people who participated in the Grand Ole Opry were actually like in real life. While they were on

stage, they kind of played the rube. They kind of played it down, they played into almost a

caricature of what country life was. So, you had people like Minnie Pearl who would come out to

do her comedy bit, and she would be wearing a very fancy hat. But on the fancy hat, with the

price tag, would still be hanging there. Of course, it was important that not only you knew that

she had the hat, but how much she paid for it. because that showed how highfalutin she was. But

of course, by having the tag hanging there, you knew that she was definitely not highfalutin. And

it was that irony that they played on. Somebody who's so silly that they think they can impress

somebody by leaving the price tags on their clothing when they would. This is the kind of thing

that of course who, I'm sure that when Minnie Pearl went out in the evening after the show was

out. She could go out in hats that had price tags hanging off of them. Other one was a fellow by

the name of Grandpa Jones. Who if you look at old videos of the, of the glamour opera, ones that

you can see even from the late 40s and early 1950s. It's clear that Grandpa Jones is only about

35 years old. He's wearing a false wig, he's got his hair sort of, he's wearing a wig, a false beard

and a wig and this kind of thing. And he's playing the role of a cranky old banjo playing grandpa,

but he's basically playing that part. Not unlike Mark Hamill playing Luke Skywalker for Star Wars.

He's playing the role of grandpa Jones, playing to this idea of the rube. And this is what the

Grand Ole Opry specialized in, constructing this image of country music as being a particular

kind of thing, projecting this image. And it was very, very effective at doing so. But there are other

ways that Country and Western music came to be popular in this country besides the radio. one

of them has to do with the fact that a lot of people were thrown together in the Second World War

who were from different parts of the country. And, so you get people, you know, going into the

South for basic training. And guys from the north who are now bunking together with guys from

the south. And they're, they're, talking about their lives and they're sharing their music. And a lot
of guys, for the first time, were hearing country music that had never heard it before. And they

started to like it. In fact, country music got so popular in the Armed Forces during World War II.

That Roy Acuff was voted the most popular singer in the Armed Forces during one of those

years. In fact, Japa, Japanese Kamikaze pilots used to, while they were crashing their plane into

boats and things like that say to hell with Roosevelt. To hell with Babe Ruth, to hell with Roy

Acuff. You know, country singer. So, it gives you an idea of people were starting to sort of

embrace this music. And of course, when those Northerners went back to their cities after they,

they left the service and the war was over. If they developed a taste for that music, they wanted

to hear it. And that's where the development of country music in these urban areas takes, takes

its foothold. so Nashville becomes the central place after 1945. And as I said before that's mostly

because of the Grand Ole Opry. And you've got your recording to do's, and your publishers, and

all these kinds of things sort of focusing in on Nashville. The most important publisher of that era

is is a publishing house put together by Roy Acuff and a guy by the name of Fred Rose. Who had

been a New York publisher. But as the story goes, his wife was originally from Nashville, and so

she wanted to move back to Nashville. So he moved back to Nashville with her and opened up a

publishing business there. But of course, he had all of the advantage of having been in the

business back in New York. So in many ways, this Acuff Rose publishing business became one

of the principal publishers in Nashville. And brought a sense of the sort of New York music

business sophistication to town with it. They were very fortunate that the song Tennessee Waltz,

which I mentioned a couple of videos ago, from 1950 sung by Patti Page was actually owned by

Acuff and Rose. And so, they earned a ton of money from the royalties that came with having

that hit recording. And they were able to take that money, and invest it in the business, and grow

it. One of the things they were doing at about that time, is signing songwriters. And, one of the

songwriters they signed in 1946 I think it was, was Hank Williams. Hank Williams has got to be

seen in this period before 1-, between 1945 and 1955 as the most important singer in country

and western music. And through the fame of country, of of Hank Williams coming out of

Nashville, it all, it really plays a big role in solidifying Nashville as the as the, the home of country

music. But, Hank Williams was another one of these guys who had a very, very short time in the

sun. From his first release in 1947 to his death in 1953, we're only talking about 6 years, but his

songs have lived on forever. They're still being covered by country musicians and rock musicians

even to this day. So he was signed by Acuff-Rose as a songwriter and not a performer. In fact,
and his first song to come out on record was actually sung by another artist known by the name

of Molly O'Day. By 1947, he had his own record out of a song called Move It On Over. In 1948,

he appeared on a show just like the Grand Ole Opry, but originating from Shreveport, Louisiana

called Louisiana Hayride. A couple years later, a young Elvis Presley would be featured on the

Louisiana Hayride, also at the Grand Ole Opry. Some of his important tunes that, that, as we look

back at Hank Williams Your Cheatin' Heart and Cold Cold Heart sort of show Hank in the mode

of romantic anguish. Thinking about how he's anguishing over a woman in a romantic

relationship. Hey Good Lookin, which is one filled with confident, sort of, sort of a country version

of confident excitement and sort of in prayerful testimony. We hear him with I Saw the Light

reinforcing the kind of church traditions that have always been part of a country life. So, for Hank

Williams, we really have to think of as that guy who was the first big Nashville star of country

music. Jimmy Rodgers, again from the late 20s, early 30s, and Hank Williams from the late 40s,

early 50s. Very, very important figures. One last figure we should talk about, I'm sorry we haven't

got more time to talk about this, is the birth of bluegrass music. Very rarely in the history of music

are we able to say, we know exactly where a style started and exactly who started it. [LAUGH]

But in this case, we almost do. Bill Monroe, and his Bluegrass Boys were essentially the

beginning of bluegrass music in popular music. And even though bluegrass sounds, like it's a

music that goes way back to the beginning of time, it was actually kind of developed in the period

after 1945. It sounds like it goes way back, but it actually doesn't in many ways. It's music that's,

that's, that emphasizes acoustic instruments, no drums. In fact, there were no drums throughout

the Grand Ole Opry for a long time. So, you've got mandolin, you've got banjo, you've got

acoustic guitar, you've got fiddle. and, and in fact, there's just one microphone, there's kind of a

shunning of technology, often times. They'll add extra measures, while the different soloist come

to the come to the microphone. There's a little bit of extra sort of walking time, that's that's figured

into the music, so everybody can get in front of the microphone. in many ways bluegrass music

as old as it sounds is kind of the bee-bop jazz of country and western. It's where the players go

who really want to show off their ability to be able to play virtuostically. So, it's important that in

the late 40s when the Bluegrass Boys make their first recordings. Earl Scruggs, the banjo player,

is sort of the star soloist of the group. Earl Scruggs and that banjo playing that he does that five

string banjo playing becomes really the emblematic sound of Bluegrass music, even today. also

in that group is Lester Flatt. After they played, after Lester Flatt and Earl Scruggs played with Bill
Monroe for a while, they, they started their own group. And that's really where they had most of

their fame as Flatt and Scruggs. If you want to listen to a great bluegrass piece, you've got time

for only one piece of bluegrass music. I would look for Bill Monroe and his Bluegrass Boys, Blue

Moon of Kentucky for 194, from 1947. That also has a great connection to the course because

one of the first songs released by Elvis Presley on Sun Records, in 1954, was his own version of

Bill Monroe's Blue Moon of Kentucky.

Rhythm and Blues (Pre 1945)

Up to this point we've talked about the growth of mainstream pop music in the period up to 1955.
And we've talked about the development of country music up to 1955 as well and the
establishment of Nashville, Tennessee as as the home of country and western music. Bringing
together country and western, and launching one of the first big stars of country music. Hank
Williams in the early, late 1940s, early 1950s. We now turn to the third style that I promised at the
very beginning of this series, and that is the music of rhythm and blues. Now, the first thing I think
it's important to say about rhythm and blues is that Rhythm and blues is a way of describing a
market category. It's a way of describing a demographic. Rhythm and blues was thought of as
music made by, and consumed by, African Americans. It was music from and for black listeners
and musicians. but inside rhythm and blues, there are there's a lot of different kind of music
going on. So, you know, as a, as a sort of, you know, musicologist it isn't so much a it, it is a
stylistic label, but it's a troubled one because its, its first definition seems to have to do with who's
making it and who's consuming it, as opposed to the musical qualities that it has. Now of course,
the musical qualities are, are consistent and it is kind of stylistic, but it's just important to say that
that's a lot broader category than you might think just by looking at them. Now, we've talked
about the different charts and the different markets. And when we get into 1945 and forward,
we're going to think a lot about how there were different charts that were for rhythm and blues
music, for country and Western music, and for mainstream pop. Mainstream pop being, by far
the biggest market sort of the, sort of the kind of the normative market, mainstream pop, and
these two other niche markets. country and western music, which was originally called Hillbilly
Records and rhythm and blues, which were really called, which were originally called Race
Records. and, it's important, I think, to point out that people will say well, there's, there's a certain
amount of racism involved in this, and the truth is, I think, that in fact there was, there was a lot of
racism going on in the country, but my experience is that people in the music business don't care
so much about white, or black, or brown, what they care about is green. They will take anybody's
money, and they'll make it wherever they can. And so I don't think the music business is
responsible for fostering this racism. But it certainly is accepting it and trying to exploit it for all it's
worth by separating these charts out. And so rhythm and blues is, is separated out, maybe a little
bit more, well, probably a lot more drastically than country and western is that we were talking
about just now. But, it is important to understand that these charts were divided for the
merchant's use and not really for the fans. That is, when we start to talk originally about
magazines like Billboard and Cashbox, those weren't designed for fans to sort of buy and sort of
see what the big hits were. They were designed for people who ran jukeboxes or eventually, for
people who ran radio stations, for people who ran record stores, so they could know what
records were hot, so they could make sure they had the records that everybody seemed to want
to buy. Had plenty of those on hand, but weren't stuck with a bunch of ones that nobody wanted
anymore. And so you had a service that tried to provide a kind of a predictor, almost like a kind of
a weather service for sales and that's really what that was about. And so, you know, from a
pragmatic point of view, if you're, if you're in a black neighborhood and you're selling R&B
records and you, there's probably no likelihood that white musicians and white customers are
going to come in to buy records from you, you don't really need to know what it is their going to
like because you don't need to have that product on hand and vice verse. As rhythm and blues
starts to emerge from our, in our historical consciousnesses in the early 20th century, maybe one
of the first important figures we're going to think about is a guy by the name of WC Handy who
sold a lot of sheet music pre-World War One with songs like Memphis Blues and Saint Louis
Blues. But the first blues recordings we have date from the 1920s and the biggest star of the
1920s, it's clear in blues music is a singer by the name of Bessie Smith. Her Down Hearted
Blues From 1923 sold over a million records. Bessie's performances are maybe, if you don't
know her music, they're a little bit more polished than you might think would come from blues
artists of the 1920s. We're so used to thinking of Delta Blues and those, those, those recordings
being a lot more sort of raw and rugged. But these are, these are these are very and there is
some very sophisticated singing, and there's, you know, not much of the usual sort of guitar
playing stuff on it. But in the wake of, of Bessie Smith's tremendous success people sort of think
we'll let's, let's go out in the country and see if we can find people who, who can do this blues
music, and we can maybe sell some records. and so, one of the most famous of these musicians
who's discovered during this period is Robert Johnson, another one of these guys who died very
young. died in 1938 at a at a very young age. He's mostly associated with Delta or Rural blues.
Blues that came from the Mississippi Delta era, area, or, or, or from places in the South that were
not particularly built up or urban. the music will often feature one singer, maybe there will be
another person along, with that, that singer, playing the guitar, maybe playing another
instrument, or banging, tapping their foot on the floor. And so, that music tends to be very loose.
If a singer wants to add an extra beat or an extra measure or whatever like that. No problem,
they can just do it, as as the spirit moves them. They don't have to worry about coordinating with
other musicians. So it's a very, expressive, sometimes very raw, sound, And so Robert Johnson
is really the, the true master of that. Probably the song you need to know, at least the one that
hooks up mostly with what we're going to talk about in the history of rock, is his Cross Roads
Blues of 1936. Eric Clapton and Cream covered that tune in the late 1960s. And Eric Clapton in
many ways is responsible for bringing to our attention the fantastic recordings of, of Robert
Johnson. Most of them that were done in a couple of years. Right there, around 1936, there's
also kind of a fun story, which is almost certainly not true, that Robert Johnson sold his soul to
the Devil, to get his fantastic guitar playing skills, he met him at the crossroads and made a deal
with the Devil. Anyway, colorful story but I don't think, it probably worked out like that. At least,
we have no historical evidence to prove that it's true. As we go onto the 1940's and the war
years. Jump Blues starts to come in. Jump Blues is a form of big band jazz. This, what's happens
when you can't afford to bring all those horn players around on the road anymore and you break
it down to just a couple of horn players. and you get this sort of Jump Blues style. And nobody
was better at jump blues during the 1940's than Louie Jordan and His Tympani Five. And here's
another case of a black artist crossing over onto mainstream pop charts. those records of his
Caldonia from 1945 and Choo Choo Ch'boogie from 1946 were big hits not only on the R&B
charts but also on the mainstream pop charts. Well, in the next video, we'll see what happened
with R&B in the time after World War II
Rhythm & Blues (posterior a 1945)
Well now we turn to Rhythm & Blues, and the period after 1945, closing in on 1955, and our at
least provisional date for the birth of rock music. One of the things that we have to keep in mind
as we think about how this music originally associated with, R&B culture starts, or black culture,
starts to make its way into urban areas. Is the migration occurred in this country from the rural
South to the urban North. The idea that, that, that blacks who were liv, working in rural
environments, in fields and doing farm work and that kind of thing. Would get on the train and go
to the end of the stop, wherever it landed north, and that place north might be Chicago, it might
be Detroit, it might be Baltimore, it might be New York. But whatever, they wanted to get out of
that kind of life, and into the increasingly available faculty or factory and service jobs that were
available in the big cities, and this was especially the case during the second World War. Where
everybody was being pulled together to, to to build the things that we needed to compete in that
war. So, there was a giant migration into the cities. we're still talking about a time where things
are pretty segregated, so people are moving up from the south into the cities. But still staying
together in their own neighborhoods, and that plays a big role in how it is that R&B is able to
become such an important force. Well, once these people are all in these areas, there are
independant labels, and now we start to talk about indie labels Independent labels that start to
take advantage of this. These people are here, they want to hear music, we will put out records
that they will perhaps buy and and this is how you get these independent labels which are mostly
regional, mostly, in certain cities. So, we can talk about places like Chicago and New York and
Memphis and Los Angeles and, and these kinds of places, Baltimore, you name it. in addition to
talking about indie labels, which we'll have to do, we'll also need to talk about Regional Radio.
Now, a couple of, several lectures ago, I talked about how when the radio audience migrated
from radio to television. It left a lot of openings in radio, because the, the syndicated
programming that those stations were using didn't disappear immediately. But it was clear that
everyone was putting their money into television, because that's what the next big thing was. And
so there were real opportunities in radio. People who had these stations started changing their
orientation. Rather than being a local affiliate for a national network, they started to think
regionally. They started to think, well, if I'm going to sell advertising, how can I sell that to some
kind of a group right here locally. And it turned out that one of those groups they could sell
advertising to was the black community. and that's, that's a fantastic story of this chain, of this
moving to television, making opportunities for radio stations that could now focus on rhythm and
blues music. So, we'll talk about that in just a minute. For now, let's go through the, the story with
indie labels and the rise of R&B. There are, at least, well there, there are probably dozens of
independent labels we could talk about, that have to do with rhythm & blues. But there are some
that are really important, that we have to, that we have to take some time thinking about. Let's
first start with Chess Records, which was formed by Phil and Leonard Chess in Chicago In 1947.
Chess Records is mostly associated with the style of Chicago electric blues that we hear in
artists like Bo Diddley, Muddy Waters, Howlin' Wolf. And also the first records of Chuck Berry,
which aren't so much Chicago electric blues, but Chess was the label that Chuck Berry was on.
Of course he made an awful lot Of money from them, but Chess did more than that. They had
other black artists on their label who were doing things that weren't just Chicago electric blues,
they had doo-wop and other kinds of things. But what they become, have become known for, is
the Chicago electric blues of the 1950's. And when you think about an independent label like
Chess Records, you have to figure that Chess Records consists of Phil and Leonard Chess, and
maybe a secretary who answers the phone and does all of their paperwork for them. They
maybe got a couple of rooms of offices, and so, they do their, their office work by day, and then
at 5 o'clock they clear all the desks away and create a space. And then somebody comes in with
a tape recorder, and they actually do their recordings there. And now as they're sort of making
more money, they will be getting increasingly better facilities. But these, these independent
labels, I mean they are really just living on a shoestring here. They're having their records
pressed in order to get them to dis, distributed. You basically are going around to record stores
yourselves with the, with the records in the trunk of your car, distributing yourself. So, there's
certain limits to how much business you can actually do if the way your doing it is this very limited
circumstances. And so this indie status had a way of sort of keeping indie labels small. In fact
there's a certain kind of penalty that can come to you, if you actually have a record that gets too
big, too fast, but we'll talk about that a little bit later. Now in distinction to Chess Records, which
was, those Chess recordings are usually appreciated, because they have a kind of rawness to
them. There's a certain kind of unbuttoned ruggedness to the way the record sound, and that's
what people like the early British blues rocker from the 1960's. They loved that aspect of what
was going on with Chess Records. And to a certain extent, I'm not sure the guys at Chess
wanted them to sound quite like that, but that's what they had available to them and that's just
the way they sounded. But it became the mark of what a Chess blues record would sound like.
Now in distinction and sort of contrast to that, we turn to Atlantic Records which was formed just
a year later in New York. By Ahmet Ertegun, who would become one of the most important
people in the music business in the second half of the 20th century. and Herb Abramson, that
was a slicker, more traditional approach to R&B. Traditional in the sense that there would be
arrangements done for tunes. So, the artists would come in reading charts, there would be
professional session musicians who would do these, these these sessions. Where as opposed
to, to Chicago with Chess Records if it would show up for the session. They'd kind of make stuff
up as they went along. And this was really a kind of imitation of what main, of how a mainstream
pop recording session would go. And the people at Atlantic Records tried to get the best possible
sound they could out of their recordings. They didn't want them sounding rugged, they didn't
want anybody to say, what a fantastic, raw sound. Of course, they liked a kind of a raw
performance, but the actual sound of the recording they were very particular about. And Atlantic
had a guy by the name of Tom Dowd doing all of the engineering. Tom Dowd has become one of
these legendary figures in the history of of rock music, for being one of the first guys to really
master the recording studio and get some great sounds. In fact, we talked before about Les Paul
and that first eight track recording machine that he got, that he called the octopus, that he got
thanks to Bing Crosby. Well the second one that was made was made for Atlantic Records. And
Tom Dowd had that machine, and so Atlantic was making recordings on eight track, oh, 15 years
before the Beatles, Sergeant Pepper. so they were really concerned about sound quality. Some
of the artists they had in the period before rock and roll were Ruth Brown, who was really kind of
their go to artist. Ray Charles was on the was on the label at that time. Big Joe Turner, and The
Drifters, all had had hits on the R&B charts for Atlantic Records. The other important Indie that
we definitely need to spend a little bit of time on is Sun Records from Memphis, Tennessee
founded by Sam Phillips in 1953. Now, Sam Phillips didn't start in the music business in 1953, he
had been an independent recording guy. His thing was he would go out and record all kinds of
things, usually he'd be recording you know, choirs that sang, church music and that kind of thing.
But on the side he was recording a lot of African American musicians because that was the kind
of music he liked. In fact, before Elvis Presley came in to his studio and recorded in 1954. Sam
Phillips was recording and releasing almost exclusively black artists. In fact, an important record,
Rocket 88, which was the number one R&B hit in 1951 for Jackie Brenston and his Delta Cats,
interestingly enough with Ike Turner, later of Ike and Tina Turner Review on piano. that record
was actually by Sam Phillips in his, in his studios in Sun, but then leased to Chess Records who
released it in 1951 on the Chess label, they bought the rights to the recording from Sam Phillips.
So, he was involved in doing a certain amount of that. But when he got his own artist, maybe his
biggest artist early on was Rufus Thomas, who had a some hits from an R&B charts. But then he
was famous for having having signed Elvis Presley in 1954 and then having sold Elvis' contract
to RCA. Other artists he had later in the 50's Jerry Lee Lewis, Carl Perkins, Johnny Cash, was
also and Roy Orbison, were also on the Sun label in the second half of the 1950's. But that gets
ahead of our story. Other important indie labels in R&B, Specialty Records in Los Angeles,
started by Art Rupe in 1945, he would later release all of his singles by Little Richard. Imperial
Records also in Los Angeles, started in 1947 by Lew Chudd. He would release all those Fats
Domino's records, although all the Fats Domino's records were recorded by Dave Bartholomew
down in New Orleans. And then interestingly, Dot Records in Tennessee, run by Randy Wood, it
started in 1951, which released the records of Pat Boone, of all people. Interestingly, the story
about Pat Boone is that we like to think about him as being exclusive appealing to white artists,
but Pat Boone actually had a bunch of hits on the R&B charts. Now we want to, we want to just
take a minute to contrast those indie labels, Chess, Atlantic, Sun, Specialty, Imperial, and Dot
with what would have been the major labels in the 1950s, and those, those labels were. And this
line will come up and you'll see these as they go by. Decca, which was started in the UK in 1937.
Mercury, out of Chicago. RCA-Victor out on New York. Columbia out on New York. MGM,
affiliated with the Hollywood Studios out there. And Los Angeles, also Capital in Los Angeles
which was taken over by EMI. The Americ, the British label in 1956. You can see the artists that
are affiliated with each of those major labels. Those labels, when they release a record, could get
it into national distribution almost immediately. The indie labels were regional, it was very difficult
for them to release anything nationally. And so you had these fantastic major labels that were
focusing almost entirely on mainstream pop. And that left room for these independent labels to
focus on R&B. Mostly not bothered too much or harassed in any way by the major labels. Until
rock and roll hit, and until these R&B labels started to sell big numbers of records. Then all of a
sudden, the majors took notice, and they were going to start fighting back. But that get's ahead of
our story. In the next video, let's talk about the role of radio and the rise of R&B.
La radio regional de R&B en los años 50
We talked in the last video about the rise of rhythm & blues in the period leading up to 1955, our
birth of rock, but especially, the time between 1945 and 1955 and the role of independent labels.
As they were able to create music that people in urban areas wanted to buy but they were limited
by the amount of distribution they could get. Limited by how far a guy could drive with records in
his trunk to put them in a record store each week. Major labels, on the other hand, had
distribution networks that could get recordings out across the country in relatively short periods of
time. For most of that period up until 1955, the indies and the major labels coexisted fairly easily.
That apple cart was upset in 1955 with the rise of rock. But we're anticipating our story. Let's talk
now about the rise of regional R&B radio in the 1950s. Now as I've said before, radio
programming started to be directed at an African-American audience in these urban areas.
Because radio broadcasters started to realize that there was a significant population to which
they could sell products. And you may think, well, that's a kind of a cynical way to view. But after
all, radio is a for-profit enterprise, the music is there really only to get you listening, so they can
sell you a product. It seems like a cynical thing to say, but that's the way that business works.
You don't have any advertisers, you can't stay on the air. And so from that point of view, you can
say well, this advertising thing is not such a good thing. But on the other hand, if you think about
the fact that at that point, African-Americans are living in a very segregated country. Where there
are certain stores that they could go into quite innocently to buy something, where they could be
turned away, simply because they were black. There are restaurants where they might go, where
they might want to get a meal. But they would be turned away simply because they were black. If
they were listening to one of these stations and they heard an advertiser advertising on their
station, they knew they could go to that business, be it a restaurant, or a theater, or a store, or
something like that. And their business would be welcome. So to a certain extent, these radio
stations, even though they were about selling advertising and using music, that they thought
black listeners were appreciate to do so. Were actually providing a public service in that they
were helping folks out from that point of view, at least that's a kind of more positive way to think
about it. Some of the most important R&B stations that rose up were WDIA in Memphis and on
the air were Rufus Thomas and BB King. You thought he was originally a blues guitarist. He's
always been a blues guitarist, but he was a DJ in Memphis. Also in Memphis, WHBQ, which
featured Dewey Phillips, the guy who originally played That's All Right Mama on the radio in
1954 after Elvis Presley had recorded it at Sun Records. WLAC in Nashville, Gene Nobles, John
R Richbourg, and Hoss Allen where the DJs there. WGST in Atlanta featured Daddy Sears. Out
in Los Angeles on KFVD you had Hunter Hancock. All of these guys were on the air doing shows
that featured exclusively black musicians, R&B musicians. So when Alan Freed comes along in
1951, first in WJW in Cleveland, and starts to put his show on the air, he's already aware that
these other guys have been doing this. In fact, there are stories that Freed would call those
stations and ask the kinds of things they were playing. Now not all of these DJs were black. But
they sounded black on the air. And so did Alan Freed in 1951. In fact, black listeners would come
down to the station to see him when they knew he was finished, and they would be surprised to
see this white guy coming out, and they would be, who's this guy? We're looking for Alan Freed.
Well I'm Alan Freed. Really, I didn't know you were white. This just goes to show that some of the
sort of race distinctions that we like to draw are sometimes a little bit more fluid than we imagine.
Well in the case of Alan Freed, he ends up moving with the success of his show in Cleveland to
New York, WINS. The original show was called The Moon Dog Show, but it turned out there was
a panhandler in New York by the name of The Moon Dog who tried sue him so he just changed it
to The Rock and Roll Party. Because he changed it to The Rock and Roll Party. And because it
was so famous, because it was coming out of New York, he says that he invented the word rock
and roll. Well, however that may be, the fact is that because the radio population, that had been
part of the national audience up to 1945, was now migrating to television that offered these
opportunities in radio. R&B regional radio folks took advantage of that. They started to play a lot
of this black music because black folks were now moving up from the rural areas, into the
Northern cities. And so there was a opportunity to sell advertising on these stations and so far, so
good, everything's fine. What could possibly be disruptive about the fact that a black community
is listening to black music on a black station and going into businesses and frequenting
businesses that welcome their business? Everything is fine. But the problem is, or the problem
came to be, not a problem for us, we celebrated, was that white teenagers could also hear those
stations. Because just about this time, radios were starting to become portable, you could have a
radio in your car, right? You could get away from what your parents were listening to and you
could listen to this music in the car. You might never be able to go into the neighborhoods where
these records were sold, you might never be allowed to go into the clubs where this music is
played, but you could turn on the radio and hear it anytime. So what happens in the first half of
the 50s is that these shows get rolling because people think they're playing music to black
audiences, and they are. But the white teenagers are listening in as well and people don't find
out about this until disc jockeys like Alan Freed start to put on shows where they think it's going
to have all black artists on it. They think it's going to be attended by an all black audience and all
of a sudden there's all these white kids there, and they're saying to themselves, where did these
kids come from? And that ability of this regional R&B radio to reach a white audience is, to a
large extent, responsible for how it is that music started to catch hold as the music of America's
youth, and it plays a big part in how it is that rock and roll comes to be an important style in 1955.

Doo Wop y Gospel

Let's talk for a minute about two styles that are important with rhythm and blues, but sometimes
are given a little bit of short shrift in our histories of popular music. again we're talking about the
period leading up to 19 55 and the birth of rock. most of the period between the Second World
War, 1945. and this birth of rock in '55. These two styles I mean are Doo Wop and Gospel. Both
of them primarily vocal styles, and both of them play a big role in how it is that R&B music
sounds the way that it does. Doo wop develops after World War II. It consists of acapella vocal
singing that developed in urban neighborhoods. Mostly among black males, and it's kind of an
acapella group, a Doo Wop group, it's kind of like a social club. And you would form it with kids
who lived right on the same block as you, and you would work up arrangements. And then kids
from these different blocks would go and challenge Other Doo Wop vocal groups from other
blocks sort of competing for territory and that kind of thing. And I don't think there were ever any
fights or that kind of thing, it wasn't an aggressive thing, but it was kind of a musical challenge.
And it created a whole culture where you had say, in blocks with New York or Baltimore, places
like that. All kinds of these groups who probably had a number of tunes worked up as
arrangements, but they had one worked up that was really kind of the knock out blue. Man, when
they did that tune that was their best shot at, at, at knocking the other knocking the other group
out. And so what happened is, in a search for talent for, for these R&B Indie labels producers
would come around and then they would bring these groups into the studio. Find their best song,
bring in a backing band and do an arrangement of it and rush it out onto the market and see if
they couldn't sell some of them. and so one thing that was great about that, is a lot of Doo Wop
groups were given an opportunity to record. Well, one thing that was not so great about it, is that
after they'd used their best number to do this recording, it was very difficult for them to follow up.
What the second or a third number, because they'd already used their best stuff and it maybe
had taken them months to work that one up. How, how to have something to, how can I follow
that? And so one of the stories of Doo Wop is it's filled with one hit wonders precisely for this
reason. groups that had one big hit, and then maybe a second one that wasn't as good, and then
a third one that, that barely charted. There were other groups that had more success than that.
There were more professional singer kind of things, but there were an awful lot of one hit
wonders inside of Doo Wop. so, if you want to think about some representative records for Doo
Wop that is, that sort of choral vocal singing that, that term Doo Wop really comes from the
nonsense syllables that sometimes. They would use in the background vocals. A good example
of that is the song from 1954 from the chords called Sh'boom. I won't I won't insult you by singing
it for you now, but if you can find a recording of that, you'll see that there's an awful lot of
background singing that just kind of uses nonsense syllables for the singers to vocalize without
specific lyrics. Of course, there are lyrics as well in some parts. But a lot of this nonsense
syllable. Another great example is The Five Satins, In the Still of the Night from 1956. One thing
about these Doo Wop numbers, is they would often become novelty tunes, in other words there
would be some sort of, funny hook with them, that would, that would make them sort of infectious
and fun to listen to. but they were also Doo Wop tunes almost always the slow dance of choice in
the 1950s. So, when there was a slow dance at one of these teenage sock hop kinds of things
where the boys and the girls wanted to dance slow, and right up next to each other. It was often
a Doo Wop tune which would be that slow number. And so, even in the middle of the sort of
craziness of people like Jerry Lee Lewis and Little Richard people listening to those kinds of
records and dancing in all kinds of crazy ways, there would always be a couple of Doo Wop
numbers in there to give the boys and the girls a chance Stead to get together. We should also
talk about the roots of almost all rhythm, and blues in the music of the church, and the gospel
tradition. these vocal music practices from the black church influenced both harmony singing and
solo singing in rhythm and blues. You can hear this in some of the call and response elements,
where a soloist will sing one thing and then a group of background singers will sing something
back against them, the call an response kind of thing. The melodic embellishments that occur,
when the solo singer is singing the melody oftentimes derived from gospel music. In gospel
music there is a traditional conflict between the music of the church, the gospel music, which is
considered God's music and the music of the club, the Rhythm and Blues music that, that would
be played at in bars in the evenings, which was considered the Devil's music. Now, this may
seem simple minded and simplistic to, to think of this sort of division between God's music and
the devil's music. But a lot of R&B singers went through a certain kind of conflict. Even kind of an
emotional problem with moving, if they were already gospel singers, moving to pop music. Or if
they were pop singers, thinking they probably should give this music up and turn their musical
talents toward praise in, in, and toward the church. And so, this also happened with white
musicians as well, but it's especially prominent as we get into the 50s and there starts to be more
and more market for R&B music and a lot more things were crossing over, a lot more singers are
tempted. Some R &B artists even recast gospel numbers as pop songs and the mo, the most
famous one of those is Ray Charles. Singing I Got A Woman from 1954, and this is the song
where when Ray Charles did I Got A Woman, and changed it from a gospel number into a
secular one, it was shocking to a lot of people in the black community who knew where he got it
from. But as far as Ray was concerned, all music is God's music, and it didn't really bother him
all that much. So, it's important when we think about rhythm and blues in this period, be sure that
we we acknowledge the influence of Doo Wop and gospel.
Hokum Blues y letras sexuales
One of the most controversial or we might say in a certain sense dangerous at least to white
audiences' elements of Rhythm and Blues music has to do with the Hokum Blues and the
perception that these lyrics were sexual and maybe a kind of a shocking kind of way in Rhythm
and Blues music. Now the Hokum Blues tradition is not limited to black styles. There's this big
misconception out there that Hokum Blues is the property of the black community and for people
who hold racist views that it somehow indicates the sort of lack of sophistication of the black
community but it's not actually true. You can find Hokum Blues in white music and Jimmie
Rodgers, who we spoke of several videos ago, has got a great Hokum Blues called Pistol
Packing Papa from 1930 which really sort of proves that this is not the exclusive province of the
black tradition. I don't say this any way to disparage the black tradition at all but just to sort of
guard it from over generalizations through perhaps racist generalizations that it really comes out
of some kind of racial thing there. The Hokum Blues effect is a playful type of song, a humorous
kind of saw meant for adult audiences not for teenagers. And so in an adult audience to playfully,
through the use of double entendres and metaphors, talk about sexuality, sexual relationships
and activity between a man and a woman in a way that plays with the idea of the thing without
ever actually saying it in a raw or vulgar way, continuing to work with metaphors and double
entendres in ways that are clever. Everybody knows what you're getting at and you're taking joy
and how it is that singer can say it in a way that doesn't actually say the thing but says it in a
colorful way that makes it fun and that's what the Hokum Blues is about. Most white parents who
heard the songs their kids were listening to sometimes, didn't really understand that those songs
were never intended for kids. This was not the stuff that they nobody really sort of thought about
this for teenagers, so there was a real reaction against some of the sexual lyrics in RnB and in
Hokum Blues and that's a big part of the change over from Rhythm and Blues to Rock and Roll
that we'll talk about next week. So, one of the reasons why whites tended to misunderstand this
practice is first of all, they didn't know very much about the black community at all. And secondly,
one of the myths that existed in culture was this staggeringly myth and the idea that black men
are really only ever concerned with deflowering virginal white women and so, when you hear a
black man singing a song about sexuality and you are a white person who doesn't really
understand very much about black culture, hearing this it may reinforce all of these negative
stereotypes and you may say, "I don't want my daughter listening to that as hell and perdition you
know." And so there was a real reaction against these kinds of tunes. Now, to be fair, some of
the titles were pretty obvious what some of the songs were about. Here are some of the titles for
you, Let Me Play With Your Poodle, Sixty-Minute Man, Work With Me Annie, Annie Had A Baby.
Right? So it's not real hard to figure out what these tunes are going to be about. What white
artists did when a Hokum Blues would get big on the charts in the RnB charts and they wanted to
cover that song for the mainstream pop charts, is they would do the song but they would change
the lyrics and they would take or obscure the sexual parts of it such that in many cases Froy
would love it, the sexual references are replaced with references to dancing and so in many
ways, sex is sublimated into dancing. And so the songs become squeaky clean, inoffensive and
acceptable to everybody and just about good, clean, teen age white middle class fun. So even a
song like Shake, Rattle, and Roll originally done by Big Joe Turner, when it's covered by Bill
Haley and the Comets becomes a hit for him and nobody has any idea what a one eyed cat
could possibly be peeping at a seafood store. It's almost like we're talking about one of the
characters from Disney's Aristocats or something. But of course, in the original Big Joe Turner
that is a very colorful metaphor for the male and female genitalia. In a group of adults hearing
this it's fun, when your kids are in the room it's maybe a little bit embarrassing. And so, one of the
things that starts to happen, next week we'll talk about cover versions and crossover and this
kind of thing, is that a lot of these songs that were originally hits on the RnB charts had to have
the lyrics changed significantly before they had any chance of landing on the mainstream pop
charts. The black artists that were involved in this didn't like this idea at all and saw it as just
another way in which black people were being discriminated against and not having the same
opportunity as white people. So this kind of racial element that's already a part of the community
is very much a part of those first days of Rock and Roll. But this anticipates our story. Let's think
about all that next week when we think about the first days of Rock and Roll 1955 through 1959.
El auge de la cultura juvenil en los años
50
Welcome to week two of The History of Rock Part One, here on Coursera. This week, we're
going to talk about the birth and first flourishing of rock and roll. So that's the period from 1950 till
the end of the decade, 1959, 1960. In this video, we're going to talk about the rise of youth
culture during that period. But before we do, let's briefly review what we talked about in week
one. And remember that, one of the main points of week one, is that there were three principle
marketing categories, or divisions of popular music in the period up to 1955. That was
mainstream pop, Country and Western, in Rhythm and Blues, and we went through each of
those, the history of each of those styles a bit to get a sense of what was going on leading up to
1955. We also raised the question why is 1955 the birth of Rock and Roll, why should we choose
that particular here.
So now, we're going to focus in on 1955 and see if we can understand how it is Rock and Roll
took off the way it did, and why it should be seen as something different from the styles that
came before, and I'll give the story away a little bit by saying one of the main ideas that What's
often taught with regard to the beginning of Rock and Roll, is that Rock and Roll constitutes the
blending of Country and Western, and Rhythm and Blues, with mainstream pop. So it's the blend
of those three. With some gospel thrown in on the side and some doo-wop as well that really
create what rock and roll is. What I will say is that rock and roll happens when these styles
become mainstream pop styles. That is when Rhythm and Blues and Country and Western
things crossover from their individual markets into the mainstream pop market and that's what
we're going to talk about this week. So let's start with talking a little bit about the entire flow of
what we'll say this week about the chapter.
The period from 1955 through 1959 is considered the first wave of Rock and Roll. That basically
divides up into the period before Elvis that is right at 1954/1955 in that period.
Elvis, 1956, and then what happened Elvis, well not after Elvis in the sense that he was gone but
after Elvis's initial success. May be better to say in the wake of Elvis. So that's the way we'll
divide it up. You may be surprised to find out that Elvis is actually not really at the very beginning
of rock and roll, but doesn't make his biggest impact until other artists have in some sense
cleared the way for him. I should also take a minute to point out that what you're learning in the
Coursera course that we're doing here is really an American perspective on the history of rock
music. It's the way this history looks in the United States. We will find out especially when we
start to talk about the Beatles and the British Invasion that in many ways, the history of rock and
roll looks different in the UK. Some of the same things we're talking about that are going on in the
music here are balanced in different kinds of ways in the UK. So for those of you who are taking
the course who aren't in the United States please understand that we're talking about the course
talking about the subject and the way it looks from the American perspective. The American
market being the biggest market really in the world for this music at the time. But that's my
caveat. With regard to that. Well, let's now talk about, dig into this idea of the rise of youth culture
in the 1950s and talk about the invention of the American teenager. What can I possibly mean by
the invention of the American teenager during these years. After all, haven't we always had
teenagers? What is it, before Rock and Roll people went from the age of 12 to the age 20 and
never went 13 through 19. Of course there's always been teenagers, but up to this point the
culture had never really separated teenagers out as their own, sort of, separate, entity in the
culture. So, kind of the way it worked is you went to school until you graduated from high school
and then when you moved onto college or into a career or something like that. You put childish
things away and became an adult. There wasn't really a transition period that was celebrated in a
particular type of way. And there weren't goods and services and products and those types of
things that were devoted to teenagers. But what starts to happen during this period Is that
parents start to develop
maybe a greater sort of care. Well, maybe it's nor fair to say care, because that makes it seem
like the parents before, they weren't caring as much about their kids. But they start to really focus
more on the children. Maybe that's because coming out of the second world war, a lot of these
people, the fathers had been away at work, people came back, war had been a tough time, now
the war was over. They wanted to get back to as normal kind of life as they could, and they really
focused on doing what they thought was best for their kids, so these kids were a little bit more
pampered, maybe, than earlier generations were. There was a lot more focus put on their
educations and their general sort of emotional health and this kind of thing, and what that
generated was a bunch of kids who, it turned out, had their own clothes, their own language,
their own cars, their own ideas of what teen romance was, lot's of leisure time and disposable
income. And most importantly, their own music. And Rock and Roll would become the music of
that. The idea that all of a sudden kids could be teenagers for a while in a period of time when
they were no longer children but weren't quite adults. And there was a whole kind of culture that
they could go into that could have all kinds of things that were exclusive to that. This was new in
the 1950's and the importance of rock and roll is it was the soundtrack of this new teenage
experience. If you want to get an idea of what life was like in the 1950's.
For this kind of kid, you might think of films like the 1973 film, American Graffiti, that was one of
the early George Lucas films, it was actually set in 1962, but it captures a lot of Of that late 50s
kind of ambiance. The television show Happy Days. A lot of people have heard that, have seen
it. If you've ever seen the movie Back to the Future with Michael J Fox where they sort of go
back to the 50s. Now a lot of that is idealized. There were a lot more problems and there were all
kinds of other issues that happened in the 50s that you don't really sort of see in that idealized
view of what the 50s were. But that's the idea. A time of innocence. A time of teenagers. It's a
Potsie and Ralph Mouth down at the malt shop this kind of thing you know, dancing to the
jukebox and this is what the American teenager thing is. I've got friend, some colleagues about
the same age as me who didn't have teenage years, or didn't have a sort of teenager culture
when they were growing up in the UK at that time. And so, they talk about this as the American
invention of the teenager. For us what's important is that it opens up a market for product. And in
the second half of the 1950's music will be sold to these teenagers as the music that sets them
apart from their parent's generation that's the important thing. We should also talk about the
construction of rock n' roll youth and juvenile delinquency that starts to develop at this time. A
real concern, because people were concerned with their kids growing up the right way, a real
concern that they might take the wrong path and juvenile delinquency, the idea of kids going bad,
kids going wrong, really started to become a thing that people were talking about in the culture.
You can see this especially in three films that came out just about in the mid 1950's. There's a
film from 1953 staring Marlon Brando called The Wild One and one of the main characters, the
one played by Brando was a character by the name of Johnny. His motorcycle gang are called
The Beatles, sound familiar? We'll get to that in a couple of weeks. Anyway, Johnny is a rebel,
and when asked at one point in the movie what he's rebelling against he turns to the person who
asked him and says I don't know, what do you got? In other words it was almost rebellion for its
own sake but it was certainly viewed as a kind of juvenile delinquency. Another film like that,
featured James Dean from 1955 it was called Rebel Without A Cause. Well there you go,
rebellion with no reason, rebellion for the sake of rebellion itself. A misunderstood youth. Who,
you know, meets tragedy at the end of the film. And that's further reinforced by the fact that the
actor, James Dean, actually did meet with a tragic death. And, to a certain extent, that sort of
solidifies this idea of dying young, rebellion the thing about The Wild One and Rebel Without A
Cause, however, is the music that appears in those movies is not Rock and Roll at all. And so
there is not the direct connection with Rock and Roll. But the third movie, Blackboard Jungle,
from 1955, starring Glenn Ford and Sidney Poitier is about some kids in an inner-city school, and
how they're struggling, and their music teacher, one of their teachers likes to play music to try to
connect up and in the movie, the music he uses is Jazz to try and talk to these kids, but over the
opening credits and later in the movie, the song Rock around the Clock by Bill Hailey and the
Comets is played. And with that, with Rock Around the Clock, and Blackboard Jungle, and this
whole sense of juvenile delinquency and the concern about it, you get this linking together of rock
and roll with troubled youth that will in fact become part of the identity of rock and roll for the rest
of its history.
What's interesting about that movie, and I guess you'd really have to use your imagination to
imagine this happening, is the playing of Rock Around the Clock in the theater when people went
to see the film. And the film starts out with this sort of crawling text. That says juvenile
delinquency in our country is a big problem, this kind of thing, and then out comes Rock Around
the Clock, and kids got so excited about the music when they were seeing this film that they
actually started to riot in theaters. There were reports of people tearing out theater seats and this
kind of thing. Well, what could more reinforce this idea of rock and roll whipping these kids up
into a demonic fever that we needed to do something about in our culture. Keep these kids from
going over to the dark side, this kind of thing. Anyway, these films, the youth culture, all this sort
of pulled together to create an environment that makes it possible for rock and roll to begin to
flourish. Bill Haley's Rock Around the Clock was one of the top Pop hits of 1955. In 1955, we
really start to see songs that we would think of as rock and roll songs now as top hits on the pop
charts. Not just crossing over but being some of the biggest records of that year. Many, of
course, records followed. And many R&B songs will start to cross over in the pop, onto the pop
charts, and we'll talk about that in just a minute. Now some would argue that there was so much
R&B crossing over in 1955 into the pop charts, that what we call rock n roll, would really be better
just to be called white rhythm and blues, white R&B. But I'll try to fashion an argument for you,
and present an argument for you that shows that rock n roll is really, in some ways a changing of
what R&B is, and is worth separating out but for now let's just think about the youth culture that
made it possible for rock and roll to happen in this country and turn our attention in the next
lecture to how was it that white teens came to hear rhythm and blues in the first place.
Radio y discos
At the end of the last video, we asked the question, we, we first observed that there was a, a
development of the invention of the teenager, a, a rise of youth culture in, in the United States in
the 1950s. And then we left off by saying that R&B was an important influence in the
development of rock and roll, but how is it that white teenagers actually got to hear rhythm and
blues? Now you say well, well how, how, why not? I mean how, why wouldn't it have been
available to them? Well, think about it, think about what we said before. We were living in a very
segregated country back then some people would say we still are. But certainly we were living in
a very segregated country back then, and rhythm, and blues records were thought of as the, the
music of, of black America, of, of urban, mostly sort of urban African American folks were who
were living in a, in, in pretty close confines in, in one particular neighborhood in town. I mean that
gets into a whole other series of issues that have to do with American culture that. But let's, let's
just accept that as having as, as having been, and for the white, for the white middle class kids to
go into that neighborhood would have been a real problem, not because they would have been
so much in danger, but because their parents would not have allowed them to do so. There was
a real divide. and so how is it that they would have come to hear that music, if they couldn't go to
the clubs where the music was being played, if they really couldn't get to the record stores where
those kinds of records were being sold, because they weren't being sold in mainstream pop
record stores that they might have had access to, how did they get to it? Well, one of the most
important ways, in which R&B came to young white teenagers, and it, it wasn't, it wasn't by
intention, nobody who was doing R&B at that time was trying to reach white teenagers in the first
half of the 1950s, but one of the most important ways that it reached them was through radio.
And this hooks into the story that we were telling last week about how it is that this large, this
large network of, of radio stations and a national audience was created by radio, developed up to
the, the second World War and then after the second World War, that national audience and a lot
of the technology that went with it, started to migrated to television, which was going to be the
next big thing. Leaving a fairly developed radio business there, but with a certain amount of
attention being taken away from in nationally, and being put into a television program at the
national level. That opened up a lot of opportunities regionally, and so stations started to look at
their region, think about opportunities for advertising, and some stations decided they would
focus on rhythm and blues music, and sell advertising that might appeal to the African American
community. And so one of the important figures in rhythm and blues radio, in fact, fact, in radio
generally, at this time, was the disc jockey. Now I think it's, I think I mentioned this last week, but
it's important for us to, to realize that up until this time, the second half of the 1940s into the
1950s, playing a record on the radio was considered cheating. Any body who heard music on the
radio before then assumed that the music was live. So if you were playing a recording, it's like
you were trying to trick the listener into believing you had an orchestra in your studio that, in your
station there that you didn't actually have. And so there was, sort, a sort of sense of sort of,
second rate quality if you played records instead of live music. But with the rise of the disc
jockey, records were played increasingly. it was seen as a very cheap alternative to live music.
And for some, some stations that were sort of keeping an eye on the budget this was a, they,
they didn't go exclusively with disc jockeys but they used disc jockeys more and more. and one
of the important things about the disc jockey is the disc jockey had a lot of discretion in terms of
which records they would play, which gave, gave the disc jockey a certain amount of power.
Some people would think it gave the mobil, the ability especially in a regional station to make a
regional hit, or not and so they became very important figures in, in shaping the music as it, as it
began to develop. Certain for, I, I, the statistics for this show that in 1947 for example, there were
about 3,000 disc jockey's in this country. A handful of them were, were, were black disc jockey's,
but most of them were white disc jockey's and, and these, a lot of these white disc jockey's were
on R&B stations playing music to African American listeners. some of the important R&B stations
that we should think about especially with regard to rhythm and blues and, and the way that it, it
spread is WHBQ which which in 1949, launched Dewey Phillips' show, Red Hot and Blue in
Memphis. Dewey Phillips turns out to be the guy who helped launch the career of Elvis Presley in
1954. We'll talk about that in just a minute. that launched the career of Elvis Presley by playing
his first record on his, first Sun recording That's Alright Mama. But then there was also Gene
Nobles, John Richbourg and Hoss Allen at WLAC in Nashville. Daddy Sears at WGST in Atlanta,
and Hunter Hancock who, who was a black DJ in K, at KFVD in Los Angeles. These guys were
all doing R&B shows, usually in the evening where they were playing all kinds of R&B records by
by independent labels. and, they were, they were really, if you were, if you were a, a, a young kid
tuning the radio in, even though you couldn't get to the neighborhood where this music might
have been played, by turning it in on the radio, the music was available to you. And to a lot of
these, these young teenagers, this was a very alluring thing. The world of R&B was a world of, of
danger, and forbidden sexuality, and all the kinds of things that teenagers love. And the fact that
their parents would have been very, very upset if they knew they were listening to it, made it all
the more appealing. After all, teenagers have always been teenagers, and they certainly were
back then. The most important of all the R&B DJ's, the guy who really sort of towers above the
rest in terms of influence and importance was a Alan Freed. And Alan Freed really became a
kind of celebrity national celebrity, in and of himself. In fact he became one of the biggest targets
at the end of the decade when the payola scandal started to come in, and we'll get to that a little
bit later. Anyway, Alan Freed, by the time he launches his his show called The Moondog Show in
July of 1951 at WJW in Cleveland, by the time he's doing that these other DJ's had already been
doing that kind of thing. So it wasn't like he invented this kind of a show, other people had been
doing it, but Freed did it in a way that really began to pick up some real attention. He was initially
sponsored by a fella named Leo Mintz who, in Cleveland, owned one of the biggest record stores
called Record Rendezvous. And Leo Mintz had, had been sponsoring a classical music show
because, of course, classical classical records sold pretty well back in those days. Had been
sponsoring a classical show on the same station, but at 11:00, after I guess they thought most
decent people had gone to bed, they decided to put on this show devoted to R&B music. So in
other words, the station that Alan Freed was initially on was doing classical music until 11:00,
then at 11:00 he comes on with the R&B, and Alan Freed, for all intents and purposes, sounded
like he was a black DJ. He was doing a lot of things, like you know, pounding on phone books,
and, and, and you know, all excited in his delivery, and all the kinds of things that we, we came to
expect from AM DJs later. he was doing all of that stuff and very effectively. Most of his listeners
were surprised to find out that Alan Freed was actually white. People who would come to the
station would say, you know, you know who are you? I'm Alan Freed. I thought, really? I thought
you were black. this kind of thing, and so Leo Mintz helps get this thing started, and they don't
really know it, but in this period between 1951, 52, 53 in Cleveland, there are a lot of white kids
tuning in to this. Now how would they ever know? Well one story is that this kid started coming in
to the store and buying the R&B records. But it probably didn't happen that way. prob, probably
the, the way they really found out about it is, Alan Freed an entrepreneur always interested in
making a little bit of extra money, starts to put concerts together where he brings all of these R&B
groups together. A concert like that would have to, would be like a package show, five or six
different groups, put them on at a big, at a big theater in Cleveland. And all of a sudden he, all of
a sudden all of these kids show up who are both black and white and they're together at the
same show. Now that wouldn't raise much of an eyebrow today, but back then the white power
structure that was in charge of these kinds of things didn't think so, didn't think that was good. In
fact, some theaters, the black patrons and the white patrons couldn't even be in the same, you
know, in the same part of the theater. The black attendees would have to be in the balcony, say
for example, and the, the, the white kids on the main floor. But they started to sort of blend
together, and this was seen as very dangerous. Rock and roll from the very beginning, was seen
as a kind of a dangerous influence. so these white, these black and white kids coming together at
these at these shows, a scandal. Well Alan White has, or Alan Freed has so much success in
Cleveland that he moves to the big apple, to, to New York, to WINS. And has, has to change the
name of his show, the Moon Dog show, to the Rock and Roll Party, I think as I said last week,
because there was a panhandler in New York who called himself The Moon Dog and actually
took him to court about it. So the Rock and Roll Party launches in September of 1954, and he's
on he's on doing this show in the, the biggest radio market in the world, New York City. and so
he, he makes a tremendous impact there. Eventually that show of his, the Alan Freed show, gets
gets, goes into syndication nationally, so people get to hear them all over the country. he does
shows, just like he'd be doing in Cleveland, but now, he does tours, where his, the Alan Freed
show goes around from city to city, that kind of thing. he did a bunch of movies. they were really
sort of flimsy plots with just an opportunity for you to see lip sync performances of some of the
early rock and roll performance, but for that they're great. Rock Around the Clock from 56, Rock
Rock Rock from 1956, and Don't Knock the Rock from 1957. So as an important figure in sort of
championing the cause Of early rock and roll Alan Freed is an important figure and probably the
most important DJ for us to think about. Lets turn our attention now to Indie labels and early rock
and roll. We said before, last week, that the, the major labels of the, of this era Decca, Mercury,
RCA, Victor, Columbia, Capita, and MGM, really were the ones that had all the money, and had
all the wherewithal to very quickly and efficiently distribute their records nationally. An
independent label was a small company with limited distribution. You could distribute your
records about as far as you could get if you put them in your trunk and drove to each place. I
mean that's basically the way it was for a lot of indie labels. There was one, maybe two guys,
working there, and really distribution was about taking the records out to the jukebox providers to
the radio stations trying to get the songs on the air, and to the record stores. And that's the way it
worked. and so it really limited these guys in a lot of kinds of ways, so they kept their focus low.
And that's okay because the major labels really didn't want this other business in R&B and
country and western so much, because it was just too small potatoes for them. They were
making the big money in mainstream pop and they were happy with that. But these Indie label
owners, they really had to work hard to promote their records. After all It was their money that
was on the line. If it worked for a major label, you were really working, spending the companies
money. But if you had an independant label, you were spending your money. And so it made it a
lot more different. So these guys would really go at promoting these records, and in the record
business this meant sometimes what came to be called payola, that is you would try to do
something nice for a DJ, who had, as I said before, all this discretion about what to play or not to
play. Do something nice for him to convince him to play your record and not somebody elses.
Sometime that would be a cash gift sometimes it would just be a gift, maybe a case of whisky
something like that, sometimes it would be a paid vacation. There are all kinds of ways you can
think of that you could offer somebody something to do a favor for you. Everyone was doing it.
The majors were doing it too, but the indies were really aggressive about it and really going after
it. So, what ends up happening is these indie records start to cross over onto the mainstream
pop charts, as we talked about in 19, the 19, well they're, we'll talk in, in a minute when we talk
about crossover, about what the figures were. But when these things start to cross over from the
R&B charts, which was thought of as sort of a small potatoes, we don't care about that, by the
majors, onto the mainstream pop label, well, then they started to cut into the major labels market
share, then they were a lot more concerned about that, and then the race was really on in rock
and roll, to see who could garner the greater market share and who could be more successful.
So, before we can talk about that, let's talk in the next video, about how crossover works.

Cruces y cubiertas Crossovers and

Covers
Let's talk now about crossover, chart crossover, and cover versions. As I said last week, the
charts that we're talking about are record industry charts, and the two organizations that get the
most consideration from scholars are a magazine called Cashbox and especially the magazine
called Billboard. There magazines were designed, not for fans to read, they weren't like fan
magazines like Rolling Stone, or Mojo, or something like that that you would pick up in order to
find out what, for a fan to find out what was happening, or interviews with their favorite artist,
something like this. These were magazines that were put together to help advise people, who
were in the business of providing music retail or music services, what music was popular and
what music was not popular. So if you were somebody who, who serviced, who had a jukebox
business. What you wanted in, you, when you put your records in that jukebox is you want to get
people to put as many dimes or nickels or whatever they're putting in that thing, as possible. And
so you want to maximize the number of plays per record you can possibly get. So, what you want
to know is, what do people like? What are they playing? You know, what, what seems like it's
getting hot? What starting to cool off? You put as many of the hot records or getting hot records
into your jukebox as you can and pull the ones, pull the records that are starting to cool out and
that way you can maximize your process, your profit from each of these each of these jukeboxes
that you have in various sort of lounges and bars and this kind of thing. If you're somebody who's
running a radio station, you want to play the music that everybody seems to be wanting to listen
to, right, because the more listeners you get, the more advertising you get, the more you can
charge for advertising. So, you want to know what's hot on the radio and having a, a magazine
tell you what the national trends are and regional trends are is very, very valuable. and if you're
somebody who's in record retail, you don't want to have a whole bunch of records sitting on the
shelf that nobody wants anymore. You want to have records on the shelf that people are likely to
buy, and so you want to sort of time your buying to what seem like the trend, what's happening
with the trends. So if you know what the trends are, if you have some suspicion you can guess,
you have a much better idea of maximizing your profit and your business in the music retailing
and service than you might if you didn't. And so that's what these things were meant to do. And
because of that they were divided up into markets. And as we said before, the markets were
thought of as fairly distinct and almost exclusive, not entirely, but almost exclusive of each other.
So pop as we said before, mainstream pop was considered a middle class, white audience. R
and B was an urban, black audience. Country and western was a rural, white audience, farming
communities, or those who were displaced from such communities into urban environments. And
the charts were also divided up by use. So there was a separate chart for radio, a separate chart
for retail, a separate chart for jukebox, and each of these designations. You kind of look up
whatever your particular concern was and see what seems to be happening week by week in
popular music. Now at this point, I should say a word, at least a sort of sound of warning about
using chart numbers too much. I will talk to you about chart numbers as an indication of
popularity of records. And, in the book, in the text book, if you're following along in the text book,
you'll see a lot of chart numbers. But you should know that chart numbers are, are a fairly coarse
instrument for trying to figure out the popularity of a particular record. I mean if a record goes to
number one, or number two, or number three, or number four, it's probably not a big distinction
there. There are kind of, could be all kinds of things that account for that. But a number 20 record
really is a different kind of thing than a number 1, 2, 3 or 4, 4 or 5 record, right, so, at that level,
when you're, when you're looking at where they, where they place generally in the chart, it makes
a lot of difference. It helps, also, charts to, they, they help, they help keep us from getting into the
fan mentality. Which is this idea that we're always rooting for the artist that we like the most, and
maybe neglecting those that we don't like as much. When you see the chart statistics there,
sometimes it causes you to admit that some of the artists you like maybe didn't sell as many
records or weren't as popular as maybe you thought they were. And it makes, also forces you to
admit that artists you don't like so much actually had a fair amount of success. Their chart
numbers are useful that way, but we shouldn't be too literal about them and use them to do sort
of fine, make fine distinctions that they were never designed to be able to make. Let's talk now
about crossover records. And crossover songs. There are really two, when we talk about
crossover, that is when a tune is originally on the country chart and somehow makes it onto the
pop chart or a tune that starts on the rhythm and blues chart and makes it onto the pop chart.
And that's mostly what were talking about. I mean when you think about it, by definition,
crossover could mean anything. It could be going from country to rhythm and blues, rhythm and
blues to country, or, or from mainstream pop back to country or whatever. But, mostly it's about
records from one of those two other smaller charts making it into the, into the pop chart. When
we're talking about crossover that's what we mean. And there's two ways that can happen. Either
the record itself can actually cross over. So, Little Richard Does Tudy Fruity, it's originally on the
R&B charts, then after place for a while and it's a hit there, it shows up on the main street pop
charts, done by Little Richard. That's a cross over record, same song, same artist. On the other
hand, a song itself, but not the same record, can cross over. So it could be a song, Tutti Frutti by
Little Richard, that appears on the rhythm and blues charts. That is then covered or done in a
different version by Pat Boone. And the Pat Boone record, on the mainstream pop charts, goes
up the pop charts but doesn't chart on the R&B chart. There you see the song moves. From, in
the case of Tutti Frutti, both the record and the song, crossed over. But there's a distinction
there. so we want to keep that that straight. Now, when a song crosses over like that, and it's
done in a different version we often use the term cover version. And as I mentioned last week,
I'm not really quite sure cover version is, is exactly the right term here because people were
already doing lots of different versions of songs. There are, there are, those kinds of versions
usually involve putting your own personal stamp on a record. It turned out though during this
period that there were actually cover versions that were more like duplicates. In other words you
are making a record that sounded exactly like the other record. The only difference was that you
change the lyrics so that there were no kind of sexual connotations that anybody could pick up
on. And the artist was white. Sometimes even like marketly white, I mean you call a group The
Crew Cuts and you know it's probably you know a vocal group of white guys, right. And so, this
kind of thing, this is the part where we start to go into the area of controversy in certain kinds of
disputes that have broken out over this, in the record business. They come down to this
controversy about whether or not, there's, how much racism is involved in the idea that white
artists would cover the music of black artists and do better on the main stream pop charts than
the black artists themselves did. Let me tell you a little bit about the statistics and why they
should be so, such an important consideration. In the period between 1950 and 1953, about 10%
of the songs that were hits on the R & B chart crossed over to the pop charts. So, one in ten R&B
hits could cross over to the pop chart. So you would say that between the R&B chart and the pop
chart, that's a pretty fair amount of isolation between the two. It's not exclusive in an absolute
sense, but there's a lot of isolation there. In 1954, you could see the trend. Already 25% of R&B
hits are crossing over from the R&B chart to the pop charts. But by 1958, 94% of the songs that
were R&B hits appeared on the mainstream pop charts. Well, if you were one of those black
artists that had the original R&B record and it was a hit, boy, it would have been great if then it
would've crossed the actual record with your name on it, would've gone over to the mainstream
pop chart. And you would be able to have all the success, financial and otherwise, that goes with
that. And to have that success taken away because somebody covers it in a version that sounds
almost exactly like yours. But they get all the success, you got the thing started on the R&B
chart, and they take it over. Well that was a pretty bitter pill for a lot of African American musician
to swallow. and there were all kinds of ways in which musicians were ripped off in that era as
well. A lot of times those musicians didn't even own the rights to those particular songs, the
publishing rights they signed that away when they recorded. I mean record company people,
they did this to both black and white musicians. They would say, well what would you rather
have? I'll pay you 50 bucks for this session. I don't know what the amount was, let's say it's 50
bucks. I'll pay you 50 bucks for this session now, or I'll give you a certain percentage of the
earnings over time. Most musicians will take their money now. They don't know whether they're
ever going to see that guy in the future. And so when they took their money now, they signed
away their publishing. So if that R&B hit crossed over, the publishers who, who own that music,
they still made all kind of money for it, no matter who sang it, right. But the original artist only go
the money they got the first time when they recorded it. And so they, they, they felt very ripped
off. Now, there is there is a kind of a controversy surrounding this. And the, the biggest part of
the controversy is whether or not this really is a kind of a, a ripping off or not. Now, the, you,
you've heard the argument that comes from people like Little Richard and and, and others who,
who, who felt like they didn't get the money they should have got and they were ripped off by
these white covers. The white artists have, have often argued that because these songs would
not have been playable on radio the way they were. Because they the lyrics might of been a little
bit too adult themed, lets say, for main stream pop radio. They weren't really taking it away from
these from, from, from, these people in that, in that way. They were really sort of adapting them
and, and that, that they weren't taking something with them they would of otherwise got. Or you
can, you can decide what you think about that. But what I can tell you here is that because of the
success, the crossover success of tunes like Rock Around the Clock in 1955 and Maybelline
from Chuck Berry and these kinds of things, we can start to look at 1955 as really kind of being a
tipping point. That's the point where all of a sudden something that had been kind of a once in a
while kind of thing, this cross over thing, really starts to happen in a, in a very big way. And so,
1955, that's one of the reasons why we can look at that as the beginning of rock and roll. So, let's
have a look a who some of the first rock and rollers were. who they were, and what they were up
to.
El primer cruce de Rock and Rollers
Let's look, take a look at who some of the first rock and rollers were in this first period of rock and
roll 1955 through 1959 when these first rock and rollers begin to cross over from R&B onto the
pop charts. The first one I think that we should talk about is Bill Haley and the Comets. And we'll
come back to him in just a minute. But, we've talked a lot about how important Rock Around the
Clock was as a record. Shake, Rattle and Roll is something that he had done the year before.
and so we should really sort of tip our hats at Bill Haley as as really being the first one to, to
really to really sort of get this, this rock and roll thing going in 1955. But there are some other
important early entries here. let's turn our attention, for example, to Fats Domino. Fats Domino
coming out of New Orleans, appearing on the Imperial label which was out of, the label in Los
Angeles but all the recording was done in New Orleans by a fellow by the name of Dave
Bartholomew. He's a famous New Orleans musician. Fats Domino was an interesting kind of, a,
of, of, a, of an entertainer for these years. Fats Domino, an African American guy who was
maybe a little, overweight. you know, very, very friendly.
sort of, cheerful demeanor. And in no way would white audiences think that, that Fats Domino
was. Threatening or menacing in any kind of way, and I'm not I'm not saying that would have any
reason for that. These are all kind of racial or racist kind of views at the time, but for a black
entertainer to to succeed in a white audience with a white audience. There are, there are
probably some features there that can help that happen, and Fats Domino was a very kind of
friendly guy.
His music had a kind of easy-going 12 eight compound time deebata, deebata, deebata,
deebata, deebata, deebata kind of feel. A kind of a laid-back New Orleans kind of sound. he
really had a lot of country influence. In fact, among the other musicians that he hung with in New
Orleans, They all kind of thought of him as more of a kind of a country country western artist. We
don't think of him that way, but in his crowd, that's the way he was thought of. So, maybe, if
there's a bit of the sort of country twang that that makes his music maybe even a little bit more
approachable. By a wide audience that's, that's not particularly familiar with rhythm and blues, or
rhythm and blues culture. So if his early R&B hits that didn't cross over, I mean, he was on the
R&B charts way before rock and roll 1955. his first big one was The Fat Man from 1950. And
another one called Goin' Home from 1952, there are several more. But his first big crossover is a
tune called Ain't It A Shame from 1955. We'll talk about that with regard to Pat Boone in just a
minute. And, maybe the most representative song of of Fats Domino from this era is Blueberry
Hill from 1956 a big hit for him. Another one is I'm Walkin' from 1957. An interesting note about
Blueberry Hill, is it goes against a lot of what we talk about with regard to crossovers and covers
in that Blueberry Hill is a song that didn't really arise out of the R&B tradition. Blueberry Hill is a
song that had been a hit in 1940 for the Glen Miller Orchestra. A big band. So in some ways, the
biggest hit for Fats Domino, one of the early African American, first, early African American stars
of rock and roll, was a cover version of a tune that had originally been done By Glen Miller. So,
the minute we start to generalize too much about cover and cross over, it's always possible to
come up with a counter example. and this is one of them. Moving on from Fat's Domino, let's
concider Chuck Berry coming out of St. Louis. Via Chicago. He recorded on Chess Records.
Was introduced to the guys at Chess Records by Muddy Waters. Chuck Berry was also a big fan
of country music. And in his autobiography, he talks about how important it was in his live act
before he started recording, to understand different dialects. He calls them with music and so he
could do country western tunes in the country western style with his voice sounding very country
western. Then he could do blues and R&B, and [UNKNOWN] for instance. And these really
understood different kinds of styles. and in many ways I think he used an awful lot of the country
voice when he was recording those first couple of tunes because most, well, many listeners as
the story goes had no idea that Chuck Berry was was a black guy. They thought he was white.
There's actually some television clips from the day when you can see where he comes out and
there's a studio audience there and maybe I'm imagining it, but they pan over to the studio
audience and it seems like a lot of those audiences are almost entirely white. It seems like a lot
of those folks are looking at Chuck Berry and they're going, God I though he was white, right?
And so, again, like Fats Domino, that country twang, that country influence maybe gives these
first black artists, maybe more approachability in the white market than they might have had
otherwise. In fact. Chuck's first big hit is the song called Maybellene from 1955. And it's really
kind of an interesting example because for one thing, if you look at the credit who it was written
by, it was clearly the words the music we'll talk about in a minute. But the words were clearly
written by Chuck Berry, but it says words of music By Chuck Berry, Leonard Chess and Alan
Freed. Well, why should that be? What could Alan Freed have possibly had to do with the writing
of Maybellene or even Leonard Chess for that matter? Well, Leonard Chess owned publishing,
and Alan Freed was cut in on a piece of the publishing which meant that every time Alan Freed
played that record, if it became a hit It would be money coming back to Alan Freed. And so these
kinds of publishing deals were made all the time as a way of cutting somebody in on the
publishing of a tune. So that they would have an incentive to play the tune, and make it into a hit.
And that's exactly what happens with Maybellene. Interestingly, the song, Maybellene. Actually
goes back to a fiddle tune called Ida Red, that had been originally recorded by people like Roy
Acuff and Bob Wills and his Texas Playboys. In fact, he was going to do it as Ida Red, because
he did it as part of his country western kind of set. But they said, no, if you do Aside A Red it's in
the public domain. That's a traditional song. You won't get any publishing on it. Let's just do the
same, do the same tune, what you usually do it, but let's just change the lyrics. because if you
change the lyrics, you can call it a different song and we can cover it. Then, you get some
publishing, and I'll get some publishing, and we'll, and Leonard Chess gets some publishing, and
Allen Freed gets some pub, so that's what they do. How did he come up with Maybellene, well
Chuck Berry would never give you a straight answer on that. And I think one of his, his funniest
responses to that was, it was the name of a cow. In a children's book he read when he was a kid.
But the story goes, at least coming from Leonard Chess, that it came directly from a makeup the
box of a makeup kit there, because Chuck Berry had been a cosmetician in St. Louis, and so
Maybellene, of course, a famous brand of cosmetics there. So right there, inside that tune You
begin to see an awful lot going on there. If you, if you listen to the lyrics, it, it, and think about the
metaphors very closely. it's almost it's self kind of a hokum blue so all the metaphors are so
thickly veiled that you really can't tell that there could be any kind of sexual content, but I'll leave
it to you. To check it out and see if you think that that's an accurate description or not. One thing
about Chuck Berry is, he saw what was happening with these crossovers. And he decided his
lyrics be, would be written so that they didn't need to be fixed. In other words, he would write
them so they were directly appealing to a teenage audience. So nobody had to change anything.
And maybe his records then. British records to be covered by somebody else. And he could get
the he could get the money and the and the fame that came with it. And, in fact, he did. School
Day, 1957; Rock and Roll Music, 1957; Sweet Little Sixteen, 1958; Johnny B. Goode, 1958. All of
those became big hits for Chuck Berry, and a lot more. Is a very, very important song-writer,
Chuck Berry, writing all his own songs at a time when most performers didn't write their own
songs, along with Buddy Holly, one of the most important ones of this generation. Also his guitar
style, that sort of, the guitar licks that you hear like at the very beginning of Johnny be Good. Are
something that every kid learning rock and roll guitar, up to a certain period maybe in the 80s or
90s, maybe they still learn it. But everybody, sort of learned that, like that Chuck Berry thing. And
this other thing he does, this duck walk thing where he gets down and puts the guitar between
his legs and does that. All these things Made Chuck Berry a fantastic guitarist and showman, and
a, and a tremendous personality. Let's talk a little now about Little Richard, because now we're
getting farther and farther away from the image that would be most appealing to to white
listeners. Little Richard was a flamboyant guy, there's just No two ways about it. Chuck Berry
might have been the first rock and roller to write a song about makeup, but Little Richard was the
first rock and roller to wear makeup. I mean he was a sort of a crazy exciting, energetic
performer, playing on the piano, singing, sometimes screaming, sometimes with his feet up on
the keyboard, he was fantastic. But all, in a very kind of charismatic Lovable, perhaps
nonthreatening kind of way. Always music, always filled with a certain kind of excitement and joy.
tunes like Tutti Frutti from 1955 which was a number two hit on the R&B charts but only got to
number 17 on the pop charts. The Pat Boon version got to number 12. Long Tall Sally. 1956 was
the number one hit, number six on the pop charts. Good Golly Miss Molly, 1954, was number
four on the R&B charts, number ten on the pop charts. Now if you paid attention to those
numbers that just went by, you'd notice that the R&B numbers are always closer to the top of the
charts, than the pop numbers were. but again, a flamboyant style may be a little rawer and
rougher than Fats Domino's music or Chuck Barry's. But the, these three guys, Fats Domino,
Chuck Berry, Little Richard, Along with Bill Haley right there at the very beginning of Rock and
Roll. Now, let's move on to this idea of the whitening of rhythm and blues that we talked about in
the last lecture, and, and, and think a little bit about this. Bill Haley who recorded for Deca. Now
we, we, we've talked about his Shake, Rattle and Roll from 1954, that was his cover version of
the Joe Turner tune. And so we all ready know something about this whitening effect that goes
on with the original, R&B recordings and changing the lyrics. Sort of making them more,
appealing perhaps, or at least acceptable To a mainstream pop audience. The guy who takes
most of the heat for this kind of this, however, is Pat Boone. Pat Boone is actually a descendant
of the the explorer Daniel Boone, and recorded for an indie label in Gallatin, Tennessee called
Dot. His version of the Fats Domino tune Ain't That a Shame, went to number one in the pop
charts in 1955. remembering that the, the Fats Domino's did not do as well. And his version of
Tutti Frutti, the Little Richard tune in 1956, went to number 12, beating out Richard's. And sort of
passing it in the charts on the way along. So, he usually takes the, the brunt of the heat for doing.
Cover versions that most fans would say they don't like nearly as much as the originals. But what
he does, by adding almost a kind of a swing band kind of vocal approach to those tunes. Really
merging the mainstream pop kinds of styles from before 1955 with R&B. In some ways what he
does is more indicative of the qualities of rock 'n roll, separable From rhythm and blues than,
than the original R&B ones are in certain kinds of ways. Pat Boone also had a whole ton hits that
were not cover versions of somebody else's tune. Don't Forbid Me, Love Letters In The Sand,
April Love, those were all number one hits in 1956 and 1957, some of them even crossing over.
People were surprised to find this. Pat Boone hits that aren't cover versions crossing over. On to
the R&B charts we sometimes call that reverse cross over where a song becomes a hit on the
mainstream chart and then becomes a hit on the R&B chart. We come back again to the society
of the controversy over cover versions is the idea of these white musicians. covering music that
was originally done by black musicians. And whether or not this is, this is right or not. And I've
offered in the, in the previous lecture, I I offered the, the reasoning there. I'll leave it to you to
decide what you think. But I would ask you to keep an open mind to the idea that
It probably matters whether, how close the song hues to the original version. In the case of the
Pat Boone versions of both the Fats Domino version and the Little Richard version, they are not
dupliacates. If you don't like them, you don't like them because, because of how much they don't
sound like the original, right? And in that way, even if you don't like it, you have to acknowledge
that in the, in terms of the pop and music at that time it was perfectly alright to do a cover version
of somebody elses tune, if you made it your own. The tops his of mainstream pop hits of 1955
there are three, of those top hits, I don't know if it's the top 20, or 25 hits, there were three
versions of the ballad of Davy Crockett. So, it was certainly possibly for that to happen. The ones
I think that really are subject to a certain amount of Of negative criticism are the ones that
basically just duplicated somebody else's record. Where the only reason why you did it was
basically to put a white artist label, name on the label, because you didn't think you could sell it
with a black artist name on it. And that's probably one of those things in history of rock that will,
we, we, shouldn't be too proud of. But that's, that's part of what happened and it's part of the
culture of the time. So now, having talked about this first rush of Of, of, of a stars from 1955, we
turn to the guy who really sort of defines this first wave of Rock and Roll, and that's Elvis Presley.
We'll talk about him in the next lecture.
El auge de Elvis Presley
Now it's time to talk about Elvis Presley. Elvis Presley in this first wave of rock and roll, really in
the history of rock and roll. But first certainly in this first wave of rock and roll, this 1950's, second
half of the 1950's, is absolutely the most important figure, there. And it, it's, he's important not
only because of his musical contributions, but because of the tremendous success that he had
as an artist and as a performer. I mean Elvis was, in many ways, a lot like people before him.
Like Frank Sinatra and Bing Crosby, Elvis was a song stylist but he was a fantastically
charismatic performer. the young Elvis was dangerous, he was definitely sort of a bad guy, in a
certain kind of a way. he's seen as sort of a, maybe a negative influence on young people. I think
about, I mentioned that because a lot of times, the Elvis of later years, the Elvis of, of the early
1970s, for example, is not really seen so much that way. But the early Elvis, we have seen those
early videos, you should check it out. anyway, Elvis himself born in Tupelo, Mississippi, but
moved with his family to Memphis when he was about 13 years old. discovered Sam Phillips'
Memphis recording service which later became Sun Records in 1952. Elvis discovered Sam
Phillips' recording service when he wanted to make, ih, a demo tape for his mom's birthday. and
so he did that in 1953, and started hanging around the, the, the, the studio there. Once Sam
Phillips started doing Sun Records, eh, established that in 1972, 1952. He'd started out as a guy
who basically just recorded concerts and did some radio announcing, that kind of thing. But then
decided, you know, and in fact he recorded a Rocket 88, the Jackie Brenston tune which he then
sold or licensed to Chess records. And they released that in 1951. Well they got the idea I should
have my own label. So it went from becoming Memphis recording service to becoming Sound
Records in 1952. Then Elvis comes along, and Elvis finds out that they're there. He's, had
always, you know, always wanted to be a singer. He'd listened to a lot of country western music,
grown up with a lot of rhythm and blues music. He used to go to the other side of the tracks and
try to sneak into clubs and hear various kinds of things. He was kind of a, in fact in, in, in the
mostly white high school that he was He was in, he was kind of a, a loner, you know, in some
kinds of ways. He was so different from the other kinds, he was so dedicated to Rhythm and
Blues Culture. Anyway, Sam Phillips sees this young Elvis kid coming in, he starts to show up for
sessions There's a story that at one session of prisoners, he actually tried to offer advice about
what they should do on one of the tunes. And Sam Phillips, the way he told the story, he said
man I didn't think that maybe the best environment for a kid his age to be hanging around. And
so I tried to scare him off, anyway, Elvis kept coming back. And kept, kept wanting to record for
Sam Phillips. And so, finally Sam decided to start working with Elvis. he did a couple of tunes for
him in the studio at Sun in 1954 and Sam, didn't think he could use either of those. But he saw
some kind of promise in Elvis Presley, so he put him together with Scotty Moore. and Bill Black to
more experience musicians who he trusted to kind of work with Elvis, to do a bunch of different
kinds of things. He wasn't really quite sure what Elvis could do well. Sam Philips said from the
time he started Sun Records until the time he started to have success with Elvis Presley. Which
would have been '52, '53 into 1954. He'd always recorded Black artists. But understanding that
crossover was an important component of being able to sell those records. Crossing over those
R&B records, crossing over to a White audience. He'd always said famously If I could find, a
Black guy or if I could find a White guy, that could sing like a black guy, I could make a million
dollars. Well, it turned out, Elvis Presley was that guy. But even Sam didn't know it at the
beginning, so when Elvis came back with Scotty and and Bill and they were doing all kinds of
tunes. A lot of them, were sort of, almost like Dean Martinish, kinds of sort of crooner songs and
they did whole. Session of that kind of thing, and things were not going well. everybody was
getting tired you know, they were getting a little bit sort of punch drunk. And the way the story's
often told, Sam Philips had to fix something having to do with his, his recording equipment. Had
to, you know, go underneath the, the equipment and fix some wires or some kind of thing. And so
the guys had a little bit of time on their hands. And they were kind of clowning around, and Elvis
always used to like to clown around. And so he starts to do this That's Alright Mama thing, this
Arthur Crudup thing that he knew. And he starts to sort of do it, and the other guys thinking it was
kind of funny, started, you know, joining in. And they started to do it, all just as a kind of a gag
that amused themselves while they're waiting for Sam to finish playing with their equipment. And
as the story goes, Sam Philips' head pops and he says, what's that? And he said it's nothing,
we're just fooling around. Let's record it. So they record That's All Right Mama, and of course,
wouldn't you know it, that becomes the song in 1954, the summer of 1954. That becomes the
defining record of Elvis Presley in his, in his career. At least the first, the first big one. It's got that
Sun Records sound. That slap back echo that Sam Phillips was so famous for and in many ways,
it's kind of like Elvis is taking country music. It's what the Arthur Crudup, who was an R&B singer.
It's what the Arthur Crudup song would have sounded like, if it was done by country western
musicians. The flip side of the record, is Bill Monroe's Blue Moon of Kentucky, done as if it were
an R&B tune. So, it's interesting that, that we've got an R&B tune, done as if it is a country tune
and a country tune or bluegrass tune done as if it was an R&B tune. So, if you look for, for
someone who was able to put those styles together. There it is, on, on the A and B side of that,
of that single from 1954. Well after he made that record. Sam Phillips immediately took it out to
his friend Dewey Phillips, no relation. not brother or family members. But they just happened to
have the same last name. Dewey Phillips who's, we've said before hand the radio show at
WHBQ. And Dewey Philips starts to play it over and over again. Well the song catches on. And
so Sam Philips has got a regional hit on his hands. And on the strength of that regional hit he's
able to get Elvis on the Grand Ole Opry, and get him a regular spot on Louisiana Hayride. It's
interesting that, that two sided single, some of the markets preferred to play Blue Moon of
Kentucky. Other markets preferred to play That's Alright Mama, depending on whether they saw
Elvis as primarily kind of a hip country act or a countryish R&B act, right. But both sides got ear
play, depending on, on the region. But anyway, it started to have some, some, some pretty good
success with it. Things were starting to heat up. This Elvis Presley guy is looking like he could be
a big star. And in walks a guy by the name of Colonel Tom Parker, who, who had previously
managed Hank Snow. A country and western singer that had had a certain amount of success.
And Parker sees something in Elvis Presley, and starts to broker a deal to take over the
management of Elvis Presley, and get him signed to RCA Records. And so they, this isn't the
first time somebody had asked Sam Phillips to sell Evlis' contract. But Tom Parker brokers this
deal for what at the time seemed like an enormous amount of money. He brokered a deal to sell
the Sun contract to RCA for $35,000, plus Elvis would get $5,000 in back royalties that he was
owed for. That hadn't been paid yet on records that had already been sold, so $40,000 total. It
seemed like to a lot of people in the industry like RCA was throwing its money away on one of
these idiotic rock and roll singers who were just the flavor of the month. And boy, would they ever
regret it. but the deal was done. It's important to point out, it was the first, the first one of these
rock and roll singers had signed with a major label. So that was already an indication that rock
and roll was coming up in the world. out of the indie label into a major label, with all the resources
at their disposal. But it's also important to point out that Elvis was signed into the country division
of RCA. And so his recordings were done at Nashville, so it's not like he was entirely in the
mainstream even within RCA. But It was a crucial step for rock and roll and because he was now
with this major label, they were able to get him Television appearances. So, he appears in early
1956, on the Dorsey Brother show, a few times. Although that show did not have very good
ratings. He appeared a couple times on the Milton Berle Show. Which did get very good reading,
rating ratings, and was extremely controversial. And then a couple of times on the Steve Allen
Show where it was controversial. And of them where he even comes out wearing a tuxedo and
sings Hound Dog to a Hound Dog To try and make up for the controversial things that he'd done
before. Which included getting to the end of, of, a Hound Dog on one of these performances.
And going into a kind of almost stripper, bump and grind kind of thing at the end, totally
impromptu. If you see the clip of that, you can see Scotty Bill and the drummer, DJ Fontanna are
looking at each other and saying to themselves what in the heck is this guy doing? Live TV and
all of the sudden he goes to this ending we haven't rehearsed? And he was really playing it up
and the girls were screaming and all this kind of thing and the next day it was like Elvis the
Pelvis. This is sinful, you know, hell and perdition. And so Elvis was now the bad, the bad boy
who was leading all these, these kids astray and all that. So then he came back the next
performance, and did this thing where he was wearing a tuxedo. And sing Hound Dog in this very
sort of proper way, as a kind of a tongue-in-cheek kind of thing. Anyway, Elvis Presley, very, very
big. One of the important things about his success, was that he not only had crossover success.
But he was one of the first artists to repeatedly have top hits on all 3 charts at the same time.
Remember the figures that I cited in one of the earlier lectures about how separated the charts
were in the period of the first half of the 50s. Now, we're talking hit records that are in the case of
records like Hound Dog and Jailhouse Rock. Were number one on all three charts at the same
time, imagine that. That's what you call market saturation. And so this, this tremendous you
know, charisma, television presence. All this kind of thing really sent all kinds of ripples through
the popular music business that RCA a major label had gotten involved. This guy was on TV, he
was having fantastic hits, he was a star, he was a celebrity. And all of a sudden the other labels
sort of thinking we need to get into this game too. And all of a sudden the rock business started
to go up a couple levels in terms of, of big sort of major label and corporate interest. Now we
think about Elvis as a performer. We should, we should view him as I said before, as a song
stylist. Elvis never wrote any songs. We talk about Chuck Berry writing his own music. Buddy
Holly writing his own music. But most of these guys didn't write their own songs at this time. And
Elvis was one of those. What he knew how to do. Was how to choose tunes that were best for
him. And a typical Elvis recording session we knew this. Wwe know this from various accounts,
including those of Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller who were there. Had him going through song,
after song, after song with the band until he found something that he thought fit him, just right. He
had a lot of idea about what he did well. The deal he made with Colonel Tom Parker is he would,
he would stay out of the business end of that. And Colonel Tom Parker would do that, and
Colonel Tom Parker would stay out of the music end. And if he recorded something that he didn't
want released It wouldn't be released. Elvis was the final arbitor of what happened, musically
speaking. And I think that that maybe defeats the image of Elvis of just being kind of a dumb,
dumb but attractive and talented singer. He really understood his own talents, his own music, his
own approach. He blended together Pop, Country, Western and R&B singing styles. You can
hear an awful lot of Dean Martin, for example, and Elvis with that hubba, hubba, hubba thing that
he does, you can hear an awful lot of R&B. Clyde McPhatter and the Drifters, for example, if you
take the, the original Clyde McPhatter and the Drifters recording of White Christmas. And then
listen to this version of White Christmas that Elvis does on his Christmas album from a couple
years later. You can hear Elvis doing that version, but doing all the different voices of the Drifters
in succession as they sing it in his own way. Absolutely imitating them. And a lot of things he
does sound very Elvis-like. Which give us, gives us a sense of where he got a lot of the things
that he blended together to create his unique vocal style. Remember, as a song stylist, that's
what you'll want. A unique vocal style and Elvis Presley certainly had that. Well, by 1958, Elvis
had been drafted into the army. March of 1958 on a day that everybody thought was Black
Monday. Elvis Presley was inducted into the armed services and was away for a couple of years.
But Elvis' success opened up opportunity for other rock and roll artist. So lets turn our attention to
them in the next lecture.

Sam Phillips vende el contrato de Elvis

Right now I'd like to take a little bit of time considering why it is that Sam Phillips of Sun Records
would of sold Elvis's contract the way he did to RCA. You would think, I would, I would think not
knowing if I, if I didn't know how the, the business work. That you know if you have a singer like
Elvis Presley, and he's just starting to rise in the charts and heard of becoming a big star. Why
would you want to sell that person's contract to another label when maybe if you became a star,
you could make all that money, and grow your own company, right? Well it's, it's kind of ironic
that the way things work for the independent label actually is at, at that time actually punished too
great of a success and here's why. If you have a record that really starts to take off. You have to
pay, in order to make as many copies as you want to be able to sell. You have to pay to have all
those records pressed, and all the sleeves printed, and all of it assembled and shipped out. You
have to pay all that money up front. The record store people, or whoever else, the jukebox
people, or wherever, they're not going to pay you for those records until sometimes months later.
So, if you're a small independent label and you've only got so much capital to work with. And you
put out all this capital to get these records out there. Those records could be selling like hot
cakes, but it doesn't do you any good, because you're not going to see that money, maybe for six
weeks eight weeks. In the meantime, you're really kind of frozen out, I mean there's, unless
you've got tons and tons of money at your disposal, which is not the definition of an independent
label, right. You're kind of, kind of frozen out and its, its, it actually ruin a big record like that
could, could back in those days is ruin an independent label, because of the time lag between
the money that they put out there. So it's ironic they would be going under, just at about the time
they were having their biggest possible success. By the time the money comes into them it's too
late they, they haven't had enough money to sustain the business during that period. And so,
what Sam Phillips decided to do in the case of Elvis is, Elvis's contract was coming up for
renewal anyway, and there's no guarantee that Elvis would have resigned it. And this is a little bit
like talking about athletics these days or sports, professional sports. So, while Elvis's contract
was still worth something he sold it to RCA, but he wasn't even sure he wanted to sell it at that
point. The way he tells the story, he says that he offered them, he made an offer to them when
he offered $35,000. He thought they would never take it in a million years. It was like a way of
telling them to go away, setting the price so high that they just wouldn't take it. But to his
surprise, they took it, and when it, when the money was actually, was actually that much money
in the deal, he had to think, well should I grab this, you know, a bird in the hand versus two in the
bush. Should I grab this now? Take this money and use it to reinvest in the company and other
artists. He had other people coming along at Sun Records, we'll talk about in the next lecture.
People like Johnny Cash and Roy Orbison and Jerry Lee Lewis and Carl Perkins. Maybe he
thought that he would take that money and would reinvest in his business, and he would grow
the entire thing, even if he lost Elvis. and so, that's one reason or at least a couple of reasons
why Sam Phillips would have sold Elvis's contract as he did.

Rockabilly en la estela de Elvis

I said at the beginning of this week lectures, that this era's basically divided up into the period
before Elvis. And we talked about that 1955, we talked about Chuck Berry, Fats Domino, Little
Richard, Bill Haley, people like that. And then Elvis, which we've just gotten done talking about.
The importance of him, especially when he comes onto the scene in 1956, when he signs with
RCA. And they put all of their promotional muscle behind him, and he starts to have all this
fantastic national success on all three charts. And then there's the period after Elvis, or after
Elvis' initial success. So, now we're talking about 57, 58, and 59. and that's what we're going to
talk about now, the artists who were important during that third division of years that we're talking
about in this relatively short period from 55 to 59 or 60. let's stay with Sun Records for a minute
and talk about some of the artists that were still at Sun after Elvis departed. The first of these is
Carl Perkins, a singing guitar player who had a pretty good hit, a number 2 hit with Blue Suede
Shoes. In fact, even before Elvis did it, Carl Perkins had a record that was a hit on all three
charts at the same time. but unfortunately for Carl Perkins, on his way to television performance
on the East Coast to promote Blue Suede Shoes, they were in a car accident and he, nobody
was killed. But I, as I recall, I think he busted a leg or something like that, and so couldn't perform
for four to six weeks. So, just when the song would have crested, maybe he could have put
himself in the position to be a bigger star. He was laid up in the hospital in and out of it for a
month or two. And so that was really a sort of a, a bad turn of events for him. Interestingly, Carl
Perkins was one of the favorite, artists for the Beatles to cover later. And George Harrison was
such a, such a fan of Carl Perkins, that when all the other guys, early on in the band when they
changed their names to have stage names. Paul was Paul Ramone, and John Lennon was Long
John Lennon. George Harrison changed his name to Carl Harrison, not exactly a dramatic
change but anyway, kind of cute and fun, Carl Perkins. Another one that was at Sun after Elvis,
Johnny Cash had a country and western hit in 1956 with Folsom Prison, Folsom Prison Blues, a
song that we all think of now as a classic country hit. and then I Walk the Line in 1956 was on
Sun Records which was a country western pop crossover. That's something we haven't talked
about yet. The idea that this song could be a hit first on the country western charts, and then
cross over onto the pop charts. Last week, we talked about New San Antonio Rose, which had
originally been a hit for Bob Wills and His Texas Playboys, and they, when covered by Bing
Crosby became a hit on the pop charts. But here, the actual Johnny Cash record moved over
from country, and then finally maybe the biggest name and most successful name, at least for
these years, after Elvis is Jerry Lee Lewis who's Whole Lotta Shakin Goin On. was a big hit in
1957, Great Balls of Fire in 1957, after that it was Breathless. I mean, he had a, was a, Jerry Lee
Lewis was in many ways very much like Little Richard, a pianist who sang and who was, sort of,
did, had a wild kind of act. Although his was a little bit more sort of you know, southern white
Louisiana. as opposed to Richards, but he was a fantastic performer, very charismatic. one other
men, person that we should mention who was on Sun. And we'll talk him, him next week is Roy
Orbison, who was here about this time. Now, in the case of Johnny Cash and Roy Orbison, they,
they both went on to have their greatest successes after they left Sun Records. But you can kind
of see with all of these going through the Sun studios in Memphis, a small, little independent
label. there was an awful lot of talented people coming through Sun Records. Some of the other,
what we call, rockabilly artists, we talk about this, this southern style out of Sun Records that
Elvis, and the rest of these artists were involved in his rockabilly the, the, the, the cross between
hillbilly music and rock music, rockabilly. Maybe the most famous later exponent of rockabilly
would be somebody like Brian Setzer who still continues to record in a rockabilly style. Anyway,
some important other rockabillies Gene Vizet, Gene Vincent Who Be Bop a Lula, was a hit on
Capitol label, on the Capitol label out of Los Angeles 1956. Gene Vincent was, was signed by
Capitol, in the wake of Elvis, to be their version of Elvis Presley, when once RCA had one,
everybody had to have one. Eddie Cochran was signed by Liberty out of Los Angeles, and had a
hit Twenty Flight Rock in 1956, and Summertime Blues, in 1958. Interestingly, those Eddie
Cochran records were recorded in Gold Star Studios in Los Angeles, which will, later, we'll talk
about this next week, be a very important studio for Phil Spector and those wall of sound
recordings. Both Gene Vincent and Eddie Cochran performed in a movie called The Girl Can't
Help It from 1956, which is sort of an upscale version Alan Freed movies I was talking about a
couple of lectures ago. Because they're actually are move, real movie stars, and there actually is
a real story. This movie, The Girl Can't Help It, was a kind of a hit movie of the day, and Paul
McCartney often talks about how influential that movie was, and the performances in it.
especially the Eddie Cochran performance of of Twenty Flight Rock. In many ways, Eddie
Cochran and Gene Vincent were probably more influential in the UK. And that may be because
they were so available to UK, music fans through that film. But anyway, both of them had really
big success in the UK, maybe a bit bigger than they had in the United States. Now, right in this
part of the course, we probably should talk about Ricky Nelson and the Everly Brothers. In this
period at the end of the 50's, as other important rockabilly stars. But I'm going to save discussion
of them for next week when we talk about music and the period between 1960 and 1963.
Because both Ricky Nelson and the Everly Brothers went on to have a lot of success, sort of into
that era. And so we'll save discussion of those, we'll double back and pick up on those guys.
when we get to that point. let's talk a little bit about something I call Rockabilly Ladies. One of the
things we, you have to remember that when rock and roll was unfolding people were trying
various kinds of things. And one thing they thought is, well, you know, if there can be a rockabilly
Elvis, why not a female Elvis. That, that could maybe be something we could sort of sell some
records. And so Janis Martin actually was signed to RCA just weeks after Elvis Presley was
signed to RCA to be kind of the Elvis, female Elvis, and so she had a, a single that came out
called Drugstore Rock from 1956. So, that gets kind of into the teen, teen life, you know, you go
to the drugstore, the soda, soda fountain there. But then she had a song called My Boy Elvis
from 1956. Wanda Jackson had a tune, a bunch of sort of rockabilly tunes from that era maybe
the biggest one at the end of this era called, Let's Have a Party from 1960. She knew Elvis
Presley personally and he sort of talked Wanda Jackson into doing this sort of female rockabilly
thing, but maybe the most interesting historically is is Brenda Lee. Now Brenda Lee went on to
have tremendous success in the 1960s. These are her song I'm Sorry was a fantastic country
western hit and cross over, but when she was just 12 years old in 1956 she was called Little
Brenda Lee and recorded a tune called Bigelow 6-2000, that was markedly a female rockabilly
tune. Now these female rockabilly are now sort of a a bit of a kind of footnote to the history, but it
sort of shows you that the, the people in the industry didn't quite know what they were not that
they didn't know what they were doing. But they didn't know what would catch on, and so they
tried a couple of different things and this is one that probably didn't catch on so much, it didn't
catch on like Elvis did. Well the last figure I want to talk about in this lecture is Buddy Holly.
Buddy Holly is a very important figure in this period, but comes, comes at it pretty late in the
game. In fact, Buddy Holly is somebody who also was signed in the wake of Elvis going to RCA
as as a major labels version of Elvis and that label was Decca. But let's say a little bit about
Buddy and his background. Buddy, I think as most people know, comes from Lubbock Texas.
and as I said signed to Decca in the wake of Elvis's RCA deal. But that initial signing with Decca
went absolutely nowhere. They took Buddy off, I forget where they did their recording, maybe it
was in New York. And the did some recording and nothing became of it, and so he went back to
Lubbock. And back in Lubbock, he caught the attention of a producer. Well a guy who had had
some records on the charts himself, Norman Petty, who had his own recording studio in Clovis,
New Mexico who was kind of becoming a record producer not unlike Sam Phillips at about the
same time. He has great equipment, great ideas, was a very forward looking kind of guy. So
Buddy Holly and his guys used to go to Clovis, New Mexico to record almost everything they did.
So, almost all of those recordings that you know, the classic Buddy Holly recordings, were all
recorded in Clovis, New Mexico. And, and engineered by, and produced by Norman Petty.
there's a time difference of one hour between Lubbock and Clovis. And so the, Buddy Holly and
his buddies, and I think the distance between the two is about 100 miles. You can, you can check
on a map and see. But, the story is that you know, long stretch of flat highway. The, the band
used to like to leave Texas and try to arrive in in Clovis before they left Texas. So, that meant
sometimes having to do 70 or 80 miles an hour, maybe 90 or 100, depending on, on what the
distance is there. That gives you some idea of the wide open spaces of, of what we're talking
about here. Well, with those recordings from Clovis, New Mexico they got interest in two labels.
Well, one label first, Coral, who ironically was subsidiary of Decca. So Decca had had, had not,
wasn't holding anything against Buddy Holly for the first one not working out. But what they
decided was an interesting, kind of, promotional trick. They decided that some of the records
would be released as Buddy Holly on the deck of subsidiary Coral. And some of the others as the
Crickets on the deck of subsidiary Brunswick. I guess the idea is that you can one artist being
two different bands, and on two different labels, and be able to maybe have more chance of
getting on the charts, or getting more records in, in, into radio play, and that kind of thing, and so
anyway, that's why it happened. So, if you really want to get picky about it, the tunes that we
really think of as being Buddy Holly tunes, some of them were Buddy Holly tunes, and some of
them, strictly speaking, were Cricket's tunes. Although now in all anthologies, they're basically
thought of you know, as Buddy Holly's and the Cricket, and same guys, same studio, same
everything, and most folk. again an important songwriter along with Chuck Berry one of the
important early songwriters The Beatles of course and others Bob Dylan. And a lot of other 60's
musicians were very much influenced by by Buddy Holly and Chuck Berry. some of the big
representative examples of the Buddy Holly style. Peggy Sue from 1957, Oh Boy from 1957 and
Maybe Baby from 1958 Buddy Holly was much covered by other artists, so we've got the Beatles
doing Words of Love the Rolling Stones doing Don't Fade Away, Linda Ronstadt doing It's so
Easy and lots and lots of others later. Buddy unfortunately died early in a plane crash it was
February the 3rd, 1959. I think he was only 22 years old when he died. Don McLean, later in
1971, in a song called American Pie talked about that as the day the music died. The idea that
rock and roll in its original incarnation, this era that we're talking about from 55 up to this point
basically died the day that Buddy Holly went down in that plane. and so, what we want to do is in
the next segment talk about what happened at the end of this period in 1959. But at this point,
rock and roll it turns out was in a certain kind of trouble. There had been a lot of pressure that
rock and roll was a negative influence, and this pressure was really starting to threaten the
possibility of rock and roll continue. So, in the next video, let's, let's find out what happened at the
end of the decade when rock and roll was in such trouble.

El día que murió la música

As I said in the last video, by 1959, rock was up against some very significant challenges. This
early period of rock and roll that started with Little Richard, and Chuck Barry, and Bill Haley and
The Comets. And Fats Domino, went through Elvis Presley, and then the artist that we've been
talking about, just most recently Buddy Holly and, and people like that. there's some real
problems that start to hit at the end of the decade. Maybe the most obvious one being as we said
when we're talking about Elvis. In 1958, Elvis goes into the army. Now, Colonel Tom Parker was
smart about having a bunch of, of tunes, recorded up. So that he could continue to release Elvis,
new Elvis stuff while Elvis was unable to record to sort of sustain his career so that his career
didn't die when he was unavailable for a couple of years. But nevertheless he went into the army.
And so he was off the scene to a certain extent. It turns out some stories go, that Elvis could
have actually gotten not a, he did get a deferment. But he could have gone with the USO and
been a performer. but no, I mean what he really wanted to do was serve. I think the Colonel
thought since Elvis had been so controversial earlier it was good to show that he was an honest,
upstanding, young American boy who was happy to fight for his country. And the whole idea the
Colonel had was about mainstreaming Elvis Presley so that when rock and roll died, Elvis's
career wouldn't die. And the people at RCA were behind, were, were behind that idea, too. So
that's sort of the way. But, you know, either, either way, by '58 Elvis was out of the picture. We
talked in the last video about how Buddy Holly died in a plane crash in February of 1959. Little
Richard quit rock and roll to preach in late 1957 figuring that rock and roll was the devil's music.
This goes to this idea of a, of a conflict between, you know, gospel and the church as being the,
the work of God. And rock and roll being sort of the devil drawing people into, you know, dark
clubs at night, this kind of thing. And so, Little Richard, as the story goes, was on a flight and it
was a very, very bumpy flight. And he was afraid he was going to die, and he made a prayer
saying he had made a promise to God saying if you get me down from this plane alive, I will quit
rock and roll and I will serve you. And the flight landed safely and he kept his word and quit.
Anyway, he was out by late 1957. Chuck Ber, Chuck Berry in late 1959 was arrested for violating
what's called the Mann Act, which is transporting a minor across state lines. He always
maintained this were trumped up charges that were basically a way of trying to strike back at a
successful black American in this country. He appealed the conviction and ended up having to do
some prison time for that. But anyway he was, he was out for a while by late 1959. There was
the Jerry Lee Lewis scandal in May of 1958. his third wife, Myra, was actually his cousin, once
removed. It turns out that she was 13 at the time they were married. And his second marriage
had not quite been final at the time. This was such a scandal that it basically forced Jerry Lee
Lewis out of out of the mainstream pop world, at least for a couple of years. He, he went on to
have a very successful career in country and western music in the 60s. And I think all is forgiven
now. But back at the time. it just, that kind of thing really fit in too much with the negative
stereotypes that had to do with southern southern life. And so, by that time, we're talking about
Elvis, Buddy Holly, Little Richard, Chuck Berry, Jerry Lee Lewis all being out of the scene by
some time in 1959. So, rock and roll was in trouble in terms of its performers. And then, come
The Payola Investigations in late 1959. And I think it's important for us to understand that rock
and roll, with all this crossover, these independent labels and these unwieldy, unmanageable
musicians. Had cut a significant, had cut out a significant amount of market share for themselves
of, of, of market share that used to belong to the major labels. and all of these Tin Pan Alley
composers who just not too long ago, publishes had been selling all kinds of music, were now
having a problem having to deal with this rock and roll thing. They thought, they, they kept
thinking that music would just go back to the way it was in 1945. When people go over this rock
and roll fever and came to their senses. somebody like Mitch Miller, for example, st, at Columbia
was proud not to have any rock and roll artists on their label. He was staying true to what was
real music. Most of these guys in the music business, the older guys who ran the record
companies had no respect for rock and roll. They thought that rock and roll musicians were kind
of cretins, and the fans were stupid and gullible. And they couldn't believe how it had gotten so
popular. And mostly they just wanted their market share back, it seems. But, to a certain extent,
they thought that perhaps it was because these indie labels were cheating. and they were able to
convince people in Washington that, that was in fact that case. Now, as it turned out, a
Congressional Committee in Washington was just finishing up and investigation of quiz shows.
Maybe you know that relatively recent movie about that, where there was a quiz show, that
turned out was rigged. And so the idea that hits on the radio would be rigged. And that's how this
lousy rock and roll music could overtake what we all know as good, traditional, tin pan ally music.
That must be what's going on. So, this Congressional Committee decided to turn its attention,
after having finished up with the quiz show, to what was going on in the music business. And
especially, in radio, and to a certain extent television. So, the House Special Subcommittee on
Legislative Oversight got to work and started interviewing people about this. Now, their whole
contention was that that there was this pay for play thing going on. That people were, the record
labels, especially indies, were paying disc jockeys to play these records. That's why they were
getting on the air. That's why they were becoming hits. And, these investigations adversely
affected both the major labels and the indie labels, because they were all doing it. It's just that
the major labels were able to endure this and it drove a lot of the Indie labels out of business.
Just having to defend yourself legally and, and all that goes with it. anyway, Payola, this idea of
paying for play has a long history in popular music. There was nothing really new about what was
going on. the major labels spent probably a lot more money than the indie labels did paying to
get plays on the radio. But anyway, the Congress got in there and they started asking questions
and it became a big scandal. There were two people who were sort of who, who were the biggest
stars to be questioned on all this. The first was Dick Clark, who was just getting started in his
American band stand career out of Philidelphia, the television show he'd been involved in, radio.
But it turns out, Dick Clark, thinking he was being a smart businessman, had invested in, had a
portfolio of products. He was, he owned publishing, he owned shares in record manufacturing.
He owned shares on the show that he was he was producing. And so, you can get the idea that
there could be a conflict of interest that could arise when you own a part of the record company.
And the publishing on a record that you're playing on your television show that's nationally
syndicated, right? That could be a kind of a conflict of interest. The way he portrayed himself in
Congress, however, was, fellows I'm, I'm just trying to make a living here. Whatever you tell me
you think I should do in order to keep this as clean as possible, that's what I want to do. But I'm
just a businessman trying to make my, my fortune in the music business. I'm trying to play by the
rules here, if there's something here that's wrong, you know, I'm happy to do whatever I can to
accommodate. And so they ended up thinking that Dick Clark was just a fantastic young man, a
model sort of citizen, a great businessman, that kind of thing. He came out of the whole thing
almost entirely unscathed, with his reputation intact, even though there was some very edgy
moments for him. And some possibility of his career collapsing, he came through it with flying
colors and was praised. Alan Freed, on the other hand, did not. He continually resisted and was,
was not particularly cooperative. he eventually pleaded guilty to taking bribes. he was he got a
suspended sentence and a $300 fine. But he, by that time, he'd already been fired from every job
that he had when he was at the height of his career. So no more radio, no more TV, no more
nothing. and by 1965, he was sort of died kind of a broken man. And so, it's too bad about how
all of that turned out for Alan Freed and Dick Clark was able to get through it all. one of the
effects, or the, I guess there many effects to the Payola Investigations. One of them is that it
made radio stations much more conservative in the, in the sense that they were fearful of losing
their licenses. I mean, a radio station can only broadcast if it has a license by the Federal
Government. So, the Federal Government decides to pull your license, you're out of business.
So, you really better be sure you're, you know, minding your, minding your business closely and,
and, and not transgressing against anything that can get you into, into trouble. And so, after all
the rock and roll craziness that had gone on with DJs and all this kind of thing. This music
business pros decide that, you know, they had better take a little bit more control over what
music gets on the radio so they get into trouble this way. And in fact, one of the things we can
say about this next era is if the period from 1955 through '59 had been dominated by
independent labels and artists. Who, you know defied tradition and maybe polite, regular polite
behavior and that kind of thing. If it was kind of like the wild west of the music business. After
that, after all this Payola thing and various musicians were out of it, the next era was the music
business taking control of rock and roll again. That is they liked the idea that there was this
youth, youth market that had been created, that they could sell records to. But they figured, they
could probably do it better and more efficiently if they took it over. And so, that's essentially what
happened. So, what we're going to try and figure out next week is when this happens. All these
years from 1960 through the end of 1963, The Beatles hit this country in early 1964, that period
between Elvis and The Beatles. is this period a kind of a dark ages for rock music? When rock
music becomes, sort of, homogenized and family friendly. And lacking all the kind of excitement,
and interest, and edginess that it had in those first years. Or, are these golden years, as new
styles begin to develop, and new kinds of things start to happen in popular music. that really
were cut short perhaps, by the arrival of the British invasion and The Beatles, and the Rolling
Stones and the rest of them. We'll consider all that next week.

Week 3
Audiences and Marketing - The Search
for the Next Elvis
Welcome to the third week of The History of Rock. This week, we take a look at the period
between 1960 and the end of 1963, the beginning of 1964. You may remember that last week,
we were talking about that first wave of rock and roll between 1955 and 1959, 1960. Talking
about people like Chuck Berry and Little Richard, Fats Domino, Bill Haley, Elvis Presley, Buddy
Holly, and we asked the question when we got to the end of it, when rock and roll was in such
trouble and a lot of the major figures were off the scene and there were the big pail
investigations. Would this period that follows, this period now from '60 through '63 really be a
kind of dark ages for rock n' roll where the music business sort of took everything over and
turned it into something far less interesting and edgy than it had been before. Or, could it,
perhaps, be a time when a bunch of new styles get going that are fun and interesting and maybe
even cut short by the British invasion, which we'll talk about next week, which arrives in early
1964. So that's pretty much the issue that we're going to be dealing with in this week's class. Let
me just give you an overview of some of the things that we'll be talking about this week and then
we'll dive into some of those.
So let's just take a look at what we're going to be talking about this week. Here's the overview.
The overview idea here besides thinking about whether this is a good period or a bad period for
rock music, is to think about what was going on in the business as they were trying to put this
music together. And the big idea, I think, to keep in mind, is that this period is sort of
characterized by a search for the next Elvis. What the business had seen in this period from '55
through '59 was the build up of this youth market for music. So people in the music business
knew there was plenty of money that could be made from this market, but now with a lot of the
major figures, the original figures sort of out of the situation. The question was, well, how could
they find the next big thing? How could they find the next big thing that would be like Elvis and
would have kind of the success that Elvis Presley had? So they try to budge and they throw a lot
of things up against the wall to see what would stick and here are some of them.
There's a brill building model that dominates pop, we'll talk a little bit about the brill building in just
a minute. It's a kind of a return to a previous model, that starts to divide singers and writers,
again, the way they had been sort of pre rock n roll. The Brill Building is both a place and an
approach, and we'll talk about that. But this Brill Building approach, professional songwriters sort
of writing songs to order as hit songs, this kind of thing, produces new teen groups, so we'll talk
about girl groups, we'll talk about teen idols, we'll talk about how this music is designed
specifically to really exploit this new teen market. Another thing we'll talk about Is the rise of the
record producer in during this period. The idea that that develops this role had been there
previously of a record producer who really controls the way records are recorded in the sound of
the record in a way that had not been done before Lerber Stoler had been important in that also
Phil Specter. We'll talk about older teens. When the kids who had been the teenagers during the
Elvis Presley years now move on, a lot of them move on to folk music. And folk music becomes
the new music of seriousness, a kind of a pop style for more mature kids and we'll talk about the
growth of sweet soul and surf music both. Both of those new styles that emerge. And so, if you
end up being an advocate for thinking that this is a golden age, these may be styles that you're
interested in advocating for. And then we'll continue the rock ability story as I promised last time
when I told you that we would return to the Everly Brothers and Ricky Nelson In the next video so
we're here now and take a chance, we'll take a time to look at that. So let's move on to the next
video, we'll start with the Brill Building approach.
The Brill Building Approach to Pop
We start now with the discussion of the Brill Building, or more specifically, the Brill Building
approach to popular music. In many ways, the Brill Building is like the successor to the Tin Pan
Alley approach that we discussed in the first week. It's an approach that is very much focused on
music publishing. It's approach to popular music that really is driven by song writers and the
interests of song writers in publishing and this kind of thing. And in fact the Brill Building, as a
physical place, is the place where most of the Tin Pan Alley songwriters still had their offices.
The people that we're going to talk about that were involved with teen pop are actually a couple
of blocks down the street. We always call the Brill Building, but most of these people didn't
actually have offices in the Brill Building. The Brill Building is at 1619 Broadway. But you've gotta
go up to 51st Street to 1650 Broadway, to get to the actual offices where some of these folks
were. But more about that in just a minute. The Brill Building approach, again, returns us to a
time when songwriters do the song writing, performers do the performing, and publishers do the
publishing. And we have a rise now of the role of the producer, which is a record producer, which
is a new thing that happened. So let's talk about that a little bit. Let's start with a discussion of
Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller. Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller are probably in the period up to the
arrival of The Beatles and Dylan in the 60s, maybe the most important songwriters in rock history
up to that point. Leiber and Stoller started out writing songs in Los Angeles. They were a couple
of white guys who really, in many ways,
blended in and became part of the African American community in Los Angeles. They hung out
in the Africans American community the way they tell the story they had black girlfriends, their
friends were black. They hung out in those clubs, always treated respectfully. And as Jerry Leiber
likes to say, we thought we were black, we were wrong, but that's what we thought at the time.
And so they very much embraced rhythm and blue's practices, but became song writers in their
practice starting up a label for a short pretty time. Spark Records and recording and writing
songs with a lot of LA bands. The Robins was one group that they worked with. Big Mama
Thornton was another one that they worked with. Big Mama Thornton, for example, is the one for
whom they wrote the song, You Ain't Nothing But a Hound Dog, which was later Covered by
Elvis Presley and Big Mama Thornton, and that was in 1953. And interestingly, the version that
Elvis did wasn't taken from the recording that Leiber and Stoller of Big Mama Thornton, but
rather a version Elvis heard a Las Vegas singer doing.
When he was traveling through Las Vegas, he heard a guy doing a version of the song where
the lyrics have been change. Jerry Leiber says, he never wrote the line you ain't never caught a
rabbit and you ain't no friend of mine, that wasn't in the original Big Mama Thornton version. But
nevertheless, when these guys had that hit with Big Mama Thornton hit being picked up by Elvis
Presley, all of a sudden, they had a hit record and they were very hot properties in the music
business. And so they had a certain amount of power and a certain amount of ability to be able to
call the shots a little bit more. They started working with a group called The Coasters which was
a version of the Robins that moved from the West Coast to the East Coast, right? So they came
from the West Coast, they were called The Coasters. Not all the guys from the Robbins wanted
to leave LA so some of them came with Lieber and Stoller to New York, they started working
Atlantic Records. They had an independent deal where they could work with Atlantic Records,
but could work with other labels if they wanted to. And from the way they tell the story, they
started not just writing songs, but writing records in the sense that when they wrote the song they
thought about how they wanted the record. How they wanted the instruments recorded. Hadn't
been normal even up to that point. Usually a songwriter would write a song, it would be
somebody else's job, an arranger's job, or the musician's job, to figure out how the song would
actually sound. But they were thinking in their head as they were doing it, how they would
produce these songs. And the group that they got the most ambitious with was a group called
The Coasters. And with The Coasters, they started borrowing songs, borrowing ideas from
Broadway, where The Coasters would actually kind of act out these little story songs that they
called playlets. And so Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller, just as songwriters now for a minute. Not so
much worrying about producer, we'll come back to that. But as songwriters, they're some of the
most important song writers, two of the most important song writers coming out of the 1950s into
this 60s era. And so they're in New York, they're around the Brill Building, and the rest of the
song writers we're going to talk about in the Brill Building are really clustered around a company
called Aldon Publishing. Aldon Publishing is at 1650 Broadway, the other office I was telling you
about that's a couple of blocks down from the actual Brill Building. It was a publishing company
put together by Al Nevins and Don Kirschner. And the way they did is very much sort of in the old
school mode. They had a whole bunch of song writers who wrote songs for them everyday. I
mean, these song writers where in little cubby holes with a piano and they would go in there. You
could hear music through the wall and they would be sort of working on their song. And at the
end of the day they would bring their song out and all the songwriting teams would compete with
one another for who would get a record. And who would get a record with which different group
that they were shopping these songs with. So it was really a kind of a pop song writing shop or
workshop or factory or something like that was going on there at Aldon Music. Here are some of
the important songwriters that came out of that. Gerry Goffin and Carole King. We'll come back
to Carole King again, in the 1970s, one of the most important singer songwriters. In fact, she has
a fantastic career stretching out over a couple of decades. But their first big hit Will You Love Me
Tomorrow by The Shirelles went to number one. In 1960 they had a song called The Locomotion
that was number one in 1961 by Little Eva. Who I think as the story goes was actually their
babysitter at the time and they found out that she could sing. And so she sang this on The
Locomotion and had a number one hit with it. Another interesting one is Chains. A song that was
done in 1962 by The Cookies that was subsequently covered by The Beatles. We'll talk about
The Beatles next week. But it's amazing how much of the girl group tradition The Beatles
absorbed. We don't really think of them as being very much associated with girl groups. And in
fact, they owe a great a debt of influence to girl groups. So that's Gerry Goffin and Carole King.
Jeff Barry and Ellie Greenwich were another Aldon songwriting team, two of their big hits, Be My
Baby for the Ronettes in 1963. Da Doo Ron Ron for the Crystals in the same year, 1963. Cynthia
Weil and Barry Mann, one of their big hits again for the Crystals, Uptown. Neil Sedaka and Howie
Greenfield, Calendar Girl was a hit they had a 1961. Breaking Up Is Hard To Do a number one
hit for them in 1962. A lot of those Neil Sedaka, Howard Greenfield songs were sung by Neil
Sedaka who was kind of a teen idol of his day. It's interesting, that song, Breaking Up Is Hard To
Do came back in 1975, Neil Sedaka did a whole new version of it. And really had a kind of
revivified career in the 1970s, but when you take all of these people together, and the song
writing that's going on, and producing song after song after song like this. Actually hit song after
hit song all to sort of, in the service of this publishing company Aldon, you really get the sense of
what the Brill Building is. So from here forward in the course, whenever I refer back to Brill
Building, I'm really referring back to this sort of professional environment of songs written
specifically for the teen market. Songs written by songwriters who aren't themselves, performers.
Neil Sedaka and Carole King kind of being exceptions. But nevertheless, most of these song
writers are not performers. So now, let's take a look at the teen idols from this era.

Teen Idols
Well now, it's time to talk about the teen idols or I think as I say in my textbook, teen idols for idle
teens. Teen idols were a rather cynical move on the part of the music business to take all the
attraction of somebody like Elvis Presley, but take anything that was threatening about it away.
So that young girls, preteens, very young teenagers, could have a kind of ideal boyfriend who is
absolutely non-threatening with no danger of any kind of sexual advance or anything like that.
This is the kind of guy that young girls could sit and listen to sing a song as if he was singing it
only to them, but maybe he would hold their hand or kiss them on the cheek. But what he really
wanted to know was to get to know their, what he really wanted to do was get to know their
personality and that's about it. So these ideal boyfriends were marketed at teenage girls. And so
one of the most important things about these teen idols is that they be really, really handsome.
That they could sing, well that would be okay, but if they can't sing, we'll fix that in the studio, but
they ought to look great. So rather than being musicians who sort of rose to the top because they
had the ability and all that, they're really, sort of, chosen almost as kind of fashion models first
and worry about the voice and the music second. But that's essentially what they were doing.
These teen idols were probably more modeled on somebody like Pat Boone, in the kind of very,
sort of, clean image, than they were on Elvis Presley. Although, if you look at Elvis's career as he
gets out of the Army, remember, last week we talked about how he went into the Army in 1958.
Well, he was out by 1960 and there was a real attempt to mainstream Elvis. We'll talk a little bit
later about Elvis in the movies and the various kinds of films he did in Hollywood during this
period of the early 60s up through the mid 60s. But Elvis even took a turn in the direction of teen
idol, there are a couple of tunes of his, especially, Are You Lonely Tonight, which was a number
one hit for him in 1960. It's a song that goes back to the 1920s. The first group to have a hit with
it was the group called Blue Barron in 1950, I don't know whether that was a group or an artist, I
don't know that version. But what I know about that version is that's the first version where
there's a kind of talking over the music, which Elvis does. And if you find that music somewhere,
that track somewhere, the Elvis track, and listen to it, you'll see that not only is it kind of a slow
song, but in the center of it, he actually speaks some lines. Sort of vaguely Shakespearean kind
of lines, but anyway, they're lines. It's almost like he's sort of speaking them into the ear of the
young girl who's sort of listening to Elvis Presley. It is absolutely a kind of a teen idol record from
Elvis. And it was just about the right time for that to be happening in 1960, as he's sort of leaving
rock and roll behind, and moving more in a direction of kind of a mainstream audience. But here
are some of the other big teen idols. And some of these guys actually did have talent. I mean,
when I say they didn't have to have talent to do the gig, I mean it was more about the look, but
some of them actually were pretty talented guys and went on to do some interesting things and
had plenty of talent. A guy like Frankie Avalon for example, he, and I'll talk in a minute about
Fabian. Both of these guys came out of Philadelphia and were managed by Bob Marcucci.
Where on Chancellor Records, Bob Marcucci would a lot of time write the songs, he would
produce the record and he own the label. He was sort of like, an awful lot like Phil Spector, and
we'll talk about in a minute, accepted that he was sort of grooming these teen idols. And he had
a stable of teen idols, not unlike Larry Parnes, who we'll talk about next week when we talk about
The Beatles in the UK, he was doing a similar thing with teen idols. But Frankie Avalon, one of
his couple of big number one hits for him in 1959, "Venus" is one of them, another one's called
"Why". But then, as the 60s unfold, Frankie Avalon not only has hits on the charts as a teen idol,
but he also starts acting in movies with Annette Funicello. Who, before her career in movies, had
been one of the Mouseketeers from the Mickey Mouse Club, which was a popular show on
television. So, the Frankie and Annette beach party movies, like Beach Blanket Bingo and some
of these others became a very, very popular form of youth entertainment. If young people wanted
to go to a movie and see a movie that was really directed at them, these Frankie and Annette
movies would be part of that. I mentioned before Fabian, another Philadelphia guy, under Bob
Marcucci. A couple of songs from 1959, "Turn Me Loose" and "Tiger", again, the kind of guy who
looks great. Maybe Fabian had less vocal technique or ability or natural aptitude than some of
the others, but he looked great. Bobby Vee is another one coming out of North Dakota, but here,
recorded with Liberty Records out of Los Angeles had a big number one hit in 1961 with "Take
Good Care of My Baby". Written by Gerry Goffin and Carole King, who we talked about just in
the last lecture with regard to the Brill Building approach. Bobby Vinton, Epic out of New York
City. Epic was a subsidiary of Columbia. He had a great big hit number one 1962 with, "Roses
are Red (My Love)", a whole series of hits in fact. And then, Bobby Darin, interesting story about
Bobby Darin, not only did he have a hit in 58 with "Splish Splash" and 59 with "Dream Lover", but
he had a hit with a song called "Mack the Knife" which actually comes from a Kurt Weill opera
called The Threepenny Opera. So it was kind of a cross-over from a piece from classical music
or at least music theater into rock and roll. And so, it gives you some idea of what was going on
with the teen idols. The ideal boyfriend, the may be a little bit too cynically constructed product,
right? But one can laugh at it all they want but these guys sold lots and lots of records. And from
a music business point of view, this was an extremely successful strategy for these years. So
let's turn from the teen idols now to talk about this rising role of record producers and the girl
groups
Producers and Girl Groups
I mentioned earlier, in the lectures this week, about the rise of the producer. And I'd like to take a
little bit more time to focus on that, and the way that developed during this period here. in, in
Rock and Roll between 1960 and '63. In previous times, before this started to happen around
1960. The producer of the session was basically what's called an A and A man, artists and
repertoire. An A and R man, at a, at a session, was basically the guy who was trying to make
sure that everything was organized. So that you got to pay for studio times so if you've got a two
hour session or a three hour session you've got to make sure everything gets done. So the
record company would send somebody down there to be sure everything was getting done. But
usually that, that person was not in charge of the musical matters there, but more just making
sure that things happen in a timely fashion. That the musicians and the other people there didn't
fritter away the record company's money not moving the session along in an efficient way. But
what started to happen under the influence of, of, of Leiber and Stoller, is that there was
somebody at the session who's job, it was to sort of help shape the way the record would sound.
They, they might have been the songwriter, but sometimes, they might not have been the
songwriter, they might be producing somebody else's song. And so, you start to think about
these records as not, not just being snapshot performances of what my otherwise be just a live
performance. I mean, think about it, if you take a snapshot recording of a performance, you
imagine, you don't need a producer at all. The performer just performs the piece and songs, and
as long as you've got your levels right and your microphones placed properly, that's all it takes.
But what's starting to happen now, is people are beginning to realize, that there are ways of
getting things to sound better at a recording studio. Maybe even better or differently or more
interestingly than they can actually sound, acoustically in the real world. As you begin to place
mics in different kind of places and mix them together you get sounds that you couldn't get in a
live situation. And people start to become experts at this kind of thing, not just recording
[UNKNOWN]. But people who have an idea of how they want they record to sound. Or different
styles they wanted to touch on, various kinds of ways in which they want to project the song. So
you're starting to move towards this idea, that, that actually moves away from the old Tin Pan
Alley idea of a song being something that, you know it basically can be, can be reproduced in
various versions. You're starting to move toward an idea here already that,it's a particular version
that sounds a particular way that you might want to have. We're starting to move toward the
kinds of things we'll see Brian Wilson doing in Pet sounds, or the Beach Boys doing in Sgt
Pepper. It's very early days now, Leiber & Stoller, as I say importantly, working with the
Coasters, we've talked about that already. talked about them, mentioned that they weren't so
much writing songs anymore, but writing records. Course having worked with, with Elvis and
written songs for Elvis and worked with him on the movie Jailhouse Rock. They had a certain
amount of ability to demand certain kinds of things cause they were the top songwriters in the
business. Starting from working on, on, on producing singles for the Robins, Smokey Joe's Cafe,
1955. as I was talking before, they work with The Coasters. some of the, some of those playlets
that we talked about before, Down In Mexico from 1956. and Yakety Yak from 1958. Charlie
Brown from 1959. Those are interesting records for the, for the The Coasters and Leiber &
Stoller, because they do what Chuck Barry was doing. That is, Yakety Yak, talks about a kid that,
if he doesn't do his chores, he won't get his day, his weekly allowance. Charlie Brown is about a
kid who's always getting picked on, in high school. Song, song approaches that really sort of, go
right at teenage life, but we're talking about 58 or 59, so that was, that was pretty current for that
time. The, the record that really kind of, breaks the whole production thing open for Leiber and
Stoller is, is a record for the Drifters called, There Goes my Baby, from 1959. But we'll, we'll talk
more about that late, that, in the next video, when we talk about the development of, sweet soul.
After Leiber and Stoll, Stoller started to show that you could sort of craft these records. you get
things like, we mentioned before The Shirelles doing Will You Still Love Me Tomorrow a Goffin
King song that was a big hit in 1960. But that was a song where Carole King had such a specific
idea. About how she wanted some of the parts played. For example the timpani part, that she
couldn't just stay in the, in the booth and issue instructions. She actually went into the studio and
demonstrated and played it for the person, exactly how, how she wanted it done. Because she
had a specific idea. You could see that Carole King, Gerry Goffin working under Leiber and
Stoller almost as apprentices, Were beginning to sort of see that they could begin to shape these
sounds in the studio in the kind of way. But, when we talk about the record producer in the early
60s, at least in this country. Maybe if we were talking about the UK, we'd be talking about
someone like Joe Meek who has recently come, much more to everyone's attention. But in this
country, record producer, early of the 60s we're talking about Phil Spector. And if we're talking
about Phil Spector, we're talking about The Wall of Sound. Now Phil Spector goes back in the, in
the popular music business at least to 1958, as a member of the group called the Teddy Bears.
Who had a hit called To Know Him Is To Love Him. Interestingly, it seems, Phil Spector, who
wrote that song, got the title of the song from an inscription on his father's tomb stone. Which
basically sort of, you know, gave the name and dates and said, to know him was to love him. And
so he thought, now there's a song title. The mark of a song writer, probably who can take
inspiration from such things. And so that was basically a kind of a doo-wop tune, To Know Him Is
To love him, but he started to get under the, under the sort of apprenticeship with Leiber and
Stoller. He started to get into the studio and developed his own approach to to record production.
Here's the best way to understand I think Phil Spector's approach. Phil's records were done
entirely in mono. Which back in those days and still today means all the sound is coming through
a single speaker. Now most people are use to listening to music in stereo so if your sitting in a
good room you're equally placed between two speakers your going to hear. Sound coming out,
not only from those two speakers but the illusion will be created, there is sound all in front of you.
So that the snare drum can seem to be coming from the center of the mix, even though there's
not actually a speaker there. A voice can be seem to be, seem to be coming over here, even
there's not a speaker there, because it's the way our ears work, get this thing in stereo. So you
start to get into the 70s. Groups like Steely Dan, other groups like that sort of specialize in
creating this really rich soundscape, where things are spread out in front of you in stereo. Phil
Spector, exactly the opposite of that, it's all in mono. So what he wants to do in mono, he wants
to create the biggest sounding record he can. So he gets tons and tons of instruments into a
recording studio, everybody gets a microphone. But the sound of this guy's instrument is going
into that guy's microphone, and it's all mixing together like a kind of soup. Creating what he
called the wall of sound. And for its day, that particular production technique of taking a lot of
instruments in an enclosed space, miking everything up. And then putting it all through the mixing
board and let it all sort of, you know sort of resolved together like a kind of. I don't know like a
kind of soup or something like that where there are all kinds of different ingredients. But you can't
exactly pick out exactly what the different ingredients are. Maybe you can taste a little bit of this,
maybe a little bit of that. But it all kind of blends together into a particular kind of distinctive taste.
This blends together into a distinctive kind of sound It's called The Wall of Sound, and it's entirely
associated with Phil Spector. Back in those days most people felt like Phil Spector records
sounded, on a little kind of car speaker that people would hear these things on. Sounded bigger
than anybody else's records in the business. So, if you want to hear a, some good examples of
Phil Spector and the Wall of Sound, check out The Crystals, Da Doo Ron Ron from 1963. A song
he wrote together with Barry, Man and Ally, Jeff Barry and Ally Greenwich, which features
Darlene Love on lead vocals. Check out The Crystals Doo Ron Ron, or The Ronettes Be My
Baby from 1963. That one's got Ronnie Bennet to later become his wife Ronnie Spector on lead
vocals. Those two, Da Doo Ron Ron and Be My Baby really give you sense of what Phil Spector
and the wall of sound were all about. A lot of people think Phil Spector was kind of, offthe charts,
once the Beatles came in, in 1964. But his, his his version, his production of, the Righteous
Brothers, You've Got That Loving Feeling went, it was a big hit for him in 1964. Or he was
actually quite friendly with the Beatles, was sitting next to Paul McCartney on the plane when it
arrived in JFK. When the Beatles came here for the first time. Gave a lot of career advice, also
gave the Rolling Stones a lot of advice. Came back at the end of the Beatles career in '69 to
produce that Let It Be album. Produced the first couple solo albums by John Lennon and George
Harrison. So Phil Spector, a very important figure in the history of Rock, but our story right now
we're really thinking about Phil Spector. This new role of the producer and his invention of the
idea of The Wall of Sound. We now turn to thinking about the invention of sweet soul during this
period.
Sweet Soul
When I said before that there were people who, there are people who believe that this period
from 1960 to 1963 is a kind of a golden period. Those people usually argue for the genius of Phil
Spector as a producer, and what he was able to do with creating these big kinds of sounds in the
recording studio that were bigger than anything you could get live. They, they used the recording
studio as it's own kind of instrument and they see that as a fantastic you know move forward for
the business. Now, it wouldn't be fair to say that gets cut short by the British Invasion, because if
anything when Brian Wilson and the Beatles started to get a hold of the recording studio, and
have the ability to start trying to do some of the kinds of things they, they wanted to be able to do,
if anything, they built on Phil Spector's work and, and become sort of students and and followers
of Phil Spector in sort of using the recording studio as an instrument. But another style that
people will often say that cut short by the arrival of the British invasion is the style called sweet
soul. and the argument usually runs, that if you had something that was going on that was great
there it was a form of African American music that was crossing over big time onto the pop
charts. It had a lot of subtlety. It had a lot of sophistication. And in come these British guys with
the matching haircuts, and the matching suits, and the accents, and the guitars, banging around
with She Loves You, and I want to Hold Your Hand. And that was just much cruder than, than
what some of these sweet soul artists were doing. And you decide for yourself what you think
about that, but what I want to do is just give you an idea of what was going on with sweet soul,
and how that whole style fits together. the roots of sweet soul probably go back to people like Nat
King Cole and Johnny Mathis. That is kind of crooner type Black singers who were singing songs
that were more sort of adult romantic kind of tunes than teen teen kinds of songs. So good
examples of that maybe, might be Nat King Cole's track from 1958 called Looking Back or
Johnny Mathis from 1957 singing Chances Are or Misty from 1959. Beautiful ballads, very much
in the old kind of, probably very much more in the old kind a sort of Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin,
song stylist tradition but without the big band instead maybe with more of a kind of a orchestral
backing. We also want to look at somebody like Sam Cook. Sam Cook's an interesting guy
because his, his, his roots were in Gospel music and he's a, he's a good example of somebody
who, who moved from gospel to pop, but felt very conflicted about it and it was kind of a
controversial thing for him to do. For a lot of the reasons last week we talked about Little Richard,
gospel being God's music and rock and roll or pop being the devil's music. It draws people away
from the church and into saloons and bars and this kind of thing. But he, he did make the
transition away from gospel and in 1957 had a number one hit with You Send Me, continued to
have hits in to the early 1960's. Another Saturday Night was a number nine hit for him in 1963.
But he died tragically in a was a, was murdered in fact in 1964 in a, in a, in a motel some kind of
a dispute over a woman or some kind of thing like that never been entirely clear to me. There
was a lot of, shrouded in a little bit of mystery for a while there. But whatever, he died, he died
too young, but was a fantastic voice that that, that was really one of the sort of pioneers in this
sweet soul sound. But, the sweet soul sound really starts to come together as a genre when
Leiber and Stoller get a hold of it and start to blend R&B music with classical strings and Latin
rhythms. The first one of these, I promised in the last video that we would talk about, is There
Goes My Baby, a number two hit in 1959. You know, When There, when There Go, There Goes
My Baby was finished and Leiber and Stoller brought it to Jerry Wexler, who, at that time, was,
running the show at Atlantic Records. Or, well, running a lot of the show at Atlantic Records at
the time, Wexler didn't think they should release it. Because it sound, it had these R&B things
going on in it that sounded very, sort of, doo wop. And then it had these classical. And not only
classical strings, but little sort of melodic figures in the center of it that sound like they could be
coming from late 19th century Russian nationalist music by somebody Mussorgsky or Borodin or
Tchaikovsky or somebody like that. And he thought, you know, he, he, he thought it was such a
blend of two different styles that it was, it would be, nobody would like it. The classical fans
wouldn't like it, and the R&B fans wouldn't like it, and so he, his famous remark was, as far as he
was concerned, There Goes My Baby sounded like a radio that was stuck between two
channels. A classical channel and an R&B channel. He didn't like it at all. but Lebron Stoler said
listen, you know, this is the song, release it, and they were right. It was a number two hit and a
big, big hit not only for the Drifters but also sort of launched the career of Benny King who was a
lead singer in the group at that time. You can probably, over the course of the time that we're
studying the history of rock, we're going to see a growing of musical ambition. We're going to see
musicians increasingly wanting to do more ambitious things with the music, make it into better
music. Maybe become less and less satisfied with the idea that pop is disposable music that they
want to create something more of lasting value. And you can start to see the beginnings of this
ambitions in There Goes My Baby. And we'll follow this story forward over the next several
weeks as we, as we talk about the development of Rock and Roll through the 60s. And then in
part two into the 70s and 80s. I mentioned before Ben E King. Ben E King sang with the Drifters
for a little while longer after There Goes My Baby but then he split off to be a solo act and was
replaced by a fellow named Rudy Lewis with the Drifters. So there were really two acts that
Leiber and Stoller were, were working with. They were working with Ben E King as a solo act and
the Drifters, as a group act. With, with Ben E King they had hits with Spanish Harlem which was
a number ten hit in 1961 and Stand By Me, a number four hit in 1961, both of those having a little
bit of that kind of Latin vibe. So, it's kind of R&B meets Latin music meets sort of classical strings.
The Drifters Up On the Roof from 1962 a, a number five hit on the pop charts, On Broadway from
1963 a number nine hit on the pop charts and that again with Rudy Lewis singing lead. So as I
said before, if you're an advocate of this period it's probably because you think this style of sweet
soul was such a, such a fantastic blending of R&B with a kind of classical sophistication with
some Latin elements. It was sort of sophisticated, understated perhaps but very expressive. So,
you decide for yourself what you think about that. In the meantime, let's move on to TV, the
movies, and dance crazes during this period

TV, Movies, and Dance Crazes

We turn now to a consideration of the role of television, movies and dance crazes in this period
at the beginning of the 1960s. when we start to think about TV and the movies, what I want to do
is start to start to lay down the groundwork for talking about MTV in part two of the course. I want
to begin to start tracking the influence of video with music. How some kind of video source,
whether it's TV or whether it's movies is used to support. The sale or the appeal or the
dissemination of musical styles and of course when MTV comes in, in the early 1980s and then
becomes very big it all starts to become about the video. But by the time MTV comes in, it's not
like that's a new idea, it's been happening for awhile. So we're going to see some of the first,
hear it at sort of at the very beginning of the history of rock, we're going to see some of the first
instances of that. So let's turn first to television. We talk about television in, in rock music during
this period. Really the first place we have to go is to American Bandstand and the success of that
show. Now, American Bandstand started out. on, WFIL in 1952 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania as
a local show. The kind of show that was a, a kind of an adaptation of, of a disc jockey radio
show. So instead of just having a disc jockey play song after song, popular songs that were on
the charts and this kind of thing. You would have a disc jockey play those songs on a camera
and you'd have kids come in and dance. And it was a, you know, it was a way of providing local
programming. when you didn't have national programming to play. lots of times this would be
done after school during the day when there wasn't a high demand for, for prime time or for, or
for national programming to be played. what happened with American Bandstand is in 1956, the
original host of American Bandstand, a guy by the name of Bob Horn, got himself into some
trouble. I want to be careful what I say because I don't want to condemn a guy on charges that
that I'm not personally, you know, familiar with. But what seemed from, from the sources that I've
seen and the reports that I've seen it seems like Bob Horn maybe got a little bit too close to some
of the kids that were on the show there. I know that he was a I, I, I, I, I think there's a report that
he was, in fact, arrested for drunk driving. There are some other things going on. Whatever was
happening, you can't have a host who has, even if these things weren't true. you know, you can't
have a host who, where any of that kind of doubt is hanging over his head. Especially in the mid
1950s, if you want, you know, white, white middle class kids to let, have their parents allow them
to watch a show. So Bob Horn was out, fair. Fair or not, he was out, and Dick Clark was in. In
fact, Dick Clark was doing the radio version of American Bandstand at that time, and so came
over from the radio version, and became the permanant host of American Bandstand. He really
had the touch. With that show. He knew just how to be the genial host that was friendly with the
kids but absolutely unthreatening but not sort of like a, an, an oldster, who, who seems like your,
your high school teacher or some kind of thing like that. So he had the perfect touch with that
show. And is wasn't long before in 1957, the show went national. It continued to film in
Philadelphia, but was carried nationally on the ABC network. Truth be told the ABC network was
the weakest of the three networks at the time. And they, they kind of were a little bit desperate for
programming, but they went with American Bandstand it, it broadcast everyday after school. And
it was the perfect thing for a lot of high school kids to come home, turn on the TV and listen to the
most recent hits with other kids dancing. of course dancing was the focus of the show. They were
playing records the whole time. Even when they had performers come on the show during the
day, those performers weren't actually. Performing the tunes. They were, they were lip syncing.
In other words, they would be just sort of singing along but the record would be playing in the
background. Now for some of the teen idols, that might have been the best way to do it. Maybe
you didn't really want to hear these guys sing live. but that was the way it went. It really didn't
matter whether is was a, was a talented performer or not. Now he had some other shows that
would, that would, that would play on the weekend, where there would be actual live
performances. And those also went under the American Bandstand. title. So if you've, if you're
looking for videos on YouTube or wherever, and you see one that's not lip sync. it's probably not
from the daytime show that, that we're talking about here. But, anyway this idea of, of focusing
on dancing really is going to lead as we get to the end of this particular segment in talking about
the dance craze that comes in with Chubby Checker. But before we do that, lets talk a little bit
more about TV and movies, then we'll come back to the dancing end of it. Other important TV
that we should think about when we think about the history of rock and roll. Are the variety
shows. They're, this is somewhere where you could have heard a, a, a, rock act actually perform
on television. And most of these variety shows were live so if you go and, and look for old variety
show performances of, of Elvis Presley or Jerry Lee Lewis, I mean they're not lip synced at all
you can tell. and they're exciting from that point of view. Probably the most important of the
variety shows and longstanding of the variety shows was The Ed Sullivan Show. And so those
performers who got, who got a spot on Ed's show really got a, a very big national audience on
Sunday nights. Another important person, we'll return to him a little bit later in this week's lectures
is Ricky Nelson. Ricky Nelson was on the very famous very popular television show during the,
the 1950s called Ozzie and Harriett. But if you want to know what, you know, sort of clean middle
class, white, suburban living was like in the 50s. You can watch Leave It to Beaver, Father
Knows Best, or Ozzie and Harriet. Now, it turns out that Ozzie Nelson was in, was a band leader,
a big band leader. And his wife, Harriett, was a singer and so they were able to help Ricky
Nelson develop a career. We'll talk about that a little bit later, but nevertheless Ricky Nelson was
able to perform these numbers on the television show and so this in the, the late 1950s, the early
1960s. So this begins to sort of lay down a marker of where popular music and rock and roll on
television is going to go but, by far, American Bandstand is the most important television
influence that we need to think about. Rock music in the movies. Well, we've already talked
about Alan Freed and those those films that that he did. kind of a flimsy affairs but you did get
performances there, although those were often lip synched performances in those films as well.
we talked a little bit about The Girl Can't Help It from 1956. Elvis was in, was in the movie
business with his, his first movie in late 1956. In fact, after he had done all those television
appearances we talked about last week the Dorsey Brothers Show, the Steve Allan show, the
Milton Berle show, and the Ed Sullivan show. By late 1956, he had a film out, Love Me Tender
where he was featured. 1957 is Jailhouse Rock, the one that we talked about before that had
Leiber and Stoller writing a lot of the the tunes there. in fact, if you check out the famous dance
sequence for Jailhouse Rock, it's the one that has all the guys in the striped shirts. It's very, very,
very famous dance sequence. If you notice the piano player, the piano player in that in that
scene is actually Mike Stoller himself. He wasn't supposed to be, but the guy who was supposed
to do that role somehow got sick or didn't show up that day and they were kind of in a panic to
find somebody to sort of. Learn the steps and, and kind of be in the thing when they had it
scheduled to be filmed. And so Stoller said, hey, I'll do it. And so if you want to see Mike Stoller
in action, here's a songwriter that was never a performer, but he is a performer in that scene from
Jailhouse Rock. Anyway, Elvis doing all those, those movies up until he goes into the, of course,
goes into the service in 1958. When he comes back, as I said before the idea was to mainstream
his career and so he did a whole sequence of movies that most Elvis fans, though they like the
movies because Elvis is in them, will admit that they're really not very good movies at all. And it's
kind of a shame because Elvis really did have aspirations to try to be a good actor but every
script he would get sent would be these sort of lousy boy meets girl, you know, movies that he
didn't want to do. But he was under contract, Colonel Tom Parker had him under contract, so he
had to see the contract through. Couldn't wait to get out of the contract, and when he finally did in
the mid 60s, he came back in 1968 with the so called Comeback Special which is some of the
best Elvis you're ever going to see. If you have ever a chance to hear, see the Comeback
Special or see bits of it on the Internet, you really should check it out. Anyway, so in terms of
music in the early 1960s, every one of those Elvis records, every one of those Elvis movies had a
couple of songs in there and there was a soundtrack album to go with it. So they were essentially
used to market Elvis Presley if you want to check out a couple of those, maybe the two best ones
are Blue Hawaii from 1961, or Viva Las Vegas from 1964. We've already mentioned Frankie
Avalon and Annette Funicello doing these kinds of rock 'n roll beach party kind of movies during
the 60s. A couple of interesting ones maybe are the movie Beach Party from 1963, which
actually features Dick Dale surf guitarist. We'll talk about him in a little bit. Or, Beach Blanket
Bingo from 1965. The important thing I guess about the Beach Blanket, the beach party movies
and all of this is to understand that there was beginning to develop a market for teen movies. And
once you've got teen movies, you can start selling teen music through those movies. And of
course, as we look toward MTV and the marketing of singles, through MTV in the 1980s, we, we
see the precursors. We're also going to talk about the Beatles next week, A Hard Days Night,
and Help, and their movies and all that goes with it. And so the, this is all of course a precursor or
showcases movies that are happening at the same time as those Beatles movies. Before we
finish this segment let's talk a little bit about Chubby Checker, The Twist, and the dance craze
that was in large part fueled by shows like American Bandstand. Interesting thing about a dance
craze is that it's not about the musicians at all, it's not really about the performers at all, it's not
even really about the songs at all. A dance craze is about dancing. And we're going to come up
against this same issue, this kind of difference in what's important when we talk about the disco,
the rise of disco in the late 1970s, and why so many rock n rollers hated it so much. One of the
reasons why they hated it so much is that disco never seemed to be about the music. It didn't
matter how lousy the music was, not that I'm saying all disco music is lousy, or anything like that
but I'm just saying. Doesn't matter how lousy the music is, so long as it's got that beat and people
can dance to it, it's all good. And for people in the rock generation who thought it really was
about the music, it really was about the writing, it really was about the playing, disco was the
antithesis of all that. Well, you can see that happening in this dance craze that sort of gets gets,
gets started here in 1960. The big track that starts it all is a track called The Twist. Number one
in 1960. Recorded by a guy whose name is actually Ernest Evans, but they decided when they
recorded it to call him Chubby Checker. So, if you think about Fats Domino, then you get Chubby
Checker. ha. That's where they got it. In fact, the record itself is a duplicate. That is, I talked
before about cover versions, and how you could do your own version. And, that was the kind of
thing that happened in pop music all the time. But when you did one of these versions, it was
exactly like the other record. that maybe was a little bit less defensible, when we talked about the
issue and the controversy surrounding that. Well, this record by Chubby Checker, The Twist, was
in fact a duplicate. It was a duplicate of a record that had been done by the songwriter, Hank
Ballard. So, Hank Ballard, an African Amer, American musician who had wrote, written a song
and recorded it, and it was such a close copy that Hank Ballard tells the story, used to tell the
story anyway. That that he was in a pool one day at a hotel when he was on tour, and somebody
had the radio on and all of a sudden he hears this song come on the radio and he says finally I'm
getting some crossover airplay on white radio, and the announcer comes on at the end and says,
that was The Twist by Chubby Checker. The artist himself, Hank Ballard, thought it was him
[LAUGH] on the recording. That's how close a duplicate it was. Why was it a duplicate? Well,
Dick Clark was involved in the publishing and all of this, and, or course, he didn't have any
money in the Hank Ballard record, so he made sure he had money in publishing in The Twist,
and then he played it on his show. This is the kind of thing that the payola people were looking
into. Is this really a legitimate kind of thing to do? Anyway, the record launched a whole craze for
The Twist. And wherever you went in a club, or dances, or things like that everybody was doing
The Twist. And it wasn't just the twist. After a while there were all kinds of dance steps that you
learn and there was a song to go with it. And the perfect place to get that song on. Was
American Bandstand, which was about the dancing anyways. So you could see these young kids
dancing. Dick Clark used to say that he thought The Twist was maybe one of the most important
songs in the early history of rock music, because it was a song that even adults could admit they
liked. And he said that when they first started doing American Bandstand, he thought it was
about kids watching kids dance. But he very soon discovered that older people like to watch the
kids dance too. And The Twist was that song that allowed people to say, they liked rock and roll.
If you want, it's, it was sort of like the final step in, in crossover for, for rock 'n roll and how it was
no longer dirty but it was fun, it was good clean wholesome fun. And Dick Clark went a long way
toward making that happen. And The twist was a song that was instrumental in making that
whole thing come together. We talked before about these white cover versions transforming
everything that had to do with sexuality in some of these rhythm and blues songs into dancing.
Now, we get to The Twist, we get to American Bandstand, the transformation from sexuality to
dancing is officially complete. Now, there's nothing sexual about this dancing. It's all good, clean,
wholesome fun. And this is, this is sort of what this whole thing is about at this particular period.
We've gone, we've gone the full circle, we've gone the full transformation now. And now it's, it's
really about dancing with no sense of sexual suggestiveness. Well having said that, this is what
the teenagers were, the music that we've talked about so far, is what the teenagers were thinking
about during this period. In the next video we're going to talk about what their older siblings had
turned to. The idea of what, what would be happening after you put childish things away, went off
to college, still wanted to be involved in popular music, what kind of popular music would you
listen to? Well, one of those kinds of music would be folk music. And that's what we're going to
talk about next

The Folk Revival

Folk music has an interesting past in, American popular music. in terms of our discussion, we're
going to think about Folk music as it emerged, in the late 1950s, into the 1960s as a kind of Folk
revival. Next week when we talk about, the Beatles and the British Invasion, we'll often talk, we'll
also talk about a style, a kind of Folk revival they had in the UK which we never really
experienced here called Skiffle. In fact their folk revival happened a little earlier than our folk
revival did. Theirs was already going in 1957 with Lottie Donegan and the Rock Island Line here
with us and the Kingston Trio and other folks like that. It isn't until 1958 or 1959 that we really get
started. Now in this country, folk music had certainly been popular before the late 50's when we
have the folk revival. But what we want to talk about here is how this folk revival constitutes one
of the first splits in this new youth market that we're going to see. Remember that the idea is that
during the 55 through 59 period, what was demonstrated was that there was a youth market at
all. That is a market for youth records as opposed to basically just any kind of mainstream pop
record. And you shouldn't expect that people like Frank Sinatra and some of the more traditional
musicians weren't continuing to sell records while rock 'n' roll was going on. I mean, rock 'n' roll
was one part of the market, but it wasn't the entire mainstream pop market. Anyway, that, that
was, that youth market was already a kind of a split away from the, the mainstream pop market.
Now, within the youth market, there's a split, where the teenage kids, the high school kids,
maybe the preteen kids, and the college age kids, who used to be fans of Elvis Presley, and now
have moved on to college, and were interested in putting their childish things behind them, and
impressing everybody with how, dog gone serious they were and Folk music, is in many ways
one of the places that those folks went. Now, a lot of other college kids got involved into jazz and
they liked jazz a lot. Jazz, was of course the music of the beat generation, beat poetry. A lot of
people got interested in classical music, as well. but folk music was a kind of music that you
know you could sort of if you are a man, stroke your beard to, and sort of think about the
importance of the lyrics and the kinds of things they were saying. It dealt with more serious
issues and more sort of serious problems in the world than teenage love and romance and ideal
boyfriends, and this kind of thing. a kid goes off to college, wants to be taken seriously. starts to
read Niche and grows a little beard, smokes a pipe and wears a sweater and all of a sudden
wants to be taken seriously. And folk music sort of really fit that pretty well for these kids. There's
a, a real appeal to populism. The idea in folk music that you know, we're sort of all in this
together. We're all equals.
There's a real kind of non-commercial emphasis. Although it turns out that folk music as a
popular style is just a commercial as every other music when it comes to actually selling it. But
the image is that it's not commercial and it's often socially conscience or even activist at a certain
kind of way. Now the roots of folk go back to the 40s and into the early 1950s. With people like
the Weavers, Woody Guthrie, Pete Seeger, writing music that was really about social problems
and a kind of an approach to everybody sharing in things together, this land is your land, this
land is my land. But, and some of those early songs are tunes like The Weavers, Good Night
Irene, which was a number one hit on the pop charts in 1950 or On Top of Old Smoky, a number
two hit in 1951. But with the rise of McCarthyism in this country and the seeking out or trying to
flash or flash out all the possible communist or communist sympathizers in the country. Right,
wrongly, or whatever way you make thing about that. A lot of folk musicians were, were under
scrutiny, because they were seen as communists or communist sympathizers. And that was
sometimes true, actually. It wasn't always true of everybody, but it actually was true. I mean,
some really did believe in communism. but that tend to sort of put a damper on their ability to sell
records to a mainstream pop audience. So, there's a kind of a silence that happens in folk music
at the, at the, into the 1950s. And when folk music starts to revive in the late 1950s, it really stays
away from political issues. the most important group in this part of this vocal revival is a group of
out San Francisco called the Kingston Trio. they take their name, the Kingston Trio from this
fascination we had for calypso music at about the same time Harry Belafonte sing singing tunes
about a Jamaica Farewell, or the Banana Boat song, the Day O song, that kind of thing. and so
Kingston was kind of, you know, kind of in the air and kind of a hip thing to do, so they were the
Kingston Trio, even though their music had nothing to do with calypso music or Jamaica.
anyway, their approach, three guys singing and playing acoustic instruments, guitars and banjo,
singing in harmony, producing very professional performances that never really seemed really
professional. They almost give, give the image of just three guys that could be anybody that
picked up these instruments and they're just sort of singing and playing. But if you listen to the
recording, you'll see there's an awful lot of production, an awful amount of talent and an awful lot
of thought to the arrangement that goes into them. A good example is their big number one hit
from 1959, Tom Dooley, which is a traditional song 19th century song that deals with a murder
and this kind of thing, but it doesn't get into issues of of, of of civil rights or, or social economic
problems, or issues or politics or anything like that. It deals with these kinds of serious issues
from a historical perspective. Which is kind of safe to do at the time, because like I say, there had
been a, a big scare with the McCarthyism thing. the, the Kingston Trio were on Capitol Records,
out of Los Angeles. And in the period between 1959 and 1965, had ten singles in the top 40. they
were very, very big during this period. And when somebody thought of, what is folk music? In the
period before the arrival of Bob Dillon and Roger McGuine and all these guys with folk rock in
1965. Folk music probably meant, either the Kingston Trio or a group we are going to talk about
in just a minute, Peter, Paul and Mary. It's important for us to realize, that somebody like Bob
Dillon, didn't really have a professional performing career, even though he did records, he wasn't
really sort of star of a performer until 1965. So, folk music really meant The Kingston Trio. in, in
many cases, they were very, very successful. other groups of note that are sort of similar to the
Kingston Trio would be the Highwaymen, the Rooftop Singers, or perhaps most importantly, the
New Christie Minstrels. All of these groups very polished, happy kind of folk sound that stayed
way clear of any kind of controversy of political affiliation. if you're interested in the whole scene
around that, there's a fantastic movie by Christopher Guest, called A Mighty Wind, which takes a
kind of a satirical view of all this. But much of like a lot of those Christopher Guest movies, much
of what's in there is a pretty accurate representation of a lot of what went on. Even if the
characters themselves are, are sort of, you know, comedic, and not, not accurate representations
of anybody in particular. let's talk about Peter, Paul, and Mary. Here's a group that, really, like the
Kingston Trio were really at the top of this, of this Folk Revival. formed in Greenwich Village in
1961, for a long time, in the early 60s Greenwich Village was the home of folk music, and so they
came out of that Greenwich Village, scene. were put together on purpose to have a vocal trio.
and had a whole series of hits, If I Had a Hammer in 1962, Puff The Magic Dragon in 1962, and
Blowin' In the Wind by Bob Dylan. Bob Dylan of course, nobody would have heard Dylan sing
that song. the version they would've known would've been the Peter, Paul and Mary tune. of
course Dylan at the very beginning of his career was more of a songwriter then a performer. So
the point I really want to drive home with regards to this folk revival, is that while we think of
people like Bob Dylan and Joan Baez, as being important folkies during the 1960s, that really
doesn't happen until the second half of the decade. The beginning of the decade it's really about
this sort of milder more commercial form of folk music, which all the same is posing itself as not
being very commercial characterized by groups like The Kingston Trio and Peter, Paul, and
Mary. As far as Bob Dylan is concerned it, it's probably worth considering that during these years
when these performances by these other groups, like the Kingston Trio; Peter, Paul, and Mary;
were so polished vocally, and and so arranged, somebody like Dylan, with the voice of his, and
the harmonica playing and all that, was thought of as really too amateurish for prime time. I
mean, it was fine for coffeehouses in Greenwich Village and for people who were folk
enthusiasts, but it just really wasn't polished enough to be part of the folk the folk music as it was
understood in the first half of the decade. So Dylan was largely relegated to being a very talented
writer of songs that other people performed. Now as folk begins to unfold into the decade and to
1963, 1964, it's increasingly involved with the civil rights movement. In fact, the famous I Have a
Dream speech that was done by Martin Luther King Peter, Paul and Mary Dillon, Joan Baez, all
those people were there, sort of locked, holding arms at the Lincoln monument, when he did that
speech. And so, this return back to politics starts to make it's way into folk music, as the 60s
unfold. First, through the civil rights movement and then through the protest movement around
the Vietnam War. It isn't long before we get to 1967 and 1968 and folk music. Is right back to its
sort of politically concerned the politically concerned kind of attitudes that it had back when it got
in trouble with the, the, the McCarthy folks back in the 1950s. So there's this period of of
neutrality, and then a sort of slow move back to getting involved with social issues. Well let's
move on now to the, the next the next lecture, and consider what happens to Rockabilly during
this period, and consider these Rockabilly popsters. [

Rockabilly Popsters
In last weeks lectures, we dealt with the question of rockabilly and talked about people like Elvis
Presley as an important rockabilly artist, although Elvis was a little bit broader than that, but other
people like Carl Perkins, Jerry Lee Lewis, we talked about Eddie Coker and we talked about
Gene Vincent. And at that point I said to you I was going to reserved discussion of Ricky Nelson
and The Everly Brothers for this week, because they had hits that continued into the early 1960s.
And so they kind of cross the boundary from the late 50s into the early 1960s. This rockabilly as I
call them Rockabilly Popsters, that is a version of rockabilly that's a little bit more influenced by
the teen idol kind of imaging. It's a squeaky or clean kind of rockabilly image. There's none other
kind of rough neck troublemaker part of rockabilly left at this point. It's really very sort of squeak
clean and almost as they say a kind of another version of a safe Elvis. It's Elvis but without any of
the kind of threatening or potentially problematic aspects for parents, the Elvis Presley's original
image would've presented. And one of the most important groups in this new sort of softer
version of rockabilly are the Everly Brothers. And as I said before, the Everly Brothers go back
into the 1950s and really are sort of contemporary with people like Buddy Holly and Jerry Lee
Lewis. They have their roots in traditional country music of the Southeast and Appalachian
singing that involves high harmony singing. And so that's a little bit where their distinctive vocal
style comes from. They were signed to Acuff-Rose Publishers in Nashville. I remember we talked
about them in the first week. Acuff-Rose formed by Roy Acuff and Fred Rose in Nashville, it's
one of the most important publishers when Nashville became the center of country and western
music. They were signed by Wesley Rose, the son of Fred Rose who had now gotten into the
family business. And they had a very strong advocate in Chet, Atkins, the famous country
guitarist who was working at RCA at the time as a producer. In fact, produced some of those
Elvis Presley sessions when Elvis moved from Sun to RCA.
And so they were signed to Acuff-Rose by Wesley Rose, and Wesley Rose promised them that if
they signed with Acuff-Rose, because they wrote their own songs, too. If they did, he would get
them a recording contract, because they'd been having a hard time getting a recording contract.
Chet Adkins, for as much of a fan, an advocate of the Everly Brothers as he was, couldn't get
them a deal at RCA. And so, Rose get's them signed to Cadence Records in New York City, and
that's who they record with for the balance of the 1950s. They're harmony singing, that two part
sort of high harmony singing that they do, the Everly Brothers Phil and Don, is extremely
influential, and really is their trademark. John Lennon and Paul McCarthy imitate the Everly
Brothers very, very often, and not just at the beginning of their careers, but whenever they're
singing together, there's a certain amount of Phil and Don going on with John and Paul. Simon
and Garfunkel, when they first started out in the business actually had a single that made the
charts in the late 1950s under the name Tom and Jerry. And for all intents and purposes, they
were a kind of Everly Brothers imitation act. Of course, we'll come back in a couple of weeks to
Simon and Garfunkel and how they went from that in the late 1950s, and reemerged in 1965 or
1964 or 1965, with what they were doing. But anyway, Everly Brothers is extremely important
and influential. Some important songs from their late 1950s, Bye Bye Love, Wake Up Little Suzie,
All I have to Do is Dream. All I have to Do is Dream is a beautiful example of their harmony
singing, the two guys together. And then in the 60s and when they shifted to another label,
Cathy's Clown. A number one hit in 1960 and When Will I Be Loved form 1960 a number 8 hit
which actually was covered by Linda Ronstadt back in the 1970s since she actually got, I think
her version of it got to number 2 then. Anyway, the Everly Brothers are very very important to
add a kind of a. They sort of form the link between late 1950s rockabilly and the period beginning
up the Beatles, all through that period from 60 through 63. Of course Ricky Nelson, well I
promise to say a little bit more about Ricky Nelson because we talked about him in context of TV.
As I said before, he was on the cast of the Ozzie and Harriett Show. He was in fact the real son
of Ozzie and Harriett, who were really married in real life. And when Elvis first started to become
famous in 56, 57, he being on the show, bragged to his girlfriend to try to impress her, that he
was going to be making a record too, just like Elvis. And she said, that's great. I'm going to love
to hear that. Then he went home and said, Dad I need a little bit of help. And it turned out Ozzie
Nelson as I mentioned before was a band later. He was way connected inside Los Angeles and
the music business. Let's face it, he had a hit television show that he was the master mind of.
And so he hooked it all up for his son and got him into the studio with some good musicians,
some good song writers. And it wasn't long before Ricky Nelson was producing some pretty good
records. Doing a pretty good job, it wasn't that he was untalented like I sort of cast dispersions on
some of the teen idols, Ricky Nelson really had talent. And so, if you want to hear an early
instance of Ricky Nelson, Believe What you Say is number four hit from 1958. Is a pretty good
example. Many of the songs were written by a classic rockabilly songwriting duo called Johnny
and Dorsey Burnette, who also had their own rock and roll trio that they made recordings that
didn't sell nearly as well as these Ricky Nelson records. He used a lot of the same musicians that
Elvis used, Nashville musicians that Elvis used during his sessions, including a guitarist named
James Burton who was a legendary rockabilly guitar player who later ended up playing with Elvis
during the Las Vegas years and oftentimes Elvis concert posters from that period, the later 60s,
early 70s would say Elvis Presley featuring James Burton. James Burton sort of cut his teeth on
those Ricky Nelson recordings. The last person we should talk about with regard to rockabilly
popsters is Roy Orbison. I mentioned last week that Roy was originally signed to Sun Records,
but he didn't really have much big success Ooby Dooby maybe that kind of thing. But then his
career really took off when he signed to Monument Records, starting with Only the Lonely, a
number two hit in 1960, and extending to Pretty Woman, which was a number one hit for him in
1964. Roy, a singer-songwriter who had an interesting sort of vocal approach, that sometimes
approached a kind of almost operatic vocal quality. In Only the Lonely, there's what we might call
in classical music, a kind of cadenza very near the end, where he goes up into a high falsetto,
the music stops and he does a kind of a flourish [INAUDIBLE] which is really unlike anything
anybody else was doing in pop music at the time. And, of course, he was extremely influential, in
a lot of musicians came after him, The Rolling Stones, The Beatles, people like that. So, that's
the story with the Rockabilly Popsters as they take the transition from what we might think of as
the end of the first wave of rock and roll, the end of the 50s. And taken into this era that is sort of
more controlled by the grownups in the room. They soften the rockabilly sound but are still able
to have some pretty convincing hits and some fantastic success. So let's turn now to Southern
California and consider the origins and the first successes of surf music.

Surf Music
The last lecture for this week is devoted to the topic of Surf Music, music from Southern
California during this period between 1960 and 1963. Surf music was a uniquely American kind
of music, that really spoke to the kind of good, clean, Southern California fun, of mostly middle
class, white kids living close to the ocean. And, most of the topics of surf music songs have to do
either with surfing, cars, or girls. So if you came up with a tune that's cars, girls, and surfing in it
all together you've hit the big one there.
This surf music thing really comes out of a kind of vocal tradition, and also an instrumental
tradition. So when we talk about Surf Music we should talk about it in terms of two different styles
of Surf Music. We'll divide it into vocal styles and instrumental styles. I'll start with Instrumental
styles, first. Although the vocal styles are really much more influential, in the history of rock music
than the instrumental styles are. Still, the instrumental styles are important, especially among
guitarist and they've enjoyed certain various periods of resurgence in the time since the early
1960s. So let's start with your instrumental stuff, the most important guitarist in instrumental surf
music is a guy by the name of Dick Dale. His group was called Dick Dale and the Del-Tones, and
his big hit was a track called Miserlou from 1962. Dick Dale really was a surfing guy. He tells the
story about he'd be out surfing, he'd come in, he'd towel down, he'd put on his Fender
Stratocaster guitar and they would do the gig. Dick Dale played left handed, he played the guitar
strung upside down. And he developed this really fast picking technique that he would use, very
much a kind of a Middle Eastern sort of stringed instrument. In fact Miserlou is derived from
traditional music from the Middle East. And so this sort of whole approach of instrumental Surf
Music, music that, no vocals there, just instrumental tracks. It's interesting in the history of
popular music that I talk about that, like it's some big exception to the rule. But in the first week,
when we were talking about popular music, we talked about a whole area of popular music, the
big bands, that was mostly instrumental music. It's just a measure of how far we've come from
the era of the big bands in the 1940s, that when I tell you about a group like Dick Dale, I have to
say it's exceptional, because there was no singing of course during the Big Band era there were
tons of hits that had no singing. But it really has become, popular music, has really become very
much a singing style, certainly by this time.
Other big instrumental hits in the Surf style are the Chantays, Pipeline, from 1963 and the song
Wipe Out by the Safaris from 1963. When I was a kid growing up, every drummer knew Wipe
Out, even if they weren't a very good drummer. And they would be happy to perform the drum
solo from it, on just about any object they could find using their hands or anything else. So Wipe
Out is the sort of, or was at least the ultimate sort of drum solo song of its day. Other
instrumentalists, instrumental songs and instrumentalists that are important for us to take into
consideration, somebody like Duane Eddy, who's Rebel Rouser from 1958 was an important
instrumental hit, and Duane Eddy with that sort of twangy style of his really continued to have
influence into the early 1960's. We should mention, The Ventures, from Seattle, Washington, a
group whose 1960 hit, Walk Don't Run, is a veritable classic of instrumental guitar music and
they were very famous during the 60s for their instrumental versions. I would say if there's one
group that most Americans would've known that consistently had instrument music on the radio,
during the 1960s, it would be The Ventures, they were very big in their day. And just take a step
outside of American perspective for a minute, in the UK, there was a group called The Shadows.
Now when we talk next week about the British Invasion, we'll talk a little bit about the scene in
the UK and the idea that there was a singer there by the name of Cliff Richard who was sort of
the British version of Elvis Presley in a lot of kinds of ways. His backing band was a group called
The Shadows, who also issued tunes that sounded a lot like The Ventures, under their own
name, simply as The Shadows without Cliff Richard there to sing. And so a good example of that,
if you want to try to find it on the Internet or somewhere else, is a tune called Apache from 1960.
So that's the story with instrumental music during this period. Let's now turn to vocal music, and
primarily the music of The Beach Boys and Jan and Dean. But more The Beach Boys than Jan
and Dean. Jan and Dean are important, but the Beach Boys are really at the center of that. And
at the center of The Beach Boys Boys, is Brian Wilson, he really was the brains of the operation.
Brian was the guy who was writing the music, arranging the harmonies, doing all that kind of
stuff. He was the leader of the group. They're all gifted in certain kinds of ways, but he's the guy
with the real gift, the guy with gift of musical imagination and creativity. As I said before, songs
about surfing, cars, and girls. Here are three early Beach Boys hits, Surfin' Safari, Surfin' USA,
and Surfer Girl. There's no surfer car there or car girl, but you get the idea, it's an awful lot about
surfing. It's interesting because aside from brother Dennis Wilson, none of the rest of the Beach
Boys were surfers, and Bryan Wilson least of all. Writing song after song about surfing when, I'm
not sure how much time he actually spent on the beach, not in the water I mean on the beach at
all. But nevertheless, unlike Dick Dale, who really was one of the surfing crowd, Bryan Wilson
talked about surfing but he really wasn't part of the surfing culture in that way. It's also interesting
that Surfing USA, Surfin' USA, I should say, is actually a rewrite of Chuck Berry's, Sweet Little
Sixteen. And Chuck Berry, when he found out about this, he said, you know, you're going to have
to pay me. So, even though the original singles came out, saying words and music by Brian
Wilson after Chuck Berry found out about it and came after The Beach Boys, every subsequent
version you find of that song will say, words and music by Brian Wilson and Chuck Berry. And
Chuck Berry gets a piece of the publishing every time, Sweet Little Sixteen is sold in whatever
form that it's sold in.
Tells you a little bit about the influences on the Beach Boys. There's a lot of the sort of chugging
guitar that goes on in those surf tunes, but also there's a strong influence of jazz-oriented
harmony singing. And Brian Wilson always talked about, he still does, talk about the influence of
the Four Freshmen, who are sort of a Jazz oriented mainstream sort of adult contemporary kind
of group from the 1960's, but always sang in this sort of rich vocal harmony. And that's really
what he was trying to get The Beach Boys to do. Of course, there's the doo-wop tradition as well,
that figures into the Beach Boy vocal harmony sound. And there's also the girl group sound,
Brian Wilson, a fantastic admirer of Phil Spector. He talks about the first time he heard the song,
Be My Baby, while he was driving in his car, as so many people heard music for the first time
driving in their car. Remember I talked about Phil Spector in terms of mono, that car speaker
trying to make that sound as big as possible. Anyway, Brian Wilson is hearing that song for the
first time, he's so impressed by the tune, he has to pull the car over because he just doesn't even
want to focus on driving. He can't believe the fantastic sound of that tune. So anyway, a very
strong influence there of girl group music, Phil Spector, jazz harmony from Four Freshman and
chugging harmonies and rhythm from Chuck Berry that go together to make that surf sound that
the Beach Boys Specialize in. The other group that has some success with this is Jan and Dean,
initially there was a lot of cooperation between the Beach Boys and Jan and Dean. But the
record labels got in the middle of that and started to tel them not to sing on each other's records
and that kind of thing. But they remained friendly and they were all part of the same kind of
musical community. If you want to look for one Jan and Dean song that really represents the kind
of thing they do, I think the best one is a song called, Little Old Lady From Pasadena, a number
four hit from 1964. It's kind of a fun tune, some great singing and very much, if you didn't know
that it was a Beach Boys tune, you might think that in fact, it was a Beach Boys tune.
Well so now, we've come to the end of our survey of this music between 1960, 1963 and very
soon, in February of 1964, the Beatles are going to arrive at JFK, in New York. And things are
going to change in popular music in a very definite kind of way. So, I would ask you to think as
you consider these lectures, and as maybe you dig into some of the music and try to find some of
the music that I've been talking about this week, do you think these early 1960s are kind of a
dark ages for pop? When pop was taken over by cynical music industry types, who didn't really
care about the music, didn't really have much respect for it and thought these kids will buy
anything. And so turned out a really, kind of second or third rate kind of product, that really didn't
have any of the edginess or excitement of the original music. Or was there a period where there
was a fantastic amount of
experimentation and ambition taking place in popular music, with sweet soul, the sophisticated
harmonies of the Beach Boys, of the sort of dedication to more serious-minded lyrics of folk
music. All of these kinds of things sort of coming together to take pop music to another level
From what it had been in 1950 to 1959. And that development forward, was in some way,
obstructed by the arrival of the British invasion. The arrival of the Beatles, and the fact that at
first, the Beatles were really pretty much like four teen idols, except that they really could sing
and they really could write their own music, and they were fantastically charismatic. But in terms
of imaging, so, which do you think it is? Was it a dark ages, or was it a golden era for pop? I'll let
you decide, and I'll be back next week to talk to you about the British Invasion.
The Beatles and the British Invasion (1964-66) I

Welcome to week four of the The History of Rock Part One. This week we're going to talk about
the British Invasion, that means the music of The Beatles The Rolling Stones, and that whole
group of musicians that that got really, really popular in the United States in the period starting
around 1964. So let's just review a little bit of what we talked about last week as a way of setting
up the British invasion. Because in many ways, the British invasion was a real disruption of what
had been happening in the American popular music industry. So it's important for us to
understand what it was that the British invasion upset. So just let's just very quickly review what
we did, what we talked about last week. The overall picture was that after that first wave of rock
and rollers, of which Elvis was the the, the biggest, most successful, the biggest representative.
That first wave from 1955 through 59. After that, the music business was kind of taken over, by
the music business people themselves, rather than independent labels and, and sort of a very
independent and strong willed performers. So, the, they had, they had discovered that there was
a fantastic and very lucrative youth market for music for, for teens in 55 through 59 and they've
tried to figure out ways to, to, to mine that, exploit that really and create new product. The whole
idea during that period was to look for the next Elvis, the next big sensation. So a lot of different
styles, were, were, were laid out. Critics disagree, as we said at the end of the last, last week, on
what the value of this music was. Was it, you know, music that was sort of dumbed down,
cynical, all the rough edges rubbed off, sort of without the edginess and excitement of the first
wave of rock and roll. Or, was it a kind of golden era where a lot of new things started to happen
and maybe are going to be cut short here by the British invasion that we're going to talk about
this week. If you were someone who liked that music, the styles you celebrated were sweet soul,
girl groups, the rise of the producers and surf music maybe. All the stuff that we talked about, last
time. When people have got a negative view, one of the things they tend to focus on are the teen
idols, the dance craze, the twist. Mostly because of their superficiality and their seemingly cynical
exploitation of the teen market. Other styles that we talked about were the con, contin,
continuation of rockabilly, I call it the rockabilly postures out of the that first period 55 to 59. And
also, the importance in the emergence of the folk revival which really for the first time split the
teen market in the United States into teenagers and an older sort of college students who, who
sort of went for the folk music. but as much as they looked for the next Elvis during that period, it
turned out that the next Elvis was none of these things. The next Elvis came from some place
nobody really expected it to come from. The next Elvis came from the UK and in the next video
we're going to talk about what the scene was in the UK that made it possible and prepared the
way for groups like the Beetles and the Rolling Stones.
The Early 1960s in the US & UK
Let's take some time now to have a look at what was happening in the UK during this period
leading up to the British invasion here in this country, that is the United States, in 1964.
Remember that, at the beginning of the course, I emphasized that the history that we'e telling, or
the history of rock in this class, is really one that is markedly and almost exclusively really from
the American perspective. But this isn't going to be one of those moments where we try to look at
what the history of rock looked like, not from America, but from the UK. And it turns out that in
many ways, the history of rock looks quite different from a UK perspective. Some of those of you
who are taking the course from the UK can comment on that. And so we shouldn't assume that
simply because we're talking about a lot of the same artists, that the situation is the same. And
maybe sometimes it's similarity that blinds us to some important and significant differences. So
here's what was happening In the UK in the period of the late 50s and the early 1960s. When
you look at the UK charts up to 1963, it's pretty clear that US pop dominates the UK charts. That
is, if you look at, for the year 1961, 1962, what the top singles are for that year in the US and
then you look at the charts in the UK, you'll find a lot of those same records. More records by
American artists, artists out of the US, than by artists from the UK.
And even those artists from the UK, in many ways, mostly imitated American artists. And the
attitude, I think, of a lot of British musicians was that their music was maybe not as good as
American music but at least it was homegrown. Certainly the attitude in America, and we'll talk
about this pretty soon, is the idea that, it certainly was the attitude in America that UK music
wasn't as good as American music. And The Beatles, of course, and The Stones, they would
change all that. But for right now, I want to focus on the fact that even among the Brits, they
thought that their own music was probably not as good as American music. Going back to the
second World War when there was a lot of American presence in the UK, we brought our pop
music with us, the British people sort of became fans of American popular music. And so popular
music for them was, the best popular music was the music from the US.
Those that imitated American artists, there were a lot of them, mostly imitating in many ways,
Elvis Presley. Probably the most important in the UK is Cliff Richard. Cliff Richard, in the period
between 1958 and 1963, had 27 hit singles in the UK. Cliff Richard had a very difficult time
getting any kind of real chart action in this country, but in the UK he was like an Elvis. I mean,
one hit after another. He was a very, very big star. There was also a UK Version of the teen idols.
There was a fellow, we talked in last week about Bob Marcucci in Philadelphia being a guy who
groomed a lot of young teen idols. Well in the UK, the guy who did this was a fellow named Larry
Parnes and he managed a bunch of teen idols. He had a kind of whole stable of these guys,
including Tommy Steele, Marty Wilde and Billy Fury. You can tell from all these stage names that
there's something aggressive and exciting about these acts. And these guys had single, hit
single after hit single. These were all records that, essentially, invisible to Americans because
they never saw any of this. It was part of the UK scene. And so looking at this period from the UK
side, you have to factor in all this kind of thing. This is the situation that The Beatles and The
Stones and the rest of these groups, when they were making it in their own country, came upon.
Of records that crossed over the Atlantic and became hits in the early 1960s, the only 2 that were
really, really successful was a record called, Telstar. An instrumental record called Telstar by The
Tornados went to number 1 both in the US and the UK in 1962. The Tornados, it turns out, were
the backing band for Billy Fury. It turns out that Cliff Richard also had a backing band, they were
called The Shadows. And the Shadows had a whole series of hits in the UK. Well this backing
band, The Tornados, had this international or US American hit, Telstar. Interestingly, produced
and written by the legendary British producer Joe Meek, who in many ways is kind of the parallel
to Phil Spector for British music there. Although, I think Phil Spector probably had a greater
success rate in this country than Joe Meek had in the UK. Still, he's an important early
independent producer.
In the UK also, there was a very different structure of how record labels and radios worked. And
this really created a very different picture in a lot of kinds of ways. In this country, we talked about
the growth of regional radio and how there were music on the radio, a bunch of different stations
all the time in this country. And that left room for stations to be able to specialize in rhythm and
blues or country and western or mainstream pop or whatever. And, of course, we had lots and
lots of record labels, so it was really important that we had independent labels. We talked last
time about, and the time before that, about how important independent labels were in being able
to sort of bring rock and roll to people. But it turns out that in the UK, it wasn’t so much like that.
They had the BBC because in many ways the UK had decided that when they decided to license
radio they were going to keep it within the offices of the government itself. And so there were no
stations in addition to the BBC that you could tune into. You had as many as three different
flavors of BBC but that was about it. There was a station called Radio Luxembourg that was
broadcasting from the continent. There was pirate radio, ships out in the sea who were
broadcasting back. And the problem, of course, with something like Radio Luxembourg was that
the programming was paid for by the record labels. In terms of record labels, there were very few
independent labels in the UK. It was a very, very difficult road, a much smaller market, very much
dominated by the major labels. And when you haven't got a lot of radio to get your music to
people and when you have a limited number of record stores, I mean, the population being
smaller, a lot of record owners weren't really interested in getting records from independent
labels. They already had plenty of product from the major labels. It made it very difficult to keep
an independent label afloat. So that meant that a lot more of what the Brits heard in terms of rock
and roll were the things that came to them through these sort of sanctioned sources, the BBC,
the major labels, and so that really constrained what was available. I would say there's probably
less variety available there than there was in this country. However, the variety there was
different from the one we had here because they had all the British artists that we were talking
about as well. An important early movement in British pop, or a movement that's important to us
in terms of talking about the 60s, is a movement called skiffle. It was led by a fellow, Lonnie
Donegan, who was a member of a big band. We'll talk about Trad Jazz in just a minute, but was
basically adapted American folk music with a bit of a kind of big band kind of beat or sort of a
heavier beat with the use of the drums. Although sometimes he would use a washboard in a
traditional kind of way. But anyway, his Rock Island Line, which is a traditional song, was number
8 in the UK and even made number 8 over here in the US in 1956. And that kind of launched in
the UK what's often called a skiffle craze. And that meant kids all across the UK were getting
inexpensive acoustic guitars and learning the first position chords, the Gs, the Cs, the Ds, the A
minors, the E minors, and learning to play these skiffle tunes, which were essentially versions of
American, traditional folk music. All of this happens before the folk revival that happened in
America which we can trace back to 58 or 59, they were doing skiffle already in 56 and 57. But
this idea of strumming cords, easy tunes that anyone can do, was extremely influential on the
members of The Beatles, the Rolling Stones, Jimmy Page. In fact, there's a television clip that
you can find where Jimmy Page, as just a young teenage kid, appears on a variety show as a
skiffle musician doing skiffle music. And so the skiffle thing, very, very, important. We'll see
traces of it in The Beatles music when we look at their music in 63, 64, and 65. Other kinds of
things that were happening in the UK at that time, there was a real interest in what they called
Trad Jazz. In the UK, Trad Jazz is more like, less like big band jazz in a sense, less like bebop
for sure, more like Dixieland kind of jazz. Really old New Orleans kind of jazz is really what Trad
Jazz tended to sound like a lot of the time. Some of the important artists there in the UK doing
Trad Jazz were Ken Colyer, Chris Barber, Kenny Ball, and Acker Bilk. Acker Bilk actually had
another, there were two British hits that went to number 1 in our country before 1964. One of
them I already talked about, Telstar. The second one was as song called, Stranger on the Shore
by the Acker Bilk orchestra, in 1962 also went to number 1. So when we say The Beatles broke
through and had a whole series of number 1 hits, it's not like they're the first UK band to have
done it. But certainly, there was a lot more of it happening and it was a lot more consistent.
Anyway, so that gives you a little sense of the Trad Jazz scene. And also, there was a movement
in the UK, not a lot of records on the chart, but we'd be sure, of blues revivalists. And those were
people like Cyril Davies, Alexis Korner and John Mayall. That'll be important to us in a little bit
when we talk about the roots of The Rolling Stones and some of the other Stones type groups,
like The Yardbirds and The Animals and others like that. The idea there was they had a real
fascination for American blues music and really worked to imitate it. So when you think about it
we're talking about skiffle, Trad Jazz, blues revivalists. These were all folks who, perhaps
because they were enamored by the Americans when they came over during the second World
War, were really fascinated by what we might call the more vernacular musics in American
culture. And so you get this fascination, by sometimes very educated and sophisticated middle
class people, in some of the music that's most associated with the poorest and most under
privileged elements of American culture. It's a fascinating phenomenon. We don't really have
time to pursue it in a kind of sociological sense here. But it's worth noting because it's the root of
what traditional music meant to a lot of the British musicians that we're going to be talking about.
So having given you kind of a snapshot of what things looked like in the UK leading up to 1963,
let's now turn our attention to the rise of The Beatles.

Beatles as Students of American Pop

Music
I want to spend some more time talking about The Beatles. And now, using The Beatles as kind
of a a representative of something they played an important roll in. But something that we're
going to see happening in a lot of bands in this period between 1964 and forward. And that is
growth and, and something I call the kind of artist approach or, or authenticity in music. So, let's
first think about The Beatles as students of American popular music. When you heard the term
British invasion and when journalists used it then and have continued to use it since. You would
get the impression that there's something markedly, or sort of essentially, or fundamentally
British about British invasion music. But when you really look at the music structurally, as a
scholar, as a music analyst, and figure out what the music is. What its influences are, what its
practices and techniques and structures are, it turns out that 90%, 95% of what happens in that
music is essentially American popular music. Of course, it's American popular music with a
strong British accent. But most of what it is, is American popular music. So, in many ways, I think
of the Beatles as students of American popular music. And really, how could it be any other way.
Understanding that most Brits, certainly British musicians revered American music. Revered
American popular music and really wanted to imitate it. Think really that, that a Brit really could
be as good an American at it. Why would it not be that The Beatles were, were students of that
music. Well, how do we know, as scholars, how is it that we know that they know that, that, that
they were familiar or intimately familiar with that music. American pop music from the 1955
through '62 or '63 period. Well, we know what they were doing at Hamburg. We know what music
they were playing. Scholars have assembled lists of, of, of as many as possible of the cover
songs they know The Beatles were playing. We have recordings, not recordings from the
Hamburg years, but recordings they did later for the BBC where they played the arrangements
that they had done back in Hamburg. Partly because they didn't want to give the BBC music they
were already trying to sell on their, on their records, on their singles and their albums. But we, so
we can hear how they did those songs. They wouldn't have had chance, a chance to really
rehearse them up again because they were so busy. There are these books out there that show
how many, you know, what The Beatles were doing every day from about 1960 or '61, all the
way through the day that they, they broke up. When you look at it, you'll be surprised. The guys
have either got a show, a recording session, or a television thing or something going on
practically every day. So when to rehearse new arrangements, probably not. You just brush the
dust off the old ones and you play them. So we have tons of those. And what we know from that
is that they played these, these tunes very much like the record. If you go and look for the BBC
recording of The Beatles playing That's Alright Mama, you could probably take that to an Elvis
Presley fan and convince them that it was a Sun Records out take or a live out take or
something. Paul McCartney sounds just like Elvis Presley. If you know it's Paul McCartney, you
can hear the Paul McCartney in the voice. But if you don't and you're not thinking about that, it
sounds just like Elvis Presley. George Harrison plays the Scotty Moore guitar solo exactly the
way it is on the record. And as you go through those BBC recordings, you hear one after another
of them doing very close versions. So, they understood how American popular music goes.
Some of the groups that they cover from the late 1950s and the 1960s. Carl Perkins, The
Coasters, The Cookies, and the Shirelles, both girl groups. Elvis Presley, of course, Chuck Berry,
Buddy Holly, Ray Charles, lots of Motown and lots more. They truly were sort of students who
understood comprehensively. Not only what the tunes were, but how the tunes went and how
they were put together. So, when they started writing their own songs, as composers who have
done going back hundreds of years. They started to model their music on music they already
knew as young songwriters.
they, they as much admitted that when they first came over to this country and were being
interviewed. Somebody was interviewing Paul McCartney and he said, well, you know, what do
you see in the future? And he basically said, John and I, you know, are songwriting team. After
this performance of The Beatles thing sort of blows over, the effect they thought may be it would
last a year or may be two years of the all set. They would continue to write songs for other artists,
they thought themselves as a kind of a Leiber-Stoller songwriting team or Goth and Kings song.
You know, that's what they thought they were. So, they were very proud to know about the
American songwriting tradition, and to be able to show that they understood it. And so, a lot of
their songs show the influence of not only the, the, the production values and the production
techniques, and instrumentation, and those kinds of things of those, of those records. But
actually, the musical structure of those. So, what we want to do now is turn our attention to how
The Beatles moved from this craftsman model. That is the idea of being very skilled at turning out
pop song after pop song, sort of ala brille building, as we talked about last week. How they
moved from that over the course of the 60s to something more like artists. Where you don't really
want to do the same thing over and over, you want to constantly be doing something new.
Something different, pushing the envelope, pushing the boundaries of what's possible for popular
music. And that leads that movement from craftsman to artists leads to a kind of new aesthetic in
popular music. This is going to be the attitude of authenticity in rock music. We'll deal with that in
the next video.

Beatles From Craftsmen to Artists

We turn now to the idea of the movement from craftsmen to artists, in the music of the Beatles
and not just the Beatles but we'll, we can see this and other artists, but we'll use the Beatles as a
good example because they were a leading example from all this. The idea of craftsman is that,
once you learn to do something, and you learn to do it well, you repeat that. So think about
somebody who makes tables for a living, for example, they find a very a great way to do a
dovetail-joint on a table and it works perfectly and produces the results. They, what do they do?
They repeat that element of craft in every table they make after that, they found a good way of
doing that, they do it that way again and again and again. That's considered an aspect of craft.
They don't say, well, I've built one table that way, I couldn't possibly build another one that way, I
would just be repeating myself. Well, that sounds comical right? But, if you think of what an artist
does, the worst thing you can say about an artist, is, oh, "he's, he's just rewriting the same
symphony over and over again" or, "She's just, recording the same song over and over again".
When you say that, you're basically saying, by repeating something they've already done, they
have no originality, they're not doing anything new, it's a weakness. So, this the idea of craftsmen
where things are found, where you find a good way of doing something and you repeat it over
and over again and the idea of the artist, where you're constantly struggling for new things and
you don't want to be accused of repeating yourself to much these things are sort of opposed to
each other and what we find in the music of The Beatles and many other artists in the mid 60's is
a movement from craftsmen to artist or crafts person, if you prefer. for the Beatles, craftsman
means, being songwriters in the tradition of American popular song, so if you want to check out
some of their early, Beatles music that really kind of does the brill building kind of thing, great
examples are Please Please Me from 1963 and I Want to Hold Your Hand from 1964. These are
really a very typically constructive kinds of pieces, they have Beatles charm, they have Beatles
emphasis and that kind of thing but most of what they are, are, are brill building type pop songs.
Already though by A Hard Day's night,which was the summer of 1964, the release, which
recorded a few months earlier, you can start to see the small signs that they're starting to push at
those boundries, they're looking for ways to do things that are more creative, starting to the first
inklings of the move toward the artist approach. By 1965, in, in large part through the influence of
Bob Dylan you begin to see them in songs like Help, You've got to hide your love away, both
John songs from 65 and Yesterday from Paul, you begin to see that the lyrics start to get more
serious, they actually met Dylan in the fall of 1964 and why, the reason why I, I, I point out the
date is because, as we'll find out in next week's class, Bob Dylan didn't really become a big star
in his own right as a singer and a performer until the summer of 1965. But the albums that
appear earlier than that were known within the folk community but you really sort of had to be in
the know to know about them and the Beatles were, they admired Dylan, he, he spoke with John
and Paul, they got together and he urged them to do more with their lyrics than just talk about I
love you, she loves me, I hold your hand, she loves your kissy kissy, and start to get into things
that were more serious matters. So the first, the first signs we see of that, really, are starting to
happen on Help, the album Help from 1965. As I say help, You've got to hide your love away
yesterday. There's a certain type of form that popular song writers use called the AABA form.
That form type goes way back in American popular music. It's not the only one that's used, but
it's an important one that's used by a lot of American songwriters and we're talking about people
like Cole Porter, George and Ira Gershwin, Irving Berlin, I mean, all kinds of the traditional Tin
Pan Alley composers. If you look at the first four Beatles records, and the singles that go with it,
there is, there are a lot of AABA forms. In fact, it's kind of the default form, you kind of count on
the fingers of both hands the number of songs that don't do AABA form. I, I don't, the percentage
is something like 75 or 80%. They didn't just stumble onto the AABA form and keep doing it over
and over again, they knew what it was because they'd studied this music and they were
replicating it and I think proud too. But what you start to see as the 60's unfold is fewer and fewer
of those AABA forms. As they start to get ambitious with the lyrics, as different kind of
instrumentation starts to come into their music, the form also starts to change as they get away
from the brill building mentality and go towards something that is more sort of artistically inspired
and so if you get to 1965 and 1966, in 65, you get a song like Norwegian Wood, which is formally
like nothing they've ever done before. Tonely, it's like nothing they've ever done before, tells an
interesting kind of story from beginning to end, the first use of the sitar you see instrumentation
coming in. 19 66 we get Eleanor Rigby which is sort of Paul's song about existential angst and,
and alienation and this kind of thing. For No One, a song about a broken marriage that uses that
uses a French horn, kind of in anticipation of the piccolo trumpet he'll use in Penny Lane, later in
1966, early in 1967. Eleanor Rigby, by the way, uses the strings, it's kind of the the, the
continuation of what he was doing with Yesterday but now, the song and the string arrangement
is a little bit edgier and of course, Tomorrow Never Knows at the end of the Revolver album,
1966 is filled with John Lennon reciting lyrics drawn from Timothy Learie's, The Psychadelic
Experience, which are in turn, drawn from the Tibetan Book of the Dead, and we've got tape
loops going on, and it's just like nothing they've ever done before. It's a, it's a very, there's a very
big stylistic difference, between I want to Hold Your Hand, and Tomorrow Never Knows, but
they're really only separated by about two years, maybe a little over two years time. And the
distance from, I want to Hold Your Hand, to Tomorrow Never Knows, is the distance from
craftsmen to artists, and that's what happens in the Beatles' music. They're not the only ones,
though. in the 60s, what the Beatles are doing, a lot of other artists are doing, the Beach Boys
are doing with surf music, we'll talk about that next week. Brian Wilson, Dylan is doing his music,
and a lot of the groups who are imitating the Beatles are doing it as well. But they, they serve as
an example to show us how this, how this trajectory happens, as this starts to happen and as
artists start to think of their, rock musicians start to think of themselves more as artists than as
crafts persons. a new kind of aesthetic begins to develop in rock and roll and it's what we might
call authenticity in rock. What this means is this, you write your own songs which really are about
who you are and what you feel or think, you play your own instruments on the records, you don't
depend on studio musicians to play things, it's really you on the records. You're really writing
songs about what you really think, and you're really playing them, that's considered authentic.
So, when get to to, already when we're getting into 1966 and 1967, and it, the truth comes out
that the Monkees records, for example, they're not even playing on them, it's studio musicians.
All of a sudden That's considered you know, scandalous. It shows how inauthentic Monkey's
music is you know, how sort of cynically music business crafts-person like it is. But, you know,
just a couple years earlier, The Byrds, who are kind of one of the icons of musical authenticity
released a tune called Mr Tambourine Man, the only guy playing on the record that's, that's in the
band is Roger McGuinn playing on a 12 string. The rest of the guys are studio guys. All that
Beatles, all that Beach Boy stuff from Pet Sounds, those are all studio musicians playing that.
But, you can see that one, it gets to a point where it gains critical mass, and then, it's always the
musicians themselves playing on the record, if it's not, it's inauthentic. It also means, authenticity
means that you at least appear to be in control of your image, you really are who you seem to be.
You're not playing a role, you're not putting on a mask, you're being authentic, you're being real,
and, it's, it's very important that, that you project that. And the, the last element of it as we've
been talking about with regard to the Beatles, is you strive to progress, as an artist, there's no
repeating, always moving forward, that's, that's where you go. You're always trying to do
something new, something different, always trying to expand. Although, with the one exception
that it is possible to go back to your roots, right, it's always possible to simplify and go back to
your roots because that's seen as a sign of authenticity. But what you can't do, is just repeat the
same thing that was successful for you before again, and again and again. By the time we get to
the late 60's, and certainly into the 1970's almost everybody is operating as, at least in FM rock,
almost everybody is operating according to this aesthetic of authenticity that I just outlined. But
you know what, in the first half of the 60's, coming out of the 50's, up until about 1965 nobody
was, it was still the old brill building idea of this grass roots movement from craftsmen to artists
habits and The Beatles music but it happens over all in the history of rock music. In fact when we
get to 1967, 1968 and 1969, we will start talking about that in a couple of weeks. We'll talk about
how FM rock continues this authenticity attitude but AM rock, which is where, this is about the
time AM and FM split off, AM continues to be very singles oriented very kind of brill building
approach, that kind of thing, and FM rock is album oriented artists, the aesthetic of authenticity,
these kinds of things. Well having talked about that, let's now turn to the rise of blues in the UK or
the, the revival of blues in the UK, and how that will lead to groups like the Rolling Stones and
the Yardbirds.

Blues in the UK
I mentioned earlier that there was a real movement of blues revival in London in the period of the
early 1960s. A lot of the groups that are involved here that I'm going to be talking about are not
ones that really placed singles on the charts. And so this was the kind of thing that happened in
London. You had to kind of know the people who were doing it. It was a kind of an underground
scene among people who were blues enthusiasts. One important thing for us to keep in mind
when we think about this London scene is that a lot of the blues records that these people were
imitating were not readily available. In the United States, they had been released on independent
labels, which already had distribution problems inside the United States, not to mention trying to
get these records over to the UK. And so oftentimes, you had to send away by mail order to get
blues records and when they came after some weeks time and you unwrapped them. And you
were the one person who in town or maybe one of very few people in town who actually had that
record and would get together and play these records for each other, kind of like record playing
parties, because everybody had different records for their collection. And that was a way, in
absence of radio that would do that for you, that was a way you could find out about music that
you didn't already own yourself. And so these turned into evenings where musicians faithfully
reproduced the music mostly of Chicago blues. And so some of the most important musicians
that would later play a part in
the more blues oriented British invasion. Most notably, the Rolling Stones, were part of these
early blues sessions. They were led by Alexis Korner and Cyril Davies. The group was called
Blues, Inc. And they established blues nights at the Marquee Theater out in Ealing, which is a
suburb of London.
These blues nights were often on off nights, if there was going to be nobody in a club on a
Sunday night or a Wednesday night or something like that, you get a club owner to let your blues
club come in and have performances. These were mostly not big Friday and Saturday night kinds
of events. But there was a real emphasis on recreating the Chicago electric blues of Chess
Records, including imitating the vocal performances, including the harmonic performances, the
tone of the guitar, the drums, the piano, all these kinds of things. When you're listening to the
recordings that are extant of these guys, Alexis Korner and Cyril Davies. If he didn't tell
somebody that these were, sort of, maybe, middle class British guys wearing tweed coats and
smoking pipes, you'd think, for sure, this has come our of a Chicago club sometime in the late
1950s. They are very, very faithful tributes to that. So, you've got this whole generation of guys
who are 20 something, 30 something, who are doing these tributes, maybe into their 40s and
then, you have the young guys who are coming around like Keith Richards and Mick Jagger. And
people like that who are coming around to kind of watch, sitting in the front row, checking out
what these guys are doing. In fact, Mick Jagger gets his first opportunity to sing when he fills in
for the singer from this group, a guy by the name of Long John Baldry, who got an opportunity to
appear on the BBC the night he was supposed to be singing with the blues incorporated. And so
he took the gig at the BBC and Mick Jagger filled in for him and he knew the tunes because he'd
been sitting there watching this unfold. And so, this small scene of blues enthusiasts, almost like
kind of a London blues club kind of environment, is where a lot of these young musicians, who
would later go on to be in The Rolling Stones and the Yardbirds and groups like that, this is
where they became familiar with the blues. Very different from the influence on The Beatles. The
Beatles also heard a lot of music that was coming from America. But the way they got it, was
because, as I said before, Liverpool's support city, the sailors that would go across to the US
would buy bucket-loads of records because they knew they could sell them for good money.
Almost like people do with eBay now, would go over to the US, get those records, and then bring
them back to Liverpool, and sell them to people. So in some ways, there was more American
music available to The Beatles then in Liverpool, than was available to these blue's enthusiast in
London because they had these sailors who were coming back. And people who worked in the
maritime business, coming back and selling the records. But the Beatles weren't so interested in
blues. You're looking for like really good blues on Beatles' records, not so much. They were more
interested in the polished vocal, song oriented kind of music. But the Rolling Stones and the rest
of these guys, this blue's club. These guys really care about the Chicago electric blues. so
having set the stage for that, let's talk in the next video about the Rolling Stones and the way
they emerged in the UK and in the US

The Rolling Stones Emerge

In the last video, we talked about the blues revivalist, London Blues Clubs scene that was
happening in early 1960s in London. And the fact that people like Keith Richards and Mick
Jagger were hanging around Brian Jones, hanging around those clubs and were fantastic blues
enthusiasts. Well the Rolling Stones were formed out of that scene. They were very much the
kind of junior partners, the young guys who were imitating the older guys who they went to see.
And the band initially was led by Brian Jones. We think about the Rolling Stones as, essentially,
being about Mick and Keith. But, in fact, Brian Jones was the sort of the leader. And Brian Jones
was really a true blues devotee. And so even when Keith Richards and Mick Jagger want to do
tunes by Chuck Berry and Buddy Holly, cover tunes of those, he was really quite suspicious of
that. I mean, he was such a die-hard that he felt like even that was selling out to commercialism.
Almost like the folk enthusiasts in Greenwich Village in the United States during the early 1960s.
If you were a blues enthusiast, you didn't want to be perceived as being in it for the money or
being in it for the fame. If you were a blues devotee during these days in the UK, you really
wanted to be in it for the music itself. There's the famous story of Eric Clapton leaving the
Yardbirds as they were recording their first single, because the band wouldn't be on part of the
record. And Eric Clapton just sort of took all of this pop baloney and just said, forget it, I'm going
to go woodshed and become a better blues player. And that's the kind of attitude that we're
talking about here, the willingness to leave fame and fortune behind if it means that you're not
being faithful to your blues calling. So Brian Jones is that guy. Well, the band takes its name, The
Rolling Stones, from the blue's tradition and then gets an established regular gig at the
Crawdaddy Club. Which was just right sort of adjacent to one of the train stations in Central
London. And it was a club that was run by a fellow named Giorgio Gomelski. And, for all intents
and purposes, Giorgio Gomelski thought he was managing The Rolling Stones. He didn't actually
have a contract with them, but we all understood what was going on. These guys are playing
regularly at my club. I'm working as an advocate [INAUDIBLE] what's going on. Turned out there
was a guy came along, who used to work for Brian Epstein. Called Andrew Loog Oldham, who
started managing the group and kind of left old Giorgio Gomelski, in the lurch there. He ended up
picking up another group to play the Crawdaddy Club after the Rolling Stones had success. The
name of that group was The Yardbirds, and with that group he definitely signed a contract. But at
this point in our story, the Rolling Stones are playing at the Crawdaddy Club, and you may recall
me talking about Dick Rowe. He was the guy at Decca who set up the audition for the Beatles on
January the 1st, 1962 and then passed on the audition tape. The tape that Brian Epstein ended
up shopping all over London and couldn't get anybody to take. Until George Martin at Parlophone
finally brought the group in for an audition and eventually signed them. Well, Dick Rowe is at a
talent show or some kind of a thing like that where he's a celebrity judge as a representative from
Decca. And George Harrison, who after the Beatles' sort of first flush of success, is a celebrity
judge. And as the story is often told, and who knows whether these stories are accurate, but this
is probably the gist of it. I think it was George who liked to tell this story.
He was talking to Dick Rowe and Dick Rowe turned to him and said he was sorry that he passed
on The Beatles. That George Harrison couldn't imagine how much trouble he'd gotten for that,
and had developed a reputation for being a guy who passed on The Beatles. And you guys have
gone on to have such great success, and everything makes me look foolish. So is there
somebody you know, a group that you're really high on, that I might sign, or that you think would
be a pretty good prospect? George Harrison says that he said to Dick Rowe, well you might
check out our friends The Rolling Stones, they play down at the Crawdady Club down by the
train station. And the way George Harrison used to like to tell the story, he sort of turned away
because somebody got his attention. And when he turned back, Dick Rowe's chair was still
spinning. He was gone. Well, in fact, however it turned out, Dick Rowe did go to see The Rolling
Stones at the Crawdaddy Club. And he did sign them to Decca, and Giorgio Gomelsky was left
out of the deal. That was Andrew Loog Oldham who made all that happen. What's interesting is
that because the Beatles had had the connection with Phil Spector, Andrew Loog Oldham got
some advice from Phil Spector. And he said to the Rolling Stones, always own your master
recordings, just license them to the record company. And so that's what the Rolling Stones did.
The British label didn't think there was anything peculiar about that, they didn't do it with their
other artists, but what's the deal? I mean after a couple years, most pop is going to be off the
charts anyways. Who cares who owns the master recording? But it was a great stroke of luck for
the Rolling Stones to own all of their own master recordings, and they have. They've taken them
from label to label in subsequent decades. Well, anyway, the Rolling Stones didn't have the kind
of success in the US immediately that the Beatles had. Their first records are primarily cover
versions that Keith and Nick, that were not yet song writers, and the cover versions were split
between rock and roll and rhythm and blues. Some important interesting cover versions that
made the UK charts but not the US charts, in 1963 Come On, a cover of a Chuck Berry tune.
Went to number 21 in the UK, going to number 3 in 1964 was their version of Buddy Holly's Not
Fade Away. They even did a song that was written by them especially by Lennon-McCartney,
who you recall I told you, really wanted to be a songwriting team. So once that they're having
success they immediately started trying to sell their songs to other artists. So they sold one to the
Rolling Stones or got them to record it. I want to Be Your Man, which went to number 12 in the
UK in 1963. If you ever get a chance to hear The Rolling Stones' version of I want to Be Your
Man and The Beatles version of I want to Be Your Man which they subsequently recorded. It
really is a great case study in the difference between those two groups, I want to Be Your Man by
The Stones, much more blues oriented. I want to Be Your Man by The Beatles, much more sort
of Motown sounding or Atlantic Records sounding, much more sort of vocal and polished. But
Jagger and Richards soon begin to write their own songs and some of the first important Jagger-
Richards songs that appear on the charts are, of course, The Last Time. Which is a number one
hit in the UK, number nine in the US, in 1965, of course, I Can't Get No Satisfaction, in 1965, was
also a Jagger-Richards tune. They even sold the tune to Marianne Faithful, who was at that time,
at some point in the 60s, Mick Jagger's girlfriend. As Tears Go By was a very big hit for her in
1964, number 9 in the UK, you probably know the Rolling Stone's version of that. But, initially,
that was recorded by Marianne Faithful, and she had a very big hit. So that really sort of tells us a
bit about the Stones as their careers developed in the UK. Let's now turn to the success the
success the Stones enjoyed in America and how that played for them, that's what we'll talk about
in the next video.
The Stones in The States
When we think about the Rolling Stones in the United States one of the first thing that that strikes
us as we look back at the chart numbers and, and all of that. Is that the Rolling Stones had a
much, the Rolling Stones had a much harder time, getting themselves established in the United
States than the Beatles did. When we tell the Beatles story, it's all about the Ed Sullivan Show,
February 9th, 1964. You know, instant acclaim. All of the sudden they've got record, tons of
records on the charts at the same time. At one point, they were occupying the first five chart
positions [LAUGH] on the singles chart, just massive success. Not just in the United States, but
worldwide. The Stones, not so much at first. They would come around and tour and they'd get
pretty good crowds in New York and Los Angeles, as in the big cities. But as they went across to
heartland of thee U.S, sometimes they were playing state fairs and there weren't many folks
there. They had to work harder at it. They ended up having a tremendous sustained success
once they got it. And continued to be able to play wherever they want to in the world and sell out
stadiums. But came a little more slowly for the rolling stones. One of the interesting things
Andrew Loog Oldham, their manager devised from the very beginning was to judge the post the
Stones against the Beatles. The Stones would be the bad boys. because the Beatles had already
sort of taken up the space of good boys. I mean, the Beatles were charming, they were bright.
they were witty and, and, and charismatic. And the kind of young man that maybe the parents of
young women in America wouldn't be so unhappy if their daughters got involved with. The
Rolling Stones, however, were the kind of guys that you didn't want your daughter ever to get
involved in. Who knows what's going on with the smoking, and the drinking, and the sloppy
appearance, and all this kind of thing. They looked sexually menacing. There was, they were,
they were definitely the bad guys. And, what's interesting in the popular music business is you'll
see this kind of market positioning happening over and over again. We can already go back to
the 50s and see Pat Boone as the good boy and Elvis as the bad boy, back in that period around
1956, 1957, into 1958. In fact, one of the reasons we said that Elvis went into the army was to
kind of correct that bad boy image so he could be a little bit more mainstream. By 1960, 61, 62,
63 and all those movies I talked about, he was just as good boy as good boy can get. So here
along come the Stones, they're the bad boys. The Beatles are the good boys. Their success, as I
said, was not immediate. But the big hit for them was, I Can't Get No Satisfaction. Number one in
the UK, number one in the US in 1965. It made them stars. And there was a story that arose
about the lyrics that said they had to do with a certain amount of sexual frustration, let's say I
Can't Get No Satisfaction. And when asked about that, the song about not being able to get
satisfaction in all kinds of areas of life. But there is one line could be seen as having to do with
sexuality. And when this became a big big story, remember it wasn't too ago maybe in 1963,
1964 that was everybody was worked up about the possibility there could be a swear word. And
Louie, Louie, I mean, to the extent that, you know, the FBI were brought in to listen to the tapes
with all their scientifically advanced technology. To see whether or not they'd actually used a bad
word. Determined that, the FBI determined that they couldn't tell. But, nevertheless, that was the
kind of thing you know, a single bad word, a single reference, could get a song off the playlist.
But, what, what the Rolling Stones decided to do was to not deny the reference to sexual
frustration in the song. It reinforced their bad boy image, but there was nothing in it that was so
blatant that it would get the record cancelled. And, of course, it was a fantastic promotional thing
for them. And really sort of cemented their image of being the kind of ne'er-do-wells of the, the
British invasion. other hits that we can point to from this period 65 and 66, Get Off My Cloud,
which was number one in both countries since 65. And Paint It Black which was number one in
both countries in 1966. In addition to a number of other hits that did very well too. sometimes
Stones fans don't like to hear this and you may have a different opinion about it. But my opinion
is that for most of the 1960s, the Stones reminded in some ways in the shadow of the Bealtes.
They were kind of in the early days 63 64 always the junior partners to the Beatles. The Beatles
success always overshadowed the success of the Stones. And many times the Stones would
imitate what the Beatles did just before that. And it really isn't until the Beatles are on the ropes
and getting ready to, to break up in 1969 about the, after the release of Abbey Road. That the
Stones almost as if they have a burden lifted from them when the Beatles are no longer together
again. And it's really in the early 70s that they really start to blossom and come into their own, as
70s rock and roll. Or so if you think about some of those, some of those tunes, and Sticky
Fingers, albums like that. That's really where the Stones really start to become the Stones. In
many ways we look back at the su, success of the Stones and maybe because they became so
much bigger later. We may be sometimes guilty of exaggerating their stature. They were big, but
the Beatles were probably almost always bigger. Again, that's more a matter of opinion,
interpretation, so there won't be any questions about that on the quiz. Let's go forward now and
talk about other British bands from the British invasion and how they sounded.

Other British Bands

After the Beatle's come to this country and break open the American market for British acts
there's literally a flood of British acts that come on to the scene in this country. It's as if what
people saw in the Beatles. Were a band of British guys with matching suits and these mop-top
haircuts. And, since the British Invasion was in fact a kind of a fad, you know, like a slinky, or a
mood ring, or a hula hoop. really any British group that, that, that looked kind of like, did kind of
what the Beatles did, was good enough. and so all these groups were kind of lumped together as
British invasion bands. Everybody had to have one, everybody had to sign one. This is not so
different then what we talked about happening with Elvis Presley in 1956 when he signed to
RCA. All of a sudden, which RCA, a major label, got into the game with Elvis Presley, the other
labels felt like they had to find somebody too. So Decca signs Buddy Holly, Capital signs
Gene Vincent, people like that. And so, what we find happening is all types of groups flooding in.
Some of them are ultimately forgettable in the sense that we study them as part of the British
invasion, they had hits at the time, but they really weren't able to sustain any careers after that.
Others, of course continue to have success past the British invasion groups like The Who, the
Beatles, the Rolling Stones, somebody like Stevie Winwood and Spencer Davis the Yardbirds
who eventually morphed into Led Zeppelin. These groups continued to have success but a lot of
the others like Gerry and the Pacemakers, the Dave Clark Five the Freddie and the Dreamers.
These are, these are groups that really are consigned to the oldies file, when you hear about
their music. So really what these groups were about is is, is having the matching suits and
haircuts,the obvious British accents but you can begin to divide these groups it just for
organizational purposes into what we might call almost. We can divide them almost all of them
this way. There will be a couple at the end of, of this sequence of videos that I'll talk about that
don't quite fit the mold. But almost all of them can be divided into either Beatles type groups or
Stones type groups. If they're Beatles types groups, the songs emphasize the song and the
vocals. It's a smoother kind of performance. Maybe a lot more of vocal harmony, and a more sort
of professional sound to the recording. If they're Stones type groups, there's more emphasis on a
blues influence. Maybe the vocals are a little sort of grittier, and that kind of thing. And maybe the
production values are not quite as as polished as the Beatles type groups. This is just sort of a
general way of dividing these groups out. Of the Beatles type bands that we might talk about.
There's Gerry and the Pacemakers, a group that was also from Liverpool. Also managed by
Brian Epstein and also produced by George Martin. So they were in a stable of artists that Brian
Epstein began to pull together after The Beatles first success. there's The Dave Clark Five a, a
group that was run by the drummer, Dave Clark, who owned the rights to all the music and
somewhere along, along the line decided that as the years went by he wasn't going to license
that music to, to anthologies and to, and to collected hits collections and things like that. And so,
go out and try and find a Dave Clark Five CD or record online. At least until at least a couple
years ago last time I looked, I, I actually did find some but, It was very, very tough to do this
because Dave Clark had basically pulled that music out of circulation. Why? I'm not quite sure,
maybe he's waiting for something, who knows. anyway The Dave Clark Five were an interesting
group because they were the group John Lennon was afraid was going to overtake The Beatles.
In those early days it was always, who's going to eclipse The Beatles? Is it going to be this
group, is it going to be that group, is it going to be this group? Nobody had the idea The Beatles
were going to be as big as they were and John was afraid. That The Dave Clark Five that, that
was the group that he respected and he thought was pretty good. It had something, it had
something pretty special. Herman's Hermits was another one of these Beatles type groups, led
by Peter Noone, who I don't know whether he purposely emphasized his accent, but when you,
when you hear him sing Mrs. Brown You've Got A Lovely Daughter. Singing it as Mrs. Brown,
you've got a lovely daughter, like that. It's really obvious that it's a British singer. and maybe
that's just the way he would've done it anyway, but it seems to sort of play on the British-ness of
the British invasion. Herman's Hermits' Peter Noone has often said, after they signed everybody
else, they finally got to the bottom of the barrel, and we were them. The fact is those Herman's
Hermits records stand up pretty well. And Peter Noone has gone on to have a pretty good
singing career playing, you know, clubs and casinos and that kind of thing. Another group,
Beatles type group, The Hollies featuring Graham Nash later of Crosby, Stills, Nash, sometimes
with Young that had a big hit, a couple of big hits. Bus Stop was a big hit for them. But also a
song called Carrie Anne. Which was actually a song about Mary Ann Faithful, who we mentioned
earlier as having had a hit with As Time Goes By and having been the girlfriend of Mick Jagger.
So they wrote a song, but they didn't have enough guts to call it Mary Ann, so they called it
Carrie Anne, as if that obscured the meaning. Somehow and then another of the last of these
Beatles type groups that I mentioned is Freddie and the Dreamers who really were gosh of of of
very kind of strange group, I mean they really just had only the sort of minimal amount of, of ahm.
requirement to be a British invasion group, the guy Freddie who was a lead singer, they, they
had a song called Do the Freddie, I guess they were trying to create something like the twist of
something and he would Do the Freddie and it was, it looks especially like a guy doing jumping
jacks. So you've got this situation where they're on The Ed Sullivan Show and you've got these
all guy, all these guys. Sort of looking like Beatles but the singer in the front, sort of with Buddy
Holly horn-rim glasses, singing a song called Do the Freddy. And, sort of, doing jumping jacks
and running across the stage. Anyway, I talk about things that, that, that, that didn't quite make a
historical mark. that might of been one of them. But we can see where they came from. Other
groups, Chad and Jeremy. Peter and Gordon. these are all sort of, think of these as Beatles type
groups. Really sort of focused on the vocals. Focused on the song. but not a lot of rought edges
in those. And then, against that, you've got groups that are Stones type groups. Now these
Stones type groups influence by blues, it turns out that a lot of people who were members of
these stones type groups end up having pretty good careers after the British Invasion, into the
late sixties and certainly into the seventies and beyond. The best example of stones type groups
of course is The Yardbirds, who as i mentioned before take over at the Crawdaddy Club And
then are managed by Giorgio Gomelsky the first important guitarist in the group, though he
wasn't strictly speaking. The first guitarist in the group, was Eric Clapton, who I mentioned before
quit the group while they were recording, after they recorded the first single because it just was
getting all too pop oriented. He went to work with John Mayall and the Blues Breakers. That was
gave Eric Clapton the real sort of badge of authenticity that has been part of his career and his,
his appeal ever since. He was replaced by Jeff Beck guitarist Jimmy Page came in first on bass
when the bass player in the group quit. Jimmy Page had been a session musician was doing
tons of sessions at the time but decided he wanted to be in a band. So first he went on bass,
then they said why we've got Jimmy Page on bass, let's put him on guitar. So that was Jeff Beck
and Jimmy Page on guitar. They were actually buddies, they had known each other for many
years, but the competition, well that didn't work out. So Jeff Beck left the group and Jimmy Page
left with the group stayed in the group. And he was sort of still the one left standing when
everybody had quit the group and there were still some gigs left over that they need to. That they
needed to do, as late as 1968, 1969, and so he got some people together this, this kid from the
country Robert Plant, and a drummer that he knew, John Bonham, and another session musician
he'd worked with during his studio days. John Paul Jones, who put the group together they were
going to be called The New Yardbirds, but then they decided they would change the name to Led
Zeppelin, and so you see The Yardbirds really give birth to Led Zeppelin, and that's another story
for another day, part two of the history of rock. The Animals, another Stones type British band,
although they weren't part of the London blues scene. im, important with Eric Burdon on lead
vocals. when they did House of the Rising Sun with the electric guitar and the organ, apparently
Dylan heard that, and that was one of the things that made him think, maybe he should use
electric guitar more. That story we'll tell next week, when Dylan goes electric at the Newport Folk,
Folk Festival in 1965. Georgie Fame and the Blue Flames. Not a group you hear much about,
except that they had John McLaughlin, the famous guitarist in the group and Mitch Mitchell, who
later ended up in the Jimmy Page, Jimmy Hendrix Experience. The Graham Bond Organization
that also had John McLachlan for a time. Jack Bruce and Ginger Baker, those two, Bruce and
Baker who would team up with Clapton to form Cream later. The Zombies, a group the was run
by Rob Argent who would later have a group in the 70's called simply Argent. Zoot Money's Big
Roll Band featuring guitarist Andy Summers who would later emerge in the Police at the end of
the 70's, going into the 80's. And the Spencer Davis group. Which featured a young Stevie
Winwood. By young, I mean like teen-aged Stevie Winwood. And his voice, of all these groups,
the Rolling Stones included. And all the Stones type British bands. his voice, Stevie Winwood's
voice is the one that could most likely pass for actually being an African-American blues singer
from the late 1950's. And what was funny was it came out of a skinny little teenage kid but there
was that big voice on those Spencer Davis records. Maybe the other guy who could compete
with him for this sort of sounding of authenticity would be somebody like Eric Burton. So, when
we think about The Beatles. And The Stones, we can think about most of the other of these
British invasion bands as either Beatles type or Stones type. And we have to be kind of liberal in
the way that we distribute, we think about that because it's never going to work this
categorization. But there's two groups. That no matter how we stretch it, no matter how we try
and do it, we can't get to work into the, fit into these two categories. And those groups are The
Kinks and The Who, and it's to those bands that we turn in the next video
The Kinks and the Who
Of The Beatles, The Stones, The Beatles-type groups and The Stones-type groups, there are
two groups that really can't be figured in easily to either The Beatles-type or The Stones-type.
And that's The Kinks and The Who, both of whom had very big success in the UK during this
period we're thinking about, '64 though '66. The Kinks actually had some success in the US too
but it's surprising how little success The Who had in the US despite the, the presence of songs
that we now think must have always been hits in this country. So I don't want to get ahead of my
story. the thing about the, about The Kinks and The Who, one of the reasons why they don't fit
into this classification is because they both depend on powerful and aggressive music. And its
the powerful and aggressive kind of thing that that makes them seem like there might be a little
bit more like the rolling stones in the sense of a blues influence and the power and the guitar
domination. And you know the, they're really so strong and aggressive kind of music but then
both groups have got clever. And thoughtful lyrics where there's an emphasis on sort of
developing a real sort of sort of songwriterly kind of approach to lyrics. And that seems to fit more
with The Beatles and John Lennon and Paul McCartney and really less with Mick Jagger and
Keith Richards, and so they blend these two kinds of things together. The songwriterly
component, either it's Ray Davies for the Kinks or Pete Townsend for the Who together with the
kind of an,sort of a powerful approach to the music and kind of blend together qualities of the
Stones and the Beatles to to, to create their own style that doesn't really fit easily into The
Beatles type or The Stones type. Now as I said before neither group really broke as strongly in
the States as The Beatles or The Stones. and The Kinks had, had more singles success. They
had a little bit of a problem supporting their success in the United States because they somehow
managed to get themselves banned [LAUGH], from the country. I think they were kind of like a
wild bunch. I think they got themselves into trouble while they were here and the, the immigration
people said that they weren't interested in giving them visas to come back, and without the ability
to come back and really promote the music in this country, they were a little bit hamstrung in
terms of their sales here. The Who, never really had much success, it wasn't really until a song
called I Can See For Miles from 1967 that got to number nine that they really had any success.
Their success in this country really starts with Tommy, and that's outside of the consideration of,
of this week's class. We'll deal with that when we talk about Psychadelia. Tommy is from 1969.
We think about Kinks tunes, I think about tracks like You Really Got Me which was a number one
hit in the U.K., number seven in this country in 1964. A very sort of strong and aggressive kind of
tune starting with a guitar lick that maybe a little bit influenced by something like Louie Louie. You
Really Got Me was covered later by Van Halen in the late 1970's. All Day And All Of The Night-
Very, very similar to You Really Got Me if you're a guitar player, you'll realize that the kind of
moves you have to make to play You Really Got Me are really only changed a little bit to play All
Day and All of the Night. And so here's an element that we see of the craftsperson kind of thing.
They, The Kinks had something that worked. With You Really Got Me. So they changed it just a
little bit and came back with almost the same thing with All Day and All of the Night. And as
frequently happens in the popular music business. The first one You Really Got Me went to
number one in the UK charts. And the second one got to number two. So they were both hit
singles. The second one also, getting to number seven in this country in 1964. Tired of Waiting
for You also uses a chord progression very similar to You Really Got Me and All day and All of
the Night although now its arpeggiated out so its changed a little bit so the similarity is not as
obvious. that one went to number one in the UK, number six in this country in 1965. And Till The
End of the Day uses a lot of the same kinds of features going to number six in the UK in 1965
and not charting in this country. Ray Davies was to go on and, and it, as John Lennon's lyrics
start to turn more philosophical, and as Dylan became an important performer in the summer of
1965, his lyrics would start to get much more philosophical reflecting on society and sort of
beginning to turn against the status quo. A well respected man for example is a good example of
him offering critique of, of conformity and everyday expectations people who are inauthentic and
weren't really being who they. Who, who they needed to be in order to be true to themselves and
and true to one another and so this kind of critical thing that you see it with the group like Ballad
of a Thin Man from Bob Dylan or Nowhere Man from John Lennon you see as well from Ray
Davies. We turn our attention now to The Who, a group that really is in many ways, a real
collection of very colorful figures. Pete Townsend, the guitarist, a great songwriter and the guy
who you know sort of writes and thinks of all the big ideas for the group, but does only some of
the singing, some of the harmony singing every now and again some lead singing. The singing is
given over to Roger Daltrey. Who many ways as, as Jimmy, or as Robert Plant would become
later into the late 1960s and the 1970s. Kind of a sexy lead singer kind of guy who, who just did
nothing but sing the tunes. Maybe in many ways it kind of very much a kind of a Mick Jagger or
Elvis Presley, kind of a figure. You've got this wild drummer by the name of Keith Moon and a
virtuosic bass player by the name of John Entwistle. And between the four of them, you'll get this
power trio with vocals, doing powerful music with increasingly sophisticated lyrics and concepts
behind it. the, the first big hit that we think of when we think of The Who, is My Generation. Went
to number two in the UK in 1965, but many people are surprised to find out that that was never a
hit in 1965 in the US. In fact, it never even made the charts. We think that it, we often think that it
did because The Who got so big in the 70s. That all of those early '60s hits got played on the
radio, all the time. And now, they've been rolled into the classic rock radio format. So, it's like
they've always been hits. But at the time, "My Generation" was not a hit. Not only was it not a hit,
but "I Can't Explain", another tune that we hear all the time, was number eight in the UK in '65. It
was never a hit in this country. "Substitute", another big song from 1965, number two in the U.K.,
nothing here. And as I said before I Can See For Miles was the first kind of breakthrough, but
already that's 1967 for The Who. As I said before the big breakthrough is going to be Tommy in
1969. The thing about The Who is that they were part of a, a movement that happened in the UK,
that never really caught on in this country called The Mods. if you've ever seen the movie
Quadrophenia. you should check it out. Sting plays in the movie, it's a, it's an it's an interesting
film. It's a kind of a movie interpretation of the of The Who, a concept album, Quadrophenia. But,
it's set in Brighton Beach, where there was a famous riot between two groups, two groups of
young people who had very different values. The Rockers, who were kind of you know, the you
know, the leather jacket greased back hair type you know, chains, big motor, big sort of, big
Harley motorcycle types and the Mods, who were very sort of well coiffed and, and, hygienic, and
you know, didn't, didn't, didn't so much drive big motorcycles as they drove like little Vespa
scooters and that kind of thing, much more sort of Pop Dandy's. In a certain kind of way, anyway
they sent, one weekend they ended at Brighton, they ended up down at Brighton Beach and got
into a fight. It was a riot that took over the whole city and it made all the papers and it was mod,
the Mods versus the Rockers. Well it turned out The Who were the band of choice for the Mod
movement. We never really had a Mod movement in this country, but the Mods used to like to
and, listen to Motown records. They danced a lot and The Who was their sort of iconic band.
They were part of this Mod thing. The Mod and Rocker situation in the UK, shows up in the
Beatles Hard Days Night by the way. There's one place in the movie where their being asked a
rapid flurry of questions and so they say things like to John Lennon how did you find America and
he says turn left at Greenland and they asked Ringo are you a Mod or are you a Rocker?
Referring of course to this Brighton Beach thing. And he says, I'm neither. I'm a mocker. Of
course, nobody in 1964 in this country had any idea what they were talking about. But it would
have been funny, and it would've it would've been something that the people in the UK would
have understood immediately if they knew anything about the popular culture that was going on
there at that time. So, The Who are the band that's associated with The Mods and it's, it's that
association sort of drives them to the top of the charts, or at least, it's part of it. The driving to the
top of the charts in the UK because there was no Mod movement here. Their music never really
made the transition to America. Well, now we have talked about the Kinks and The Who. And it's
time for us to reflect for a minute on what we've talked about during this in, this entire week of
lectures. The British invasion, as it turns out, opened up new opportunities for British artists in the
UK. And in the, and the, and this Not only in the UK but in the US, and this had the American
music business shaken up by these new arrivals. The fact, this is, this is, actually kind of a repeat
of something that we've seen already, when all of a sudden, in 1955, 1956, 1957, all of these
records from independent labels, started to cross over into the mainstream pop charts. And they
were edging out records by major labels. And the major labels were scrambling to be able to
produce their own versions of these records. there was a real sort of shock that went through the
industry, and we see how that turned out in the end. There were the payola hearings and all that
and by 1959 into 1960. These powers that be had taken it over again. Well it all starts to happen
again in this country when in early 1964, the Beatles and all of these British acts start to come
and and have a tremendous amount of success. There's a another, kind of threat that goes on
there and so, the story is often told that the British invasion totally shook up the American music
business as if everybody had to stop what they were doing and do something else. Well, that's
not really of course what happened. But it wasn't a significant shock. in some ways, some parts
in the American music business continued as they were, as I've mentioned last week. Phil
Spector had a hit with ah,the Righteous Brothers, You've Lost that Lovin' Feelin' in 1964. and,
the, the, the if you, if you track the progress of Motown Records through the 60's, Motown
Records really starts to hit its stride in '64, at almost the same time as the Beatles show up in this
country. If you track, for example, the hits of the Beatles and the hits of The Supremes during the
period between 1964 and 1966, The Supremes, really, stay stay step for step with the Beatles.
And what are the Supremes, if not a girl group? I thought the British invasion displaced the girl
groups. Well, not so much. See, they're a girl group from Detroit, not one from New York, not
from the [UNKNOWN], but still, it's a girl group kind of thing. So there is a continuity from what
was happening before, but it's true. The Beetles and the British invasion did shake up the music
business, but by the summer of 1965, the American bands would be back. It would be folk rock, it
would be Dylan, it would be The Byrds it would be a new kind of southern California kind of
sound and and focused in the music business. And it's to that American response to the British
invasion that we turn in next week's lectures.

WEEK 5

Dylan as the New American Songwriter

this week we're going to talk about the American response to the British invasion. Just to review
our story up to this point we [UNKNOWN], we've already talked about that first wave of Rock and
Roll between 1955 and 59. All those folks like Elvis and Buddy Holly, Chuck Berry, Fats Domino,
and the way in which much of the energy of that sort of dissipated by the time we get to the end
of the 1950s into 1959. You know, February 1959 being the day that Buddy Holly went down in
the plane crash and often called [UNKNOWN] the day, the day that music died. Then we talked
about that period between the end of the 1950's, the first half of the 1960s up to 1964 when The
Beatles arrived and asked the question was this was this a great period for pop music or was
this, in fact, a kind of a dark ages between Elvis and The Beatles. Then, The Beatles arrived in
February of 1964 and in, with, with the rise of the British invasion, the impression is always given
that it, it changed rock music considerably, especially changed the American market because,
you know, that period between 60 and 63 had been all about trying to find the next Elvis. And it
turned out that none of the things they did during 60 through 63 were actually the next Elvis. It
turned out the next Elvis were the Beatles. Of course, the Beatles coming from England, that's
the first time an English group, a British group, had ever really broken through in America in, in
the way the Beatles did. So, in many ways, the, the two sort of, big figures in our history so far
are Elvis and the Beatles. When this British invasion occurs, as I said it, it, it doesn't disrupt as
much as many historians or, or music journalists will often say, but it did disrupt, disrupt the
American music business a lot. And a lot of American musicians felt like these British musicians
were, were really taking part of the business away from them. And so what we want to talk about
this week is the response that American artists had during this period, roughly from the, the 63,
64 period, up through about 67, 68. Although by that time we get done this week we'll push some
parts of our discussion up to the early 1970. So lets, let's start now talking about the American
response. Start with probably the most important American figure, arguably the most important
American figure in our history for the 1960s. And that's Bob Dylan. Bob Dylan's importance here
is that he establishes a kind of a new model of what it is to be a songwriter in popular music. up
to now, out, our model has really been the Brill Building kind of songwriters. You know, the
professional songwriters who, who who wrote songs almost by order in a, in a kind of craftsmanly
kind of talk, a kind of way. And when we talk about The Beatles, we talk about how they move
from that model in 64 63, 64 to something more like an artist's model, Tomorrow Never Knows
from 19 66 Strawberry Fields and Penny Lane from early 1967. There's a real change from the
craftsman model to the artist model. Well, Dylan is right in the center of all that too, and there's a
lot of interaction really between The Beatles and Dylan. And a lot of influence going both ways.
So, let's, let's talk a little bit about Dylan. Dylan began his career in New York's Greenwich
Village in the early 60s, but as I've pointed out before, did not have his first hits as a performer
really until the summer of 1965. So really those first few Dylan albums were really only known to
people who understood what the sort of purist folk movement was. Not even the folk revival. I
mean, the folk revival was really about Peter, Paul, and Mary, it was about the Kingston Trio, the
New Chrinsty, New Christy Minstrels, groups like that. Not people like, so much like Bob Dylan
and even Joan Baez. Dylan, born in Duluth, Minnesota, raised in Hibbing. his his given name is
Robert Allen Zimmerman. By changing his name to Bob Dylan, the Dylan part coming from the
influence of, of the poet Dylan Thomas. in 1959, he enrolls in the University of Minnesota. And
his first musical interests were in rock and roll. I mean a kid growing up, 1955 to 1957, you're
going to be listening to Chuck Berry and, and later Buddy Holly and Elvis. So that's kind of what
Dylan was doing, playing some guitar piano in different groups. But with the rise, rise of the folk
revival Dylan got increasingly interested in folk and, and fash-, fashioned himself as a kind of of,
of a folk singer and very much in the, in the under the influence of Woody Guthrie. So he starts to
play the, the folk circuit around the University of Minnesota and that region. And eventually, he
moves to New York City, to Greenich Village where that's really where things are happening. as I
said his early image, his early act really based on, on, on Woody Gutherie. Woody Guthrie, by
that time was really quite ill with Huntington's Disease and was in a hospital there. Dylan, as the
story goes, would visit Woody Guthrie quite often and in many ways according to the, the, the
stories and the accounts that come from the folk communities, almost sort of pass the mantle
from Woody Guthrie to Bob Dylan. And it's sort of Dylan that became sort of the new star, or over
a certain period of time, became the new star of this, this folk movement. so, Dylan comes to
Greenwich Village, he starts to play around in different clubs. He sees what the other more
experienced guys are doing and starts to imitate that. it's interesting that people don't think about
this too much, but early in Dylan's career a lot of his stage show his, his performing had to do
with his rapport with the audience and almost a kind of a kind of a comedy thing that he would do
sometimes. A dry kind of comedy, for sure. Nothing sort of slap stick or loungy about it. But there
was an element of him you know clowning and fooling with the, with the crowd a little bit. We
tend to think about Bob Dylan as being sort of deadly earnest so much the time or maybe just a
little bit sort of sarcastic or ironic but, in this case he, he, he, he really did try to connect and, and,
the in a minute I'll talk about some of the tunes were you can sort of see this in their early stuff.
So anyway Dylan makes a great impression around New York and is signed to Columbia
Records by a fella by the name of John Hammond in the fall of 1961. And remember this is all
way before anybody really knows who Bob Dylan is going to to be. he releases this album, his
first album called Bob Dylan in March of 1962 and it sold really poorly. some, some reports are
that it maybe only sold 5,000 copies in the first year. I mean, this is Bob Dylan we're talking about
here. so, so much so that around Columbia Records since John Hammond had signed him Dylan
was sort of referred to as Hammond's Folly, right? In other words, he, he sort of made made
[UNKNOWN] a real misstep, with signing Bob Dylan. But Bob Dylan ended up signing with a
manager by the name of Albert Grossman in August of 62. And, this guy Grossman really knew
how to manage Bob Dylan's career. Not unlike Elvis signing with Colonel Tom Parker back in in
the mid 1950s and what Grossman was able to do was to helped sort of reshape Dylan, reshape
the word, the, the, the ideas around him the, the, the press on him. And there was, there was
some friction between Albert Grossman and John Hammond. And so Hammond stopped
producing Dylan. And another guy came in, Tom Wilson. I wouldn't normally mention that, that
seems like a small detail, but Tom Wilson producing Dylan is going to play a bigger role in our
story than, than, than just the Dylan early albums. that early The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan, his
second album from May of 1963 is produced by Tom Wilson. and again, Dylan is getting a
reputation inside the folk community but is not very well known. He's more what, he's more
known as as a songwriter. his tune Blowin' in the Wind becomes a big hit for Peter, Paul, and
Mary in the summer of 1963. Dylan also recorded his version of Blowin' in the Wind. But his
version of it, even though it's maybe more popular and better known to people now back in the
day that, that would have been seen as not suitable for radio play. Dylan's voice being, not
sounding very professional or very trained and the harmonica playing to go with it that, that just, it
just wouldn't really have, have cut it by professional standards. So a smoother sounding group
like Peter Paul and Mary were able to have a hit with one of his songs. that album, The Times
They Are a-Changin' comes from January of 1964. another side of Bob Dylan from August of
1964, all these albums I've mentioned were essentially not really big hit albums for Bob Dylan. It
didn't turn him into a performing star. They were more sort of catalogs of his songs. Well, the, the
idea of folk performer, we talked about this when we talked about the period between 60 and 63,
is that they, they engage more serious issues than maybe your average teen idol or girl group
does. And so Dylan was very much working in that tradition and meant that he was playing a lot
of traditional songs, traditional folk songs that, that went back to the nineteenth century and even
further back than, that dealt with social issues. Issues of, you know social equality and justice
and this kind of thing. But as he continued to develop, Dylan began to develop as a song writer
himself. Now the idea of writing your own songs developing your own sort of language, is maybe
a little bit, and became increasingly at odds, with the idea of writing songs about the collective or
being part of a kind of of a tradition in the sense of, of, of giving new meaning to traditional tunes.
So, in many ways, one of the criticisms that's brought against Dylan as he begins to sort of not
only developed as a songwriter but begin to expand past the idea of the traditional folk singer is
that he took the we in folk music and turned it into a me. And that move from the we to the me is,
is, is in doing so, he's really creating the singer songwriter model, which so many were going to
follow after him. think about the different kinds of songs that he did early in his career. Blowin' in
the Wind, for example is a kind of social and political kind of message but for the sort of comic
kind of stuff, this talking blues thing he would do or he would kind of josh and, and, and, and
make jokes and stuff like that. a great example of that is a track called MotoPsycho Nitemare
from one of the early albums. And then there were romantic sort of almost kind of love songs like
a Girl from the North Country. If you really want to hear a tune that really I think sets the, sets the
standard of what the singers songwriters thing is going to be, it would be, Don't Think Twice, It's
All Right is, is a great tune sort of shows the crafted Dylan's songwriting and really starts to
become what we're going to start to expect from singer-songwriters. And that's a long wave from
Don't Think, there's a big difference between Don't Think Twice It's All Right and Blowin' in the
Wind in terms of the focus. Don't Think Twice It's All, Its All Right is all about Dylan talking about
a relationship that's gone bad w-, w-, with his, with his girlfriend. And Blowin' in the Wind is all
about social change and justice and this kind of thing. And it's this trajectory away from the folk
toward the singer-songwriter, which is going to be Dylan's important contribution. In the next
video, we'll talk a little bit more in depth about how folk rock was born and how Dylan's change
during this period, leading up to the summer of 1965 and, and his, his, his change towards being
more of a singer-songwriter and his turn to electric instruments really became an important part
of the American response to the British invasion.

Dylan Goes Electric

We continue our story of Bob Dylan. In the first video we emphasized that Dylan's emergence as
a traditional folk singer, and the transformation that started to happen during those early years
leading up to 1965 with Dylan away from a traditional folk singer and more toward a singer
songwriter. Now we talk about the big moment at least in the American response. One of the
most important one's, in American popular music in the 1960's, and that's the moment when
Dylan goes electric. why should Dyl Bob Dylan picking up an electric guitar be such a
controversial thing? After all, don't all rock and rollers play electric guitar? Well in the folk
movement, the electric guitar, when it was associated with traditional electric blues, chest style
blues, that kind of thing, no problem for the electric blues, the electric guitar, that's fantastic. But
when it was associated with songs and, and you know, somebody who's music was primarily like
a folk singer, primarily about the lyrics, when you brought an electric guitar in, it, it, it made it
seem much more commercial. I mean that was about AM radio, that was about teeny bopper
music. And so for Dylan to embrace the electric guitar as part of his folk act was, was really seen
as a kind of a sell out to the, to the folk traditionalists for whom he'd become the hero really, it
was like a kind of a slap in the face. And what's interesting is that when you look at Dylan's
history, the, the first, the first real use of the of the electric guitar in a, in an important way that
seems to shock everybody is his album Bringin' It All Back Home, which was released in March
of 1965. But if you look at some of the earlier records not only were there electric guitar on, on a
couple of those things, but there were unused tracks that he tried out almost in a kind of a
rockabilly style that used electric guitar. So, it's not like it was a big change as far as he was
concerned. And remember, before he turned to folk, he was interested in rock and roll anyway.
But anyway, it still made a tremendously big impact that Dylan went on this went, went electric,
and didn't go completely electric. Anyway, I mean, half the album Bringin' It All Back Home was
accoustic, the other half was electric. featured on that album is a track called Subterranean
Homesick Blues which, which was released as a single and went to number 39 in the summer of
1965. So in many ways that that blending of electric guitar and folk music or folk rock, American
folk rock is we call it, this, this track, Subterranean Homesick Blues is one of the first ones to
chart in the style making Dylan a real kind of a ground breaker. But the real trouble erupts when
Dylan shows up at the Newport Folk Festival, a kind of big festival of the year for all the
traditional folk musicians, and shows up and, shows up with a band. And he, he was booed. I
mean, there were people who were screaming at him. of the you know, they, they thought that he
had sold out. There are all kinds of stories about Pete Seeger being there, most of them probably
not incredibly accurate. One of them has Pete Seeger running around with his, you know, his
hands on his ears. Another one of them, another story has him sitting in a car backstage with the
windows rolled up so he couldn't hear it. Even one other sort of more dramatic story has him
running around trying to pull the power out of the amplifier, you know, the, the, the plugs out of
the wall or whatever [LAUGH] . What, whatever story you believe, or however it actually went,
there is one general theme that we take away from it, and that is Pete Seeger was not pleased
with what Dylan was doing. And some people were, say well they weren't yelling because they
didn't like the electric guitar they just thought it was too loud or they couldn't hear or whatever.
Well, I don't know. The way it goes down in the annals of history is that Dylan was rejected at the
Newport Folk Festival primarily because he was playing the electric guitar, and this rejection
caused him caused him to become increasingly angry with the traditional folk establishment, and
he basically sort of broke his connections with them. the big song that summer for him, a number
two hit released in, at about the same time as the Newport Folk Festival, was Like a Rolling
Stone. again that being a big hit for him, and again, the, the second one for him on the charts in
this new style. when he, in his anger Bob Dylan writes a song that is released in September of
1965 called Positively Fourth Street, which is just verse after verse after verse of him pointing his
finger at the folk establishment for being false friends, saying that they had, that, that, that he
thought they cared about him, but all they cared about was themselves. And in many ways, this
was Dylan's official break. Well, what, what's so interesting or special about this particular electric
Dylan music? Well, the use of the electric guitar, drums, bass, this sort of a jingly, jangly kind of
sound that, that went with what was essentially be, sort of folk music or at least singer songwriter
kind of music, that's the basic recipe. very American sounding, certainly under the influence by
the Beatles, but, but not really sort of doing quite exactly what The Beatles were doing. An
interesting feature on these records is the music, is the organ playing of Al Kooper. Al Kooper is
a very fascinating figure as, as the history of rock unfolds as a songwriter and as a producer,
doing a lot of different kinds of things, mostly behind the scenes. by the way, Al Kooper, spelled
with a K, not the same as Alice Cooper who we'll talk about in the 70s when we talk about
theatrical rock and this kind of thing. Anyway, Al Kooper went to those Dylan sessions, for
Bringing it All Back Home, hoping that he would play guitar but there was another guitar player
who was, who was at some of the sessions, Michael Bloomfield, who was sort of the iconic
electric blues guitarist in the New York area. So Al Kooper didn't really want to pick up a guitar
while Michael Bloomfield was present, so he went over to the organ, which he didn't really play,
but he could sort of you know, play chords and this kind of thing and started to play. Well, they're
listening to the playback of Like a Rolling Stone, and Dylan says, it, they're in playback, turn the
organ up. And Tom Wilson who was producing the session said, no, hey, you know, you don't
want to hear the, the organ. That guy, he can't really play. Now Dy, Dylan said, no, no, I want to
hear the organ. And it was Kooper's particularly almost amateurish take on playing the
Hammond Organ, which really created one of the most important parts of the Dylan sound from
that period. So if you listen to Like A Rolling Stone and Positively Fourth Street, really listen for Al
Kooper's organ together with, with Dylan's vocal delivery and you really get a sense of what
constituted that. Kooper likes to tell the story of him and Dylan going on tour. Whenever they
would go on tour, they would, they would go to record stores and pick up records, bring them
back to the hotel and listen to their records, and they would hear record after record where
people were imitating Al Cooper's organ style because Dylan's music became so so popular, so
that these people are imitating Al Cooper's organ style and Dylan and Al Kooper just thought that
was the funniest thing in the world that people should imitate Al Kooper's play. Anyway that's the
way Al Kooper tells the story. so Dylan, Dylan continues through 65 into 66 to have this
tremendous popularity, but now the important thing is not only does he go electric, but now Dylan
is important as a performer. Up to this period in mid 1965, he was really just a songwriter. Not
just a song writer, but he wasn't really thought of as a performer, right. In 1965 he really becomes
the Bob Dylan we know. Bob Dylan, the persona who is really a, a star in his own right, not only
as a songwriter but as a performer. The albums that followed from that Highway 61 Revisited
from August of 65, Blonde on Blonde from the summer of 1966, but then Dylan has a motor a,
motorcycle accident in upstate New York out by Woodstock. And it's really quite unclear what the
extent of his injuries were or what happened but whatever went on with Dylan, that accident and
his recovery from the accident created a kind of withdrawal from the music business. And, and
he's later talked about it as, as being on purpose. Maybe the world was spinning a little too fast
for him. things were things were sort of clouding his mind because of fame and fortune, and all
that came with it. So he in, in a sense withdrew for a while, and so it actually makes for a very a
nice sort of story for us to think about Dylan in this period between 64 and 66 because by the
time Dylan reemerges in, into the late 1960s, things have changed quite a bit and we're no
longer thinking about American response. So, if we think about Dylan as one of the central
figures in our story of the American response in the 1960s, we now need to think about who were
some of the others that were important, and to a certain extent, what, what role did Dylan's
influence play on those, to, on those people? And, it's, that's what we're going to turn to in the
next video
Folk Rock and the Byrds
Bob Dylan was an important figure in the American response during the mid-1960s, but he
certainly wasn't the only one that was, that was making a difference in sort of fending off, if you
will, the, the British acts who were, who were so dominating the charts during this period.
often together with the story that we've heard about Bob Dylan the summer of 65 the Newport
Folk Festival Like a Rolling Stone and all that went that, with that. We have to talk about the
music of The Byrds, because it's sort of intimate, well in many ways it's intimately related with
what was going on with Dylan. The Byrds started by Roger McGuinn, a guitarist, along with
David Crosby, Gene Clark, Chris Hillman, and Michael Clarke. That group McGuinn and Crosby
emerged out of the Greenwich Village folk scene as, as many of the other musicians did. But at
this point in time, there's kind of a, the beginnings of a real migration toward the west coast in the
music business. In fact, between the beginning of the 60s and the end of the 60s, you can really
see the music business in this country really, in large part, migrate from New York to Los
Angeles. There is a lot of natural attractions to Los Angeles. One of them is the television and the
movie business were out there. And so, there was a lot of sophisticated people out there who
involve the production, there were good recording studios, this kind of thing. and so McGuinn
makes his way out to LA, starts doing his folk routine, his, has folk act, doing traditional folk
songs, and also playing songs, Beatles songs [LAUGH] in his, in his folk act which I guess was a
little bit a little bit strange for the day. but you could already see the beginning of, of McGuinn
wanting to go in the direction of what the Beatles did. their first, the, the first collections of, the
first version of The Birds was called The Beefeaters. And they used to have a song that they did
called Mr Tambourine Man, which was a Dylan song. But it's a Dylan song that Dylan hadn't yet
recorded. he'd done a recording of it. And as the story goes, Rambling Jack Elliott had been on
the, the, the recording they'd done. Something about the playing on it was out of tune and they
decided not to use it. But the guy that was producing The Byrds at the time, Terry Melcher got a
hold of this recording. And The Byrds heard it, and so they started working up this version of
Dylan's Mr Tambourine Man. Initially doing it with an acoustic twelve string, very much like you
know, a kind of folk revival group from the first half of the 1960s. New Christie Mitchells or
something like that. but then A Hard Day's Night came out in the summer of 1965. And so the
guys from The Birds went to see A Hard Day's Night. First, like everybody else, they were totally
enraptured by the Beatles and Beatlemania and all was going, this is fantastic. This is just what
we want to do. We want to be just like these guys. But they noticed that in that guitar, in that
Movie, George Harrison is playing a Rickenbacker twelve string guitar. Now McGuinn had been
playing a twelve string acoustic guitar, but this Rickenbacker electric twelve string had six pegs. If
you looked at it straight on, had six pegs just like the normal guitar, but if you turned it sideways,
you would see that there were six more pegs for the extra six strings that added up to twelve.
And there's George Harrison playing that Roger McGuinn thought that's fantastic, that's what I'm
going to do, I'm going to get a guitar just like that. Well, it turned out that Rickenbacker guitars
were made right there in Southern California. He was able to go a music store, and, as the story
goes, trade in like, I don't know, an acoustic twelve-string and a banjo or something like that for a
brand-new Rickenbacker guitar. They decided to do their version of Mr. Tambourine Man with
that Rickenbacker electric 12 string guitar. And that jingly jangly sound of folk rock, which has
been you know, emblematic ever since in, in, the pop music business. You think about groups
like REM, Tom Petty, all that sort of jingle jangle. It all comes from that moment in 1965 when
Roger McGuinn picks up to the Hard Days Night guitar, and you know, puts it on a Bob Dylan
song. Right. And plays a little introduction that he says is, is influenced by Jesu Joy Of Man's
Desiring by J.S Bach. Puts all these things together and creates this hit single Mr. Tambourine
Man which goes to number one. Released in April of 1965, so just at the same time as Like a
Rolling, Like a Rolling Stone is on the charts. We've also got Mr Tambourine Man two Bob Dylan
songs interestingly one song written by Bob Dylan but not performed by him and one song
written by Bob Dylan and performed by him. Sort of the two sides of what Dylan's career had
been up to that point.
an interesting element of that song Mr Tambourine Man, is not only that it combines a Beatles'
guitar a Dylan song and this Bach influenced introduction. But also that it uses the same studio
band as had worked with Phil Spector in, in his records. And in fact, it was some of the same
guys who'd been on a Beach Boys session called, for a song called Don't Worry Baby. And when
they were putting together Mr. Tambourine Man, these studio musicians, remembered this and,
Terry Melcher said, can you do the beat, can you do the feel from The Beach Boys. So they took
the Beach Boys feel from Don't Worry Baby and put it together with that McGuinn already had on
the tune and that's what became Mr Tambourine Man. You notice I'm talking about a studio
band. The only person actually playing on Mr. Tambourine Man is Roger McGuinn from The
Byrds, the rest are all studio musicians. The other Byrds members are singing, but in a couple
years, when we talk about the music of The Monkeys, well then, well, when Monkey's music
comes along in a couple of years.
we'll talk about how people that were so inauthentic that the Monkeys weren't even playing on
their own records. But it turns out when it comes to Mr Tambourine Man, an iconic folk rock hit of
unquestioned authenticity, it turns out that the, most of the musicians on the recording were
studio musicians. Nevertheless, after that the, the Byrds played on their own records and had
subsequent hits with All I Really Want to Do. There's a fun story which has to do with Cher that
I'll, that I'll tell you about in just a minute. Turn, Turn, Turn a Pete Seger song which again went
to number one in the fall of 65. And Eight Miles High which is a song that mm, McGuinn said is
about a cross-country airline flight which would be seven miles high, but eight miles, that, that
didn't scan so well as a lyric, so it became eight miles high. But of course, Eight Miles High,
everyone thought they were drug lyrics. And so, in fact, the song only got as high as number 14
in the Spring of 1966 and got pushed off the charts because a word went round to radio stations
that it was a drug song. It's also very much influenced by the music of John Coltrane, that, there's
a guitar lick on the 12 string at the very beginning, which is a quote directly from a John Coltrane
track, India. I think it is, so that's the story with the Byrds is, taking this fold thing as [UNKNOWN]
was doing, and really sort of turning into that jingly-jangly sound. Speaking of the jingle-jangle
that I mentioned before, in the previous video that we would that, that, the guy, the producer Tom
Wilson would become an important member, an important part of this discussion. let's talk a little
bit about Simon Garfunkel Simon and Garfunkel and how, how all of that how all works out for
them. Another important group here coming out of New York City and actually staying in New
York City. Well, it turns out that, that Simon and Garfunkel had actually been a kind of
[UNKNOWN] brothers kind of group back in the 50s called Tom and Jerry. They had a mild hit
with the song called Hey Schoolgirl. they even appeared on the American band stand, right, as a
kind of teenage version of of the [UNKNOWN]. But then the, they you know, they finish school
and, and did other kinds of things and they came back as part of folk revival as Simon and
Garfunkel doing totally acoustic music released an album in 1964 called Wednesday Morning, 3
am. It kind of flopped it has a song on it called the sounds of silence, but it's not the version that
you are used to hearing. Anyway, the album flops. Paul Simon goes off to England, to, to sing. I
think Art Garfunkel goes to graduate school, whatever. And so they're really not doing Simon and
Garfunkel at the time. But when Mr Tambourine Man hits, and when the Dylan tune hits in the
summer of 65. Tom Wilson, the producer remembers this, this album, this Wednesday Morning,
3 am, which was on the same label as, as, Dylan, Columbia. And he so, without the knowledge
of Paul Simon or Art Garfunkel, he brings studio musicians into the studio. They take The
Sounds of Silence and they add to it electric guitar, bass, and drums. Now how do you add
something to a song that's already recorded? Well you can tell if you listen to the recording that
the first couple of measures to it are the acoustic guitar all by itself. That's how the musicians are
able to pick up where the tempo is. And then after a couple of measures, the electric guitar
comes in, the bass comes in, the drums come in. And so without their knowledge this song was
re-released in this country and actually became a big hit a number one hit in 1965. Imagine being
Paul Simon, and getting that phone call. Well, listen, Paul, it's your record company calling.
Guess what? You've got a hit in America. What do you mean I've got a hit in America. Well, in,
so that's the whole story. And so, what Tom Wilson essentially did was took what was an
acoustic folk song, added the electric guitar as base and drums to it, and really, that's the
definition of what folk rock is. Well, Simon and Garfunkel went on to record an album The
Sounds of Silence and, and that's, that's the one your probably familiar with and that version.
other songs like Homeward Bound from 1966, and I Am a Rock really kind of made them one of
the most important acts of that of that era. also coming out of LA we've got The Mamas & The
Papas. Now they also form in New York, but again, like what we saw with the Byrds, moved to
LA. And they're, they're a little bit late comers to this, this folk rock thing. The group led by John
Philips, but having two men in the group, two males and two females, so those are the the Papas
and the Mamas there, including Cass Mama Cass Elliot. who was, sort of, the, in many ways,
sort of the star of the group. Well, although all of the, a lot of the song writing and harmonies,
vocal harmonies and arrangements were done by John Phillips, one of the guys in the group.
their big hit, first big hit, California Dreamin, went to number four in 1966. And their big number
one hit, from '6, from '66, was a track called Monday, Monday. And another thing that began to
happen among these, these folk-rock groups is because The Byrds had had so much success,
covering Dylan's songs. Other groups either covered Dylan's songs, or try to imitate in their
songwriting what a Dylan song sounded like. So there was a fellow by the name of Barry
McGuire who had a number one hit in the fall of 1965. So this was kind of just, just in months
after the emergence of, of folk rock and Mr Tamborine Man. This track is called Eve of
Destruction, and the guy who write the song, P.F Sloan was essentially given the assignment, I
think it was by Lou Adler, the record company to basically write a song that sounded like a Dylan
song that wasn't a Dylan song so he wrote Eve of Destruction. Barry McGuire had a number one
hit with that one. The Turtles, another group from LA covered the Dylan song, It Ain't Me Babe,
and had a number eight hit with that in 1965. The hurd, the Turtles made up of dual singers Mark
Volman and Howard Kaylan would later be known as Flore, Phlorescent Leech and Eddy or Flo
and Eddy when they appeared on Frank Zappa albums and had their own solo career in the 70s.
But early on, they were the Turtles. It Ain't Me Babe is a fantastic tune. But Happy Together, their
number oe hit from slightly later, 1967, is one of the classic American, pop hits, from the 1960s.
So this, this, in many ways, wraps up our discussion of folk rock. But there were other elements
of the american response that we can talk about on the 1960s and in the next video we'll turn to
the legacy of Phil Spector.
The Phil Spector Legacy
We now turn to a discussion of the Phil Spector legacy. Remember Phil Spector is the producer
from the first half of the 1960s producing big hits for girl groups and, and later for the Righteous
Brothers. But really seen as one of the iconic figures and representative figures of that early
period. So he would think given the way story goes that when the Beatles come along in
February of 1964, Phil Spectors is one of the casualties of, of, of the, of Beatle mania and the
British invasion. He's one, his, his group would be some of the groups that we pushed off the
charts. And that's the way, that's the, an idea you get from the way the story is usually told. but in
fact, Phil Spector continues to have success with his groups at the same time as the Beatles are
having success with their groups. And he continued to have hits into 1965 with The Righteous
Brothers "You've Lost That Lovin' Feeling" and The Righteous Brothers doing "Ebb Tide", which
was a number five hit still in 1966. So the idea that the British invasion totally shut American artist
down or off the charts is a little bit exaggerated it made a big difference but it, it, it, it, it's easy to
sort of exaggerated that difference a little bit. Phil Spector has a bit of a legacy in, in this country
that as people who came after him. Who were very much influenced by what he did in the early
60s and sort of pushed the ball a little further down the field in the, in the 60s with the American
music. Interestingly one of the, for me at least, one of the most significant of these people is
Sonny Bono. Sonny Bono half of the the, the duo, Sonny and Cher had been Phil Spector's
promotion guy on the west coast, and, and his aid. He was around at Goldstar Studios when Phil
was, was recording a lot of those girl group tracks he ended up singing. background or playing
tambourine or, or whatever on some of those tracks. And his girlfriend Cher, actually sang back
up on a lot of those girl group tracks and so, Sonny starts to get the idea well he wants to do
what Phil's doing. He wants to produce and act, he wants to write his own songs, you know, he
wants to, to pretty much do what Phil's doing. He's, he's been his apprentice, his assistant all this
time. So the, one of the first attempts is that, is a song that ref, that responds to the British
invasion. It was sung by Cher, but her name was given as Bonnie Jo Mason in 1964, and the
name of the song was Ringo I Love You. Well, that one didn't do so good, but when the when the
American response started to happen in 1965
Sonny immediately got on the bandwagon of that. And had Cher do her own version of All I
Really Want to Do. It was on the charts at the same time as the Byrds version of that tune. The
Byrds, The Byrds it was their followup to Mr Tambourine Man but 'All I Really want to Do' got
pushed off the charts the Byrds version of all I want to do got pushed off the charts by the Cher
version. And there's a story I don't know whether it's true or not of Bob Dylan saying to Roger
MceWen how could you let this happen. You let the Cher version knock the, the Byrds version
off. Of course for Dylan it was all the same because of course as a songwriter he gets paid either
way. So Sunny, he thinks, well you know, I, I can write one of these Dylan songs and this, what
are, what's the essential elements of these Dylan songs? So he starts to kind of to write, and the
way he liked to tell the story was you know, Dylan is always saying this babe, babe, babe thing,
you know "It Ain't Me Babe". So, he came up with this tune that went, "I Got You Babe". [LAUGH]
Right? And for him, him, it was his version sort of like P.F. Sloan had done with the Barry
McGuire hit, "Eve of Destruction". Of writing what he thought sounded like a Dylan song. "I Got
You Babe" went to number one in 1965, and made, Sunny & Cher, real pop stars. They, they,
they came back with a couple of different hits maybe their biggest hit after that was a tune from
1967, called The Beat Goes On. Sonny & Cher early on, I mean, lot-, lot of folks who grew up
with this, with this music cer, certainly grew up in the 70's.
remember Sonny and Cher as being sort of mainstream pop, sort of host of a variety show that
that, that, that played in the 1970s. But actually in the, in the mid 1960s, they were, they were
sort of pioneers in outrageous Hippie fashion. Already in 1965 and 1966 they were wearing just
crazy clothes. Check it out on the Internet. See if you can find some images of this. way before
the hippies really sort of hit with all this stuff in main stream American culture, anyway, in 1967
you could have gone to Carnabie Street in London and seen some sort of outrageous sort of
things but not like Sonny and Cher. So bad that there were hotels that wouldn't let them stay
there because of the kinds of things they were wearing. This kind of thing. So in many ways
Sonny & Cher, even though they became very mainstream, were edgier, in the moment. And
Sonny Bono, very much, at the, at the center of making all that happen. Well we wouldn't, if we
were talkin' about L.A. in the 60's, it would be, certainly, be, a grand omission if we didn't talk
about The Beach Boys and the development of their music. Especially in the, in the, the along
the idea of the legacy of Phil Spector that Ronette's tune 'Be My Baby'. Remember that by the
time 'Be My Baby' came out in 1964 the Beach Boys already a hit or two but Brian Wilson wasn't
doing the wasn't doing the producing at first. There was somebody else a guy who'd been
assigned by Capital Records their label who was producing and [UNKNOWN] was thinking well, I
can do this, I can produce this. He really wanted to be like Sonny Bono did, wanted to be just like
Phil Spector in the sense that he would have his group, he would write the songs, he would
produce them up just like Phil had done with his famous Wall of Sound kind of thing. He heard
"Be My Baby" and the way Brian tells the story he was so impressed by "Be My Baby" the first
time he heard he was driving the car, he had to stop the car. He was so afraid he was going to
have an accident. He had to pull it over to the curb, and just listen to the tune. And he thought,
this is it. This is exactly, the kind of, he actually wrote a song that he, that he hoped that the
Ronettes would record. But Phil Spector, did not record it and The Beach Boys ended up
recording it. But very much influenced by Phil Spector and this idea of using the recording studio
to create the biggest and most interesting kind of sound. And so what happens with the Beach
Boys is Brian Wilson who was always a emotional, fragile and maybe a little bit emotionally
unstable has an episode where he doesn't feel like, an episode where he cant get on a plane or
a freak out on a plane. Any way the guys decide maybe has maybe the best thing to do is to get
somebody to replace Brian on the road to do the tours. Brian can stay home, write the songs,
work up the arrangements, that kind of thing. We'll come back from the road, we record up
Brian's songs and then we go out and tour them again with somebody else on base. In fact, the
first base that replaced Brian Wilson was Glenn Campbell who was at that time, a session
musician doing sessions in LA who went on to be a big star in his own right. But anyway, Glenn
didn't last for very long. Bruce Johnston eventually replaced Brian on the road. A fantastic voice
too, so he sang on a lot of the stuff. So, Brian stays home, and he's working in the studio.
Working with Phil Specters. Musicians, the, the, the top flight musicians in L.A who were called
the wrecking crew. He's got them, he's working on these arrangements and Beach Boys
arrangements get increasingly ambitious. Again, under the sight that's kind of what Phil Specter
was doing in the studio too. So, if you think about tracks like, California Girls, which is kind of a
familiar surf kind of tune but now with new kinds of sophistication in terms of the instrumentation
and the big introduction that occurs and the various kinds of things that happen, you can see that
surf music is really starting to get ambitious
Well, the real point of of arrival for the, for the Beach Boys and for Brian Wilson, in many ways
isthe track Pet, is, is the album Pet Sounds from 1966. Some of the tracks you may know from
that album are, 'Sloop John B', 'Wouldn't It Be Nice' and 'God Only Knows'. In Pet Sounds, Brian
Wilson really creates something like a kind of a concept album but it wasn't thought of as a
concept album at the time. The way he thought of it was, he saw The Beatles' Rubber Soul and
he said, you know, there's an album where the Beatles have really put all the songs together
where the sum is, the sum of the parts is, is greater than any of the individual. pieces, and so he
wanted to do that with Pet Sounds, and so he did but the album is full of all kinds of studio,
experimentation. really in many ways, the guys were a bit frustrated with the other guys. The
Beach Boys were a bit frustrated with Brian, 'cuz he would have things on the recordings that
they couldn't do live. And they thought well this sounds fantastic in the studio but Brian how are
we going to perform this stuff. I mean, we've got to play this stuff for people, you know. What
followed right after Pet Sounds was Good Vibrations and in many ways they thought that was
just impossible. What followed Good Vibrations was supposed to be called Smile. But we'll talk
about that when we talk about the competition between the Beatles and the, and the Beach Boy
during the early psychedelic period getting into the late 66 and 1967. We'll wait for week seven
on that, but I think probably now, it's important to point out that the, the Beach Boys were not
only competing with the Beatles on the charts. But they were competing with the Beatles on their
own label. The Beatles in this country were on Capitol Records and the Beach Boys were on
Capitol Records. And the Beach Boys had been on Capitol Records before the be, before the
Beatles came along. during that period when Capitol wouldn't release any Beatles mu, music
and so along comes The Beatles and they haven't just The Beach Boys have not just gotta fight
for the attention of the fans, but they've gotta fight for the attention of their own record company.
Interesting like the Kingston Trio was also on Capitol at the same time so a real cluster of im, of
important figures are coming together. some of the other L.A acts that's is probably worth
mentioning and thinking about Gary Lewis & the Playboys. this group fronted by a, a young guy
Gary Lewis who was the son of popular comedian Jerry Lewis. in many ways this is a, a, a replay
of the story that we told about Ricky Nelson in the sense that remember when we talked about
Ricky Nelson, we said that his dad was Ozzy Nelson. Of course Ozzy Nelson was very hooked
up inside the business and was able to help. Make it so that Ricky Nelson could have a singing
career. Same thing with, with Gary Lewis. His, his dad Jerry Lewis in the 60's was, you know,
one of those kind of guys in Hollywood who was very hot, and, and, very much sort of wired
inside that business and all that kind of thing, so he was able to help his son quite a bit. The tune
this diamond ring was a number one hit for Gary Lewis, The Playboys in 1965, 'She's Just My
Style' a number, a number three hit for them in 1965. Another guy coming out of L.A Johnny
Rivers had a couple of hits. Interestingly his, his first big album was a live album. We'll see this, it
turns out, at the end of the 70s, where a couple of big acts really sort of break through break big
on the scene because of live albums, and the most important being Frampton Comes Alive,
right? And Peter Frampton had a number of albums out before Frammpton Comes Alive. But
here, Johnny Rivers has got an album, an album Live At The Whisky, and his first couple of hits
are, are hits, are covers of Chuck Barry tune. So, Memphis from 1964 and Maybelline from 1964.
But probably, Johnny Rivers, it will always be remembered for his version of the song, 'Secret
Agent Man', which got to number three in 1966 and is has become one of those evergreen kind
of songs that plays on oldies stations and classic rock stations now all the time. So, that
concludes our, our consideration of, of Los Angeles and the, and the Phil Spector Legacy. Let's
see what was happening back East on the East Coast during these same years

Meanwhile, Back East

A lot of what we talked about with regard to the American response, we've talked primarily about
things that were happening in LA. We talked about folk rock, and we talked about a lot of artists
that had started in the New York Greenwich Village scene, but sort of migrated to LA. It's easy to
get the impression that almost everything that was important that was happening as part of the
American response was happening in Los Angeles. And while there were certainly a lot of
significant stuff coming out of L.A., it wasn't the only thing going on during those days and it
wasn't the only part of the American response. We said before that a lot of artists continue to
have success both before and after the arrival of The Beatles in February of 1964. And some of
you may have wondered why I haven't already mentioned Frankie Valli and the Four Seasons.
Well talking about Frankie Valli and the Four Seasons brings us back now to the East Coast, to
the New York-New Jersey area to New York as an entertainment center. And some of the music
that was coming out of that part of the country, and so that's what we'll talk about in this video.
Well, let's talk about Frankie Valli and the Four Seasons. Of course, made popular in the most
recent years by the musical, Jersey Boys, right? Frankie Valli and the Four Seasons had big hits
in 1962. Number one hits with Sherry and Big Girls Don't Cry. In this period that we're talking
about, during the British invasion, they continue to have hits. Let's Hang On was the number four
hit for them in 1965, and Workin' My Way Back To You was a number nine hit in 1966. So during
this entire period before The Beatles, going back to '62 and then going all the way forward to '66
we can see Frankie Valli and the Four Seasons have a tremendous success.
For me anyways, it is interesting that we have what you might think of as a West Coast falsetto
and an East Coast falsetto. On the West coast, that sort of falsetto that high, male voice, where
you flip into the high part of your voice. That's a very big part of the Beach Boys' sound with Brian
Wilson being the high falsetto in a lot of those Beach Boys' surf music records and even the
ambitious surf music that we start to get in the mid-1960s. Frankie Valli, a kind of a different
sounding falsetto voice, maybe a little bit more raspy. But still when we think about the Beach
Boys and Frankie Valli and the Four Seasons, we have really groups that in a lot of ways are
essentially, are similar in a number sort of essential ways, one representing the West Coast and
the other representing the East Coast. Also with Frankie Valli and with the Four Seasons and
what was happening with them during the British invasion, remember that, when we were talking
about the Beatles [INAUDIBLE] the first couple of singles they had, they couldn't get released by
Capitol Records. Capitol Records just did not believed that Americans will be interested in a
British group. And so three of those singles was released on Vee-Jay records, an indie label out
of Chicago and Vee-Jay also had most of the material from the first Beatles British album. And so
interestingly, the Beatles were in a position where when they broke in February, they had albums
that were number one and number two on the charts but on different labels, one on Capitol and
one on Vee-Jay. Well, after things started to cool a little bit with that material Vee-Jay that
owned, they also have Frankie Valli and the Four Seasons. So there's an album, that are really
big with collectors, called, I think it's called The Beatles versus The Four Seasons, which was
released in late 1964, which featured a lot of The Beatles stuff that Vee-Jay had licensed, plus a
sort of greatest hits package of the Four Seasons. And so, even Vee-Jay was trying to take
advantage, not only the fact that they have Frankie Valli and the Four Seasons, but that they had
this Beatles music. And so you see this interaction between these two groups occurring. Also in
New York we should talk about The Lovin' Spoonful, there's a situation of from the Greenwich
Village scene, who didn't go to L.A but who rather stayed in New York City and made their
careers there. John Sebastion, the lead singer, song writer and interestingly enough one of the
few examples of rock and roll auto harp. If you check out those videos on the Internet
somewhere, you'll see him singing and playing an auto harp which was actually a kind of a harp
that had little set of chord presets on it. So if you pushed down a button you'd get a C major
chord, or an A minor chord. And these were used a lot by people in the public schools to sort of
accompany kids while they're singing folk songs. You didn't have to learn how to play the guitar,
you just sort of pushed the different buttons down for the chords and you could accompany. So,
here's John Sebastion, their big song probably their big breakout song was Do You Believe in
Magic, a number nine hit in the summer of 65, the same time as we're getting Like a Rolling
Stone and Mr. Tambourine Man. And, then in 1966, a number two hit with Daydream, in addition
to a bunch of other hits. The Lovin' Spoonful projected a kind of an upbeat image. You hear a lot
of the sort of jug band influences, jug band kind of a folk, sort of an amateurish folk style, is sort
of a populous kind of style. You see it, hear a lot of that sort of good time music happening in The
Lovin' Spoonful. Another group from the New York area was The Rascals. In a minute we'll talk
about Paul Revere and the Raiders and the way they wore revolutionary war garb as part of their
sort of stage uniform. The Rascals started out as The Young Rascals, wearing outfits that looked
an awful lot like The Little Rascals who had been part of a movie series of a series of movie
shorts and episodes that had played earlier in, I suppose it was, the 30s and the 40s. So anyway
they called themselves The Young Rascals, but I guess that kind of got tired of that issuing, they
just became The Rascals. But their influence was far less in pop and vocal oriented music than it
was with blues roots. So if you think about maybe The Birds being the answer to The Beatles,
The Rascals would kind of be the answer to the Spencer Davis Group maybe or I dont know, The
Animals. Or to a certain extent The Rolling Stones although The Rolling Stones were a little more
song oriented. In fact The Rascals opened for The Beatles at that famous Shea Stadium, A
concert in 1965, featuring Felix Cavaliere on the organ and Eddie Brigadi on vocals, those two
guys often wrote songs together. Big hit for them came in the spring of 1966, Good Lovin', which
still gets a lot of airplay, that was their cover of a R and B hit for a group called The Olympics
from 1965. And then right in the middle of the beginning of the psychedelic era, Groovin' was a
number one hit for them in 1967, lots of other music there. Finally, let's talk about a group that
started out in Indiana. This group is called The McCoys, and featured Rick Derringer on the
guitar. Now Rick Derringer would later become important for playing with the Edgar Winter Group
and then adding his own solo career in the 70s, but at this point he and the rest of the guys in his
band are young, I mean young like under 18 young. So young that when they have a hit, a
number one hit in 1965 with a tune called Hang On Sloopy, they can't tour until Spring Break
from high school because they can't cut classes to go out and tour, right. And so what we're
talking about really, really young guys. They were produced by a fellow named Bert Berns who
worked for Atlantic Records and had picked up production of The Drifters, after and Stoller left
off. He was already producing groups and his sort of Beatleish group American response group
was going to be The McCoys. And as I say, they had this big hit in 1965 with Hang On Sloopy
which was for all intents and purposes, a kind of a reworking of the song Louie, Louie. We'll talk
about Louie, Louie in the next video coming up here. Interestingly Bert Berns as I said Rick
Derringer went on after the McCoys to have his own career with Edgar Winter and as a solo
artists but Bert Berns went on to produce Niel Diamond on his first couple of singles including
Cherry Cherry. Which was a hit for him and Night was a hit for Neil Diamond in 1966, Neil
Diamond as we'll mention a little bit later, also went on to, also as a songwriter, had a big hit in
'66 with the Monkees, a song called I'm a Believer. So in the next video, let's turn to garage
bands, as I've already mentioned Louie, Louie, and let's see what was happening with young
kids influenced by The Beatles, picking up guitars and playing music in basements and garages
all across was this country in the middle of the 1960s

Garage Bands
So far our discussion to the American response to the British Invasion and the music of the
Beatles and the Rolling Stones and other British artists in the mid1960s. So far our discussion
has really focused on the way the music industry responded and the way professional musicians
responded to, to the threat, or the market incursion. of the British bands, on the charts and, and
having all kinds of popularity. But, when the Beatles first performed on February the 9th, 1964,
on the Ed Sullivan Show. There were kids all across the country who saw the Beatles and
wanted to be just like them. Now not everybody who wants to play music is going to end up
having a hit record and a career in music. But, so there's, there's always a much, much larger
number of people who play music for fun and, and for recreation, than who do it professionally. In
many ways the ,the scene that was called the Garage Band or the garage rock kind of scene that
arouse in the 60's was a direct consequence of kids all of a sudden who maybe already played
guitar. Because during the folk revival they've been humming and strumming to Kingston Trio
songs or Peter, Paul and Mary you know hanging out by the beach camp fire singing these kinds
of songs. And when the Beatles came along it turned out they could use a lot of those same
chords and if they just got an electric guitar and a drummer and a bass player why they could all
of a sudden have a band. And of course they're called garage bands because the first place they
could find to re, rehearse was probably in a garage if it wasn't in a basement somewhere. And so
you get, what, what, what garage bands, that, that the term has come to characterize is a kind of
a raw rough and ready full of, full of enthusiasm but maybe not so full of skill and musical
prowess kind of music. that has a kind of charm because of it's, of it's the cheer energy of it. So
these groups, these garage band groups spring up all around the country and some of them get
awfully good but like, like doo-wop, a lot of them are also a lot of one hit wonders. because they
got this one song that they, that they can really do really well. And so they'll have a regional hit
with that song but then it's very difficult for them to, to follow up. so the records themselves were
only maybe ever released regionally. So among record collectors it used to be finding these
various hits by these relatively unknown groups was great sport at record collector shows and
that kind of thing. Well, in 1972 a guy by the name of Lenny Kaye came along and put together a
double album called Nuggets. This double album Nuggets really focused on the garage band
sound and pulled together a lot of records that had been previously very, very difficult to, to to
find by groups that weren't so famous. I mean on Lenny Kaye your not going to find, you know,
much Birds or Paul Revere and the Raiders or that kind of thing. Your going to find things by
other groups that they're sort of a little bit more obscure. That album it turns out, this garage
band collection, Nuggets ended up being very influential on the Punk musicians. Especially in the
New York scene, who would later become The Ramones, Television, Talking Heads, those kinds
of groups. Lenny Kaye himself would end up playing for Patti Smith. So, this, this, the, the, the
resurgence of interest just a few laters, few years later in garageband music is helped
immeasurably by this Nuggets collection. In fact, when it was transferred to CD, the Nuggets
collection, they went from everything that was one the original Nuggets collection fits on the first
CD but they expanded it to be a four CD set. So now when you buy the box set Nuggets, it's just
tons and tons of stuff. It really gives you a good idea of all the variety of stuff that was happening
in this garage band scene, in this period between about sixty four, sixty six, sixty seven in that
window there. The most important garage band for us to talk about, or group associated with the
garage band sound is a group called the Kingsmen out of Portland Oregon. And in many ways,
the Pacific Northwest is often seen as a sort of hot bed of garage band activities in the, in the, in
the mid 1960's. Anyway, their hit, their big hit, their infamous hit was Louie, Louie which was a
number two hit in late 1963, early 1964. So just before the Beatles still on the charts at the same
time when the Beatles came along. The song Louie, Louie was enormously controversial. it was
controversial because it was said that there was profanity in the lyrics that somebody in there
was saying you know swear words, talking about sexual activities or something like that but
nobody could really tell In fact anybody who wanted to know what the lyrics were could have
gone to the original recording by Richard Berry who had written song and recorded it with the
The Fairs in 1957. It's kind of calypso flavored R&B which was sort of big at that time in 57. And
the lyrics are very, very clear. And once you know what the lyrics are, you can pretty much make
out that they're, what they are on the Kingsmen record. But, of course, nobody bothered to check
that. and so they, there was this idea that Louis Louis contained bad words. It contained
swearing. In fact it was, it was such a big controversy that both the FCC and the FBI were called
in. The FBI using their highest tech uh,equipment to you know, look at the sound scans or
whatever of his lyrics and see if they figure out whether that, those swear words were actually
there, and in the end They decided that they really couldn't tell. But, for the Kingsmen and Louie,
Louie, it made the song, you know, the middle of a big controversy for awhile and it was very
very good for business. Louie, Louie is if you're going to look at one song that is the sort of
controversy song, sort of prototype, Louie, Louie was that song. In fact music journalist Dave
Marsh wrote an entire book about Louie, Louie. And all of the shenanigans and, and episodes
and, and scandal sort of associated with it. It's a fascinating kind of study. But when we think
about, for example, the Rolling Stones' Can't Get No Satisfaction, and the, and the controversy
that began to swirl around that, that was only about a year after all this controversy with Louie,
Louie. You think about The Byrds' Eight Miles High and the controversy around that being a drug
song. Again, this whole controversy around songs is something that we see again and again.
Louie, Louie the prime example. As far as The Kingsmen were concerned, they went out in 1964
to have a hit with the song called Money and then in 1965 with a song called The Jolly Green
Giant. And then to and then there that was about it for them. other notable hits on that nuggets
CD the CD's now are the original album, these those hits from the original album that you might
find interesting are tuned by The Electric Pru, Prunes out of LA called, I Had Too Much to Dream
Last Night. That was a number 11 hit in 1966. Of cour, of course, the lyric, I Had Too Much to
Dream (Last Night) was a play on I had too much to drink last night, right? But during these sort
of, you know, heady days of Sort of pre-psychedelic, I had too much to dream last night. Oh,
wow, that's very groovy. The Standells from LA, had a toon called Dirty Water, an number 11 hit
in 1965. so a pretty big hit there, but sa-, sa-, sa-, song with a Boston theme. That has as, you
know, the dirty water apparently is the water in the Charles River in Boston. And now it's become
the dirty water sound has become a sort of a big, a big theme song for a lot of Boston sports
themes. So, it's usually associated with Boston. Even though The Standells themselves were
originally from Los Angeles. The best duplicate of a Beatles record not actually by the Beatles is
probably by a group from New Jersey called The Knickerbockers, and their song "Lies," which
was a number 20 hit from 1966. That song sounds so much like the Beatles that for years, I
thought it was a Beatles song, and I couldn't figure out which album it was on. and then, finally
it's probably it's worth pointing out that the song by The Seeds, from Los Angeles called You're
Pushin' Too Hard. It was a number 36 hit for them in 1967 although it had originally been
released in 1965, a song written. By the lead singer of the group who apparently wrote the entire
song while he was waiting for his girlfriend while she was shopping in the grocery store.
interestingly fans of Frank Zappa will know "You're Pushin' Too Hard" is satirized a little bit in the
Frank Zappa album Joe's Garage. So, the Garage Bands scene and the, the, a, a very
interesting kind of phenomenon. One that is embraced later as I say by punk musicians. The
music, the music was okay popular, but not nearly as big as a lot of the other stuff that we're
talking about in the '60s. But, it was idolized by musicians in the '70s who wanted to get away
from what they thought was the overproduction of music at that time and get back to something
that was a little more rootsy. A little bit more authentic, a lot less produced so the garage bands
became the heroes. Nuggets was the album was helped make that happen. in the next video,
we'll turn to television and talk about TV rock.
TV Rock
We now turn to the role of television in this American response that that we've been talking
about. This American response to the British invasion and the role played by TV in helping to
mount the American response to this this, the great success of the British artists starting with The
Beatles in 1964. Now, when you think about the role of television in popular music. Probably the,
the place that we always go back to as our touchstone, our sort of original place is American
Bandstand. And we talked about American Bandstand. And way back when we were talking
about the period between 1955 and '59. And especially that period between '59 and '63. A show
coming out of Philadelphia hosted by Dick Clark and a show that a lot of kids watched after
school every day. Mostly focused on dancing, was an important vehicle for a lot of the pop
groups of the early 60s, the teen idols, the girl groups, people like that. The, the, the sweet soul,
groups, The Drifters, Ben E. King, people like that. Well in, as the 60's continued these kinds of
variety shows devoted to youth music, started to spring up all over the place. The first one of the
sort of a success or two. Although American Band stand remained on the air until '80, so when I
talk about these other as being successors I don't mean that American Bandstand went away. It
continued to be very, very important. but one of the, one of the shows that came along after
American Bandstand was already going was a song from the was a show from the fall of 1964
called Shindig! on ABC. It was hosted by a fellow named Jimmy O'Neill. And it would have a lot
of the current acts would appear on Shindig! What's interesting for our story at least is that the
show that it replaced on ABC When Shindig! came in and was like sort of you know British
invasion, American pop kind of stuff, what it replaced was a song called Hootenanny, which had
been devoted entirely to music of the folk revival. So, you know, there you can see the folk
revival being displaced by what was happening with the British invasion in American pop in the
mid-1960s. Well once ABC started having some success with Shindig. That was followed in
January of 1965 on NBC by a show called Hullabaloo, essentially the same kind of show, right,
with a variety show geared at a kind of teen pop audience. The one that's most important to our
show, our, our story, however, was one that was developed by Dick Clark of American
Bandstand for CBS. It appeared in the summer of 1965 at about the same time as Mr.
Tambourine Man, Like A Rolling Stone, and that was one called Where the Action Is. And the
reason why Where the Action Is is important to us is because the house band for Where the
Action Is was a group called Paul Revere and the Raiders. These other shows, Shindig! and
Hullabaloo, had lots of musicians on them and they had regular sort of variety show kinds of
hosts, but they didn't have a kind of house band. With Where the Action Is you got to see Paul
Revere and the Raiders on that show an awful lot. Paul Revere and the Raiders were a group
that originated, well they're usually associated with the scene around the Pacific Northwest. In
fact they had recorded a version of Louie, Louie not too long after the Kingsmen's album the
Kingsmen's song that got picked up for national distribution when it became a regional hit and so.
Paul Revere and the Raiders kind of lost out, the group kind of broke up, the, the, different guys,
Paul Revere, who was the organ player not the singer, drifted back to LA, got the group back
together, the original lead singer Mark Lindsay came back. And so the group was back together
in time to get this gig as the house band on Where The Action Is. But because the British had,
the British had hit our shores, the, all these groups, the Beatles and the rest of them. they
decided that what they would do, their gimmick would be they would wear American
Revolutionary War outfits. Complete with the three corner hats. And the little buckled shoes. And
the stockings and the whole routine. And the the, the jackets and all that kind of thing. When you
saw them they were always wearing this Revolutionary War, or course the guy's name. Was Paul
Revere, right? One if by land, two if by sea. And, and so, you get this whole kind of American
response to the British Invasion, sort of Hollywood, style. Anyway, these guys, were also
produced by Terry Melcher, who had produced the Byrds and recorded in LA there. They, that's
where the show was, the show was, filmed. big hits for them. Just like Me, from '66. Kicks. From
'66 and Hungry from '66. In many ways they took the garage band sound of a garage band
approach and brought it mostly, more into the mainstream than anybody else aside from the
Kingsmen's hits. In fact, in many ways, Paul Revere and the Raiders taking their garage band
sound and cleaning it up, and it sounding, it ended up sounding an awful lot like the Rolling
Stones.
But perhaps the biggest of these, when we start to talk about the influence of TV, perhaps, the
biggest, figure for us to think about is this group The Monkees. Now, it's very popular, well, The
Monkees are maybe kind of, people like The Monkees because they think it's in kind of an ironic
way. You know? Not that they think The Monkees are great like The Beatles are great. The just
think the whole Monkees thing is kind of cool and off and weird and this kind of thing, kitschy
maybe a little bit. But The Monkees are an interesting group because they are essentially
constructed in the same way that like a teen idol would've been constructed in the early '60s.
That is, people who are song writers and producers and people like that are basically trying to
find four guys who fit the suit. They already kind of have an idea how they want the, the group to
go. They've got professional songwriters to write the music but the difference is that the Monkees
were never put together to be a musical act. The Monkees were put together as a TV cast for a
weekly television show that would essentially be a television show version of the Beatles, A Hard
Day's Night. And so, they got guys who not only had some musical background, but who also
had a background working in comedy troupes, and acting, and that kind of thing. So, for
example, Davy Jones had appeared on Broadway. In fact, he appeared as a character doing a
song from the musical Oliver on the same night on the Ed Sullivan Show that the Beatles
appeared the first time. so he had a rich experience in, in theater. Mickey Dolenz had been a
child star in a, in a show called Circus Boy, and so he was, he had, experience as an actor. And
so these guys got together, essentially, to work out a kind of improvisational way of acting and
interacting with each other. They spent so much time on that that the musical part of it, like
actually learning to play the instruments and be a band and stuff, kind of got pushed to the back
burner. And so when the show was getting ready to come out, they had to real quick get this
music together so there'd be music to support the show. So, the, the music on those Monkees
albums. Was played by a studio band, not unlike as I said before, the musicians for The Byrds
Mister Tambourine Man. They used their actual voices singing, but the songs were all written by
somebody else. It was either written by a songwriting team of Tommy Boyce and Bobby Hart.
Two guys who were originally considered as potential members of the Monkees but were
consigned, really, to the, to the songwriting. And of and also former Brill Building songwriters led
by Don Kirshner, you remember, who'd been half of the Aldon Publishing that had been, been
part of the Brill Building scene. Now, Kirshner was out in L.A., like a lot of New York people, had
moved out to L.A. And so you get a real kind of Brill building kind of feel to a lot of this music. The
songs are really, really well written. I mean these are good tunes, and the playing and the
production is fantastic. It's amazing when you listen to those Monkees songs how well they hold
up. Just as pop records from the time, because they were really very well done. But the important
thing is that the music was never intended to be the selling feature. When you bought that first
Monkees album you got an advertisement on the back of the album for the TV show, you know, it
said something like, you know, seen on ABC TV. You know, 7:30, every Monday night, it was
essentially, kind of like, a flyer with an album included, you know? But the music got really
popular, and I wouldn't say that it eclipsed the television show, but it certainly did very, very well
on its own. We-the show debuted in the Fall of 1966. What's interesting there is that just about
the time The Beatles were giving up touring, in the summer of 1966, they didn't want to do the
touring any more they didn't want the matching suits, they didn't want the mop top haircuts. They
released in August of 66 released Revolver, and then went on to Penny Lane, then Strawberry
Fields and Sergeant Pepper. Just the time they no longer wanted to be the mop top Beatles. In
the fall of 1966 along come the Monkees, who then become the mop top Beatles, so at the same
time in '66 and '67, you've got the mop top Beatles in, in, in the Monkees are them. And you've
got the new Beatles, the kind of long-haired, beard hippy Beatles. and, and the actual Beatles
themselves are them. And there's a split there, between what we might call AM and FM, that
starts to occur that we'll deal with a little bit later. But, a lot of these songs, I'm a Believer, we
already talked about. being written by Neil Diamond, a number one hit in 1966. The 'B' side of
that record, "I'm Not Your Stepping Stone" which was kind of a garage band tune had also been
done by Paul Revere and the Raiders, was number 20. So you've got this instance of a sort of a
double sided hit. for The Monkees, A Little Bit Me, A Little Bit You. From 1967 went to number
two. Pleasant Valley Sunday written by Gerry Goffin and Carole King, brill building song write,
song writing team. And now in LA that went to number three in 1967. Interestingly the first two
albums by The Monkees, occupied the number one slot in the album charts. Either one or the
other of them together, for 31 consecutive weeks, from late 96, late 1966 to the summer of 1967.
That's some pretty serious chart domination for the Monkees. The Monkees eventually got tired
of being you know, the guys in the suits, and, and wanted to do their own music their own
production. Mike Nesmith the guitar player in the group, was actually a pretty good songwriter,
but they wouldn't do any Mike Nesmith tunes for The Monkees. And so Mike Nesmith gave one
of his songs, A Different Drum, to Linda Rondstadt, and her group The Stone Ponies, and they
had a hit with it on AM radio. So, at the same time The Monkees were doing hits written by
somebody else, one of The Monkees, a song written by a Monkees member was a hit on the
charts at the same time. Of course, they would all go on to have their own careers later after The
Monkees broke up. So, let's let's turn a little bit now to some of the other kind of outrageous
things that happened once The Monkees kind of broke out on tv. And this will take us into the
period of psychedelia and into the early seventies. But I think it's fun just to kind of see what
develops. We've a cartoon show, the Archie show, based on the Archie comic books, featuring
an animated band, the Archies, entirely studio musicians, because, of course, cartoons can't
really play and write their own songs, right? So it's entirely, written by songwriters and, anyways,
this animated band has a number one hit in 1969. With Sugar, Sugar interestingly written in part
by Jeff Barry who had been one of the Brill Building songwriters. We have a group of chimps
from the television show that debuted in the fall of 1970 on ABC called Lancelot Link Secret
Chimps. The actual group was called Lancelot Link and the Evolution Revolution. On every show
the chimps would get up and sort of play a pop song. They had a single and an album. The
single was called Sha La Love You. We're talking about chimps now folks. this all leads to a
more, kind of, organized version of that which is debuting in the 1970 on ABC The Partridge
Family featuring Shirley Jones and David Cassidy as a kind of teen heartthrob. I Think I Love
You, a number one hit in 1970. It's like I said, this is taking us into the early 70's. Other important
sort of heartthrobs from that period, Bobby Sherman, who'd been on a show called Here Come
the Brides as early as 1968, had a hit in 1970 with Julie Do you Love Me. we start to see people
like Donny Osmond, the young Michael Jackson, other teen idols and it really starts to become
AM bubble gum music. And this is something that we'll talk about in weeks number seven. Mostly
when we talk about our history of rock music, when we get into the end of the 60s we follow the
groups that did album oriented rock. We talk about Sgt. Peppers being the first concept album.
And then we start to talk about groups that did that did mostly albums. But is should be noted
that in this sort of TV rock thing, we've sort of touched on it a bit here, these groups continued to
have hits on AM radio. AM radio tended to be the place where the sort of teen hits, bubblegum
music ended up getting a lot of airplay and a lot of time, and FM radio, which began to develop in
'67, '68, ended up being a place where most of the rock that we talk about is happening. So at
the same time I'm telling you about The Grateful Dead or about Led Zeppelin, you have to realize
that on the charts at the same time were people like Donny Osmond, Michael Jackson, Bobby
Sherman, David Cassidy. They were on the charts as well, and as part of it we tend not to follow
that story through. For us, maybe, the interesting connection is this is all the shadow of Ricky
Nelson, right? He's the first one who, back in 19, the late 1950's, who is on a big television show,
and uses the television show as a way of promoting his music. So in many ways, this stuff that
we're talking about, this TV rock from the end of the 60s early 70s, really is anticipated by Ricky
Nelson, and all of it anticipates MTV, which just about ten years later, it's going to become very
important that the video and the music go together, during that period of time when yes, MTV
actually played music some of the time. So, that concludes our discussion of the American
response. Next week we'll turn our attention to Black Pop in the 1960s, the music of Motown,
Stax and James Brown. And what we'll find out is while all of this stuff was happening the British
Invasion on one hand, these American responses we've talked about going on this week, we're
mostly talking about American responses as they occurred in white pop. But in black pop there's
a lot of music that was on the charts that's very, very important for us to take note of. And to
figure into the equation. If you take the hits, for example, of the Beatles and the Supremes and
put them right next to each other in the period between 1964 and 1966, it's amazing how the
Supremes seem to match the Beatles almost step for step most of the way. And it's to that story
we'll turn next week

Preamble
This week, we talk about the music of Motown, Stax and James Brown in the context of the
1960s. Essentially, a kind of a history of black pop in the middle of the decade. There a few
things though before we actually get into the consideration of Motown, Stax & James Brown that
I want to talk to you about just so that we can identify some of the important issues that go into
talking about this music. One of the first things, and maybe important things for us to discuss for
a minute, is to talk about the issue of race. And how it plays into a lot of what we're talking about
here. There's probably no issue, in American culture at least, that is more sensitive in a lot of
kind of ways, than discussions of race. And so we have to be careful the kinds of things that we
say that we don't give the wrong impression or send the wrong kinds of signals, especially a guy
like me, obviously, a white guy talking about black music. There might be some who would say
somebody like me could not really totally understand the black experience, and then maybe not
really totally understand the music for what it's trying to say. Well that may or may not be true,
and people can have their own views on it. But fortunately for us, we don't really have to worry so
much about that because what we are really talking about is the history of black pop as it's seen
through the lens of rock and roll. And it's probably fair to say that rock and roll is a style of music
primarily directed at, at least initially at, white teens and primarily at a white audience. I mean if
one of the failures of rock n' roll may be that by the time we get into the 70s, and we'll talk about
this in part two of the class, rock n' roll has become very segregated from black pop and it's like
black pop and rock n' roll exist in two very different worlds. So anyway, one of the things that
we'll do this week, is talk about black pop in the 60s. But I make the admission or say right up
from that we're talking about black pop as it's viewed from the history of rock. Now I have
maintained for a long time, and I hope one of my scholarly friends or professors will take me up
on this that what we really need is a textbook that deals with the history of black pop in its own
context. Not the way that people like Motown and Stax and James Brown fit into the story we're
telling about the history of rock, but one in which, so they're sort of on the side of the stories or of
coming in where they seem to be interesting to us from a perspective centered on rock. But
rather, a perspective that deals with black pop as being the central thing and maybe thinks of
rock as peripheral, or jazz as peripheral, or country western as peripheral. But it really sort of
takes black pop as the central thing. That would be a fantastic thing and probably, dealing with
the 60s, a book like that might deal with this differently than I'm going to do in this week's set of
lectures. When we talk about racial issues, being involved in this music and our discussions of it,
we've already seen how this plays out in our discussion of music in the 1950s and before. The
idea that there was a kind of a chart segregation, a kind of
separate but not very equal distribution of resources. Where rhythm and blues, thought of as
music for a primarily black audience, did not really have the same resources, the same attention,
as mainstream pop. Music for primarily middle class white listeners audiences really had. So
we've already seen a kind of a segregation and some of the kinds of sensitive issues that came
up from there. When songs that were cover versions or crossovers came from the R&B chart
onto the pop charts and some of these songs were covered by white artists when they original
had been done by black artists, this caused a lot of resentment from black artists. And this was
all sort of tied up in some of the racial issues that our country was dealing with and to a certain
extent continues to deal with. When I say our country, I mean America for those of you taking the
course outside of the United States. So let's talk about, having said that, let's talk about what
some of the issues are to focus on this week. The new black pop that we're talking about that
sort of parallels the rise of the British Invasion and the American response in the middle of the
decade arises from true principal sources. There's Motown coming out of Detroit that's owned
and founded by Berry Gordy, Jr.. And that's a label that's really interested in finding black pop
that crosses over to white audiences. And all kinds of steps are taken to try and ensure that
music crosses over to white audiences. Berry Gordy, Jr. wanting to get the largest possible
audience, and so his strategy was go where the money is. And the money really was in the white
community, and so he tried to make sure that his artists were able to capitalize on that. The
problem with making an effort to crossover to white audiences is that a lot of critics have said
about Motown that, in many ways, Berry Gordy Jr. and Motown sold out its blackness for a white
audience. When people make that argument, a lot of times, they juxtapose Motown and its
crossover tendencies with the music of southern soul. Often just referred to, as a shorthand, as
Stax out of Memphis.
And they talk about that music as being more unabashedly black, making no apologies for its
blackness and its roots and maybe being more authentically black than the Motown music. Now,
we'll tell the whole story about Stax and Memphis and how it was really sort of distributed by
Atlantic. But the question really comes down to, is Stax music somehow, or the music on the
Stax label somehow blacker than Motown? And you can see why I start this out with a discussion
of race, because this is an important kind of consideration. And really, it's more of a kind of a
critical reception thing. Do people perceive that somehow Stax music is black, or more sort of
authentically true to the roots of black culture than Motown music is. It's an interesting issue, and
one that's much debated in scholarly circles. Now at the same time, you've got James Brown, for
whom nobody has, whatever you may say about James Brown, nobody has ever said about
James Brown that he sold out his blackness. In fact, he, in many ways, is kind of an iconic figure
in terms of black pride and black identity in the 1960s. So that's a bit of an overview of what we're
going to talk about. Let's move to our first specific lecture now, and we'll talk about the music of
Motown

Hitsville, USA: Motown

We're going to talk about the music of Motown now, or Hitsville, USA, as Motown called itself and
then came to be called. Motown was a record label established by Berry Gordy, Jr. in Detroit in
1959. Berry Gordy, Jr. is a very important figure in the history of
the rise of black business in this country. At one time, I'm not quite sure if it's still true, but
Motown Records was the most successful black-owned business in the country. And so, a record
label that started out as a kind of a small indie label, in a lot of ways, regional indie label became
a very big force in the world of pop music. And that's partly because of the excellence of the
artists and other people who were involved with him. Partly the vision of Berry Gordy, Jr. who
from the very beginning had these ideas, we said in the opening lecture, of taking the label and
trying to reach out, cross over to white audiences and get the biggest possible audience for his
groups. Berry Gordy, Jr, a little bit about his personal story. He was actually a pro boxer, hung
out with boxers and also sort of hung out with jazz musicians at Detroit's jazz club. Again,
Motown being associated, of course, with Detroit, Michigan. And so between hanging out with
the boxers in the gym and the jazz musicians in the clubs, that was sort of his basic milieu. He
also worked on one of the assembly lines for the car companies at one time. Berry Gordy, Jr.
started a record store, his first foray into music, or one of his first forays was a record store that
specialized in jazz music. Like a lot of people who like music, he got this idea, well, jazz music is
the best music, so that's what I'll sell. Well, it turns out that a lot of times people aren't always so
interested in buying the music that fans or connoisseurs would think is the best music. You really
make your money selling the most popular music. And what Berry Gordy says that he learned
from the jazz orchestra, which eventually failed, is towards the end of it when it was too late to
sort of save it he realized that the real money was in selling pop music or R&B music and not so
much in jazz. And so he adjusted but kept it in his mind that the money is in pop. Berry Gordy, Jr.
continues to stay involved with music by writing songs. He started writing songs with Jackie
Wilson, for Jackie Wilson, the singer. Reet Petite from 1957 was one of those records that was
released. Lonely Teardrops was a number one hit on the R&B charts. It crossed over to the pop
charts to number seven in 1958. And That's Why I Love You was a number two R&B chart hit in
1959. These were all records that featured Berry Gordy Jr. as a songwriter, often together
working with other people. There's a story that has been told to me by people close to Jerry
Leiber that Berry Gordy, Jr. at one point had a discussion with Jerry Leiber of the Lieber and
Stoller song writing production team. And said that he really wanted to be involved in the Brill
Building scene that was starting to coalesce in the late 50s, and of course, it came into bloom in
the late 60s, as we've talked about a couple of weeks ago. And Jerry Leiber said, Berry, why
would you want to pick up stakes and come to New York and start all over here? You've already
got a good thing going in Detroit. Why don't you just do what you want to do in Detroit? And so
the story is that Berry Gordy, Jr. took that advice very much to heart, and so established Motown
in 1959. And Motown is, in many ways, a parallel structure to the Brill Building structure that we
talked about a few weeks ago. With the exception that by 63, 64, and 65, most of what's
happening in the Brill Building has really kind of broken down from what it was at the beginning of
the 60s, as we talked about last week. A lot of those people were moving to the West Coast, Don
Kirshner and people like that were focused in Los Angeles. But during this period, the middle of
the 60s, the end of the 60s, that's when Motown taking the Brill Building model and establishing it
in Detroit. Really that's when Motown really sort of hits its stride. And so, very much based on
this Brill Building model. Some of the early hits that Berry Gordy had on Motown Records was a
song by Barrett Strong called Money, which was a number two R&B hit in 1960. So we're still
talking about a time that's parallel to what was happening in New York with Brill Building. The
Marvellettes, a girl group with Please Mr. Postman, that was number one on both the pop and
the R&B charts in 1961. So a big hit for a very small regional label, a fantastic success for him.
The Contours had a track called, Do You Love Me? Which was number one in the R&B charts
and number three in the pop charts in 1962. Early on, when Berry Gordy was releasing these
records, in many ways they were imitations of things that other people were doing. So you see
the Marvellettes are basically a girl group from 1961. The Contours sound an awful lot like the
Isley Brothers from 1962. And so, at the beginning he's sort of following the lead of others, Berry
Gordy is. Now, let's talk a little bit more about this idea of crossing over and pursuing a white
audience. We said a bit about it as well in the first video. This is the idea that if you just as a
business person look at the lay of the land and see where the disposable income is. Where are
the people who've got money to spend recreationally for a record? It's no mystery that most of
that money resides in the white community. So Berry Gordy decided very early on, as I said from
the story with the jazz record store, he decided if he was going to have a successful business,
that's where he had to go. But the thing is, he had artists, many of whom came from very modest
and challenged economic backgrounds. And they were not the kinds of people who, without a
certain amount of training, could really mix in polite society, that kind of thing. So he had to do
something to help kind of shape the artist and shape the image of Motown to make it acceptable
for crossover. As I said before a lot of people have criticized this as being a kind of selling out.
But really, it's no different from what Chuck Berry did when he decided he was going to write his
songs directly for a white teen audience in 1955, 56, 57. So that these songs wouldn't need to be
covered and the lyrics changed. So in many ways, I think when we think about Motown during
those early years, we can think of it as taking the Chuck Barry philosophy and applying the Brill
Building practices. So taking these two sort of established models and putting them together, and
starting what turned out to be a very, very successful label in Detroit, Michigan. Let's talk a little
bit about what we might call the etiquette and choreography of Motown. What was different about
Motown, and people have loved to talk about Motown as being some kind of an assembly line.
And this is partly, I suppose, because Motown being in Detroit and Detroit being, at that time, the
home of the auto industry. Anybody's talking about Detroit back in those days would have
thought about Ford, GM, Chrysler, these big car companies. That the idea of music that being
made through a certain kind of specialization of different kind of jobs would be thought of as a
kind of an assembly line. Of course, it was no more of an assembly line than the Brill Building or
most New York labels had used, but the name has kind of stuck. One thing that was interesting
though about this was that as I said before, Berry Gordy Jr. was concerned about the image and
the behavior of his stars in public. And so he hired a woman by the name of Maxine Powell to
start something which the artists called the Charm School. And Maxine Powell had actually run a
charm school in Detroit in the 50s. And her job was to take these people, many of whom as I
have said before had come from challenged backgrounds. And teach them how to sit at a table
and use the right silverware. How to speak in a way that is elegant and appropriate. How to move
to a certain extent and walk. To teach the women when they get into a car they have to be
careful about keeping their legs together. This kind of thing. Teaching some these folks to sort of,
if they need this kind of instruction to eat with their mouth closed. Various kinds of things that
parents teach their kids all the time. Not to say that this was a particular sort of problem for all of
the artists, but what Berry Gordy said is that his goal was for all of his artists to be presentable in
two places. Either the White House or Buckingham Palace. So we're not talking about teaching
etiquette so that they could come hang out with your family or my family, or something like that.
It's more like, if these people are sitting at the table with the President of United States or the
Queen of England, they should be presentable and sort of up to the standard of elegance that
goes with that. So that's what he set out to do. And Maxine Powell's job, to a certain degree, was
to work with all of the Motown artists to be sure they had that level of polish. The artists who were
mostly just young kids at the time hated it. But years later many of them have come back and
said they really appreciated the training that they got from Maxine Powell, because it really
helped a lot in their subsequent careers. The other thing he did is he hired a guy by the name of
Cholly Atkins who had been a Broadway dance choreographer and got him to do choreography
for all the acts. So every move that you see these different groups make, The Supremes, The
Four Tops, to a certain extent The Temptations but we'll deal with that later. All of these moves
were chartered out and worked out by Cholly Atkins. So you've got the etiquette covered by a
kind of a central person. You've got the choreography covered by a single person. And then
Motown also handled the management for its artists. Which allowed it to coordinate promotion
and coordinate releases and coordinate Motown tours where they put a bunch of their groups
together at one time. And so Berry Gordy really had created a shop where he had a lot of control
over shaping the careers of these artists. Now the Motown assembly line, the musical end of it,
consisted of on one hand songwriters and producers, and on the other hand a studio band that
well, various members from a sort of large extended studio band that played on all the records.
Now, imitating the Brill Building model, Berry Gordy had a whole group of songwriters and
producers and they would all write songs and vie to get the next record. And they would have
these sort of, these meetings where he would pull everybody together and they would all talk
about which song that they had. And Berry Gordy's famous line was, if you only had a dollar
would you buy this record, or buy a sandwich? So the record that he released that week or
whatever, or the one that they decided to take into the studio, that record would have to be good
enough that somebody would be willing to skip lunch in order to buy that record because they
just had to have it so bad. So that was the way he tried to discriminate between the records that
could be good and those that were really excellent. And so all these different songwriters and
producers were vying with each other to get that record each week. And to get a record with one
of different artists. And as long as they had a success with an artist, they got to keep that artist.
When they began to fail, he'd give somebody else a shot of that artist and in order to keep the
artists at the top of the chart. So some of the producers and songwriters we're talking about is
Berry Gordy, Jr. himself, Mickey Stevenson, Smokey Robinson, were all important songwriters.
The songwriting team of Brian Holland, Lamont Dozier, Eddie Holland, or we'll often talk about
the Holland, Dozier, Holland, or simply, HDH, and Norman Whitfield. All of these people were
writing songs, producing during the heyday of Motown in the 1960s. Then they also had a studio
band. They were called The Funk Brothers, and they were Detroit's version of LA's Wrecking
Crew. The Wrecking Crew were the sort of top flight studio musicians that played on the Phil
Spector records, played on The Byrds' Mr. Tambourine Man. Played on the Beach Boys' record,
that kind of thing. Well, in Detroit, it was the Funk Brothers working exclusively for Motown. You
may know the film, Standing in the Shadows of Motown, from 2002. That really is a documentary
about these sort of unsung heros of Motown. They worked very closely with the songwriters and
producers and artists, so that there were not often a lot of arrangements written out. They would
just sort of go in with the tunes and start working parts out. We're talking people like James
Jamerson on bass, Bennie Benjamin on drums, Earl Van Dyke on piano, and many others who
were sort of part of this group. Motown had its own devoted studio, and that studio was in use
almost constantly. So there was more work in that studio than one particular band could do. But
they were a central group of players and others who replaced them when those players needed
a break or had other gigs elsewhere in town. And so it was a combination of the songwriters and
the studio band and the etiquette and the choreography and the management, all of that together
that was considered the Motown Assembly Line. Of course, the only piece that we haven't talked
about is the actual performers themselves and the very thing that the audiences would see. And
it's the performers in Motown that we turn to next.

The Motown Performers

Well now we turn to the performers on the Motown label and we're going to focus really the, I
mean, the, the, the high point of the period is the one that we're going to between 64, 66, sort of
parallel to the first big success of the Beatles and the American response, which really starts to
launch in the summer of 1965. Remember our talk about folk rock, Mr. Tambourine Man, Dylan
and, and all of that last week. The early successes at Motown, the sort of first performers to
really get on the charts, besides what we're talking about before, the Marvellettes and Mr.
Postman or the Contours, Smokey Robinson and the Miracles. Smokey Robinson not only a
singer/producer at Motown, but also an artist in his own right. His group had a, number one R&B
hit, number two on the pop charts in 1960 with a track called Shop Around. that was a tune that
they recorded and Berry Gordy took the recording home, I don't know if he, he was listening to it
on reel to reel or acetate or whatever. Acetates were little sort of temporary records you could
press to be able to hear something on your record player, but you could only play the record, you
know, maybe a dozen times before it wore out but it was a great temporary way to find out how a
record was going to sound. Anyway, he's listening to it at home, he decides in the evening, he
decides, you know, this song is just, the tempo is just wrong, the tempo is wrong. So he calls
everybody in the Miracles up and says, we have to rerecord it and they said, tomorrow? He said,
no, now! So he gets them all out of bed. They all go down to the recording studio in the middle of
night. In fact, they couldn't find the piano player who was on the session, so Berry Gordy himself
actually plays piano on that record. They adjust the tempo and that's the version that becomes a
hit. I mean imagine the, the guy is so sort of consumed with the business that he's going to
release a record he decides he's gotta call everybody together at the last minute to totally
rerecord it because he's not quite sure the tempo is right. But that's, that's the kind of intensity
that Barry Gordon Jr was devoting to Motown in those early years. Thinking about Smokey
Robinson and the Miracles, another early hit for them in 1962 is You've Really Got a Hold On
Me. That was number one on the R&B charts, number eight on the pop charts and it was a song
that The Beatles covered as well in the early days. The Beatles covered a lot of Motown stuff in
their their early days when they were doing cover verses on those first few albums. another early
star for, for Motown was Mary Wells in 1962. She had a pretty big hit with The One Who Really
Loves You. and then the song that I think she's most known for from 1964, a number one on the
pop charts, My Guy. Now as we talk about the rest of these artists, I want to start by talking about
just the artists that were produced by the Holland Dozier Holland songwriting and production
team because in many ways HDH, Holland Dozier Holland were one of the most successful
songwriting production teams in all of popular music during the mid 60s. So they compare really
quite favorably against people like Bob Dylan The Byrds, The Beatles The Rolling Stones, all of
these people who were having tremendous success in the middle of the decade the by 65 or 66.
So here are, here are some of the artists that worked with Holland Dozier Holland The
Supremes. If you're going to choose one group that really represents what Motown was in the
middle of the 1960s, it has to be the Supremes. And for all those people who say that when the
Beatles came to this country it pushed the music that was happening before the girl groups, for
example, off the charts, well, that's not quite right. Not only were there still Phil Spector girl group
hits after The Beatles had their first success in 1964, but the Supremes were nothing if not a girl
group. And they had fantastic success from starting in 1964 all the way through the end of the
decade. So this may not have been the same girl groups that were coming out of the New York
studios, but the ones, the ones, this one coming out of Detroit did just fine thank you very much.
So when we tell these stories about the disruption of The Beatles and the British Invasion, there
really was an important change that happened with that, but we shouldn't get this the the idea
that it changed everything. So the Supremes, very, very important. Diana Ross, Mary Wilson,
Florence Ballard, the kind of, the line up that we usually think of. started out life as the Primetets
because the Temptations at that time were called the Primes, or a group that would eventually
become the Temptations was called the Primes. So they were sort of the girl group. core,
corresponding to the to the Temptations, they they kept hanging around the studio wanting to get
a record and Berry Gordy Jr apparently at one point said, go home and finish high school, then
we'll think about it. they did release a bunch of records and they, all of them flocked, and around
Motown they were called the no hit Supremes. Now, at one point Berry Gordy decided that it
would, it should be Diana Ross who did all the lead vocals. She's, technically speaking, is not the
strongest voice in the Supremes, but she, Berry Gordy saw a certain kind of potential in her
voice, a certain kind of power. I think it was a certain kind of sensuality and the delivery of the
songs he, he identified and decided she should be the one that really sings lead on all these
tunes. So he pairs them together with Holland Dozier Holland, on the third try they get a number
one hit in the summer of 1964 with Where Did Our Love Go. A number one hit at the charts at
exactly the same time as The Beatles were releasing A Hard Day's Night and everybody was in
the throes of Beatlemania. [LAUGH] Here are the Supremes, at the top of the charts. So again,
Beatles, Supremes sort of blow for blow, they, they really kind of keep keep pace with each
other. well they had five consecutive number one hits. Again, it sounds like I'm talking about The
Beatles or The Rolling Stones here. and Baby Love and Come See About Me from 1964, Stop in
the Name of Love and Back in My Arms again from 1965 and continued to have fantastic
success throughout the, the rest of the 1960s. Of course, Diana Ross going on to have a
fantastic solo career when Motown eventually moved to Los Angeles in the 70s and got more
involved in the film industry. Another group that was working with Holland Dozier Holland during
these years, The Four Tops. So he had, they had the Supremes on one, on, on one hand and
their sort of, their girl group and The Four Tops their, their guy group, if you will. They originally
formed in 1954 and signed to Chess Records in Chicago, but they moved to Motown in 1964
featuring Levi Stubbs on lead vocals. Their arrangements for HDH often featured orchestra in
interesting kinds of ways, maybe more orchestra on those records than you would find on other
records by, say, the Supremes, the Temptations, Martha and the Vandellas, some of the other
artists. if you're looking for representative examples of The Four Tops, there's probably a couple
that you, you really should check out. Baby I Need Your Loving, a number 11 hit from 1964. one
of my personal favorites I Can't Help Myself or Sugar Pie Honey Bunch. That one was number
one on both the pop and the R&B charts in 1965. Standing in the Shadows of Love was also
number one on both charts in 1966. So some fantastic HDH, Four Tops music for in the mid
1960s. HDH also worked with Martha and the Vandellas, now Martha Reeves the lead singer of
that group had been a professional singer and was continued to be a professional singer when
she was hired at Motown not as a singer but as a secretary. So there was Martha Reeves, you
know, typing letters and answering the telephone as the business, trying to get a, a record
contract with the, with the label because, of course, she was playing clubs in the evenings. So
eventually she gets she gets an opportunity to, to do some singing, first doing background
singing. I think she sang background on Marvin Gaye's Stubborn Kind of Fellow from 1962.
anyway, her group, Martha and the Vandellas has a very big hit with Heat Wave produced again
by HDH number four on the pop charts, number one on the R&B charts in 1963. So there before
the, the arrival of the Beatles in this country. Mickey Stevenson takes over for a minute with
Dancin' in the Streets, ironically maybe the most the, the most famous of the Martha and the
Vandella tunes that's from 1964 a number two hit. And then HDH take over again, they have hits
in 1965 with Nowhere to Run and Jimmy Mack in 1967. Other acts work with more than one
producer. in fact what Barry Gordy would, Jr would do is he would put an act with the producer
until that, they didn't get a hit and then he would switch and try to get another producer, another
songwriter into the game see if they would have better luck with that act. So, maybe one of the
most famous instances of that is The Temptations, but when I was, when I was talking about The
Supremes I said they were originally formed as the, as The Primes. Well they were actually a
combination of two groups, The Primes and The Distance came together to form The
Temptations. They were famous for their choreography, five guys in the group, fantastic dance
moves, but that also brought them into friction with Charlie Atkins, who believed that he was the
guy who was in charge of choreography for everybody on the label. But The Temptations were
like, hang on man, we already got our routines. So there was a bit of friction there, a bit of tug-of-
war over exactly what the moves would be. So The Temptations dance moves were a little bit
more athletic, a little bit more show offy and ost, ostentatious than some of what the other groups
did. But they were very, they were famous for exactly those same kind of things. When we think
about The Temptations, Temptations choreography we have to think of that as a piece with some
of the things that James Brown, we'll talk about him a little bit later. Some of the kinds of things
James Brown was doing with his dancing and eventually what the Jackson 5 and Michael
Jackson would do as we get into the 70s and into the 80s as well. So the Temptations not just for
the music, but for their presentation for their, for their choreography became a very influential
kind of group. initially, probably during this golden period, mid 60s we're talking about, David
Ruffin on lead vocals with also the, the lead vocals of Eddie Kendricks, whose voice is that, that
high falsetto kind of thing. Remember last week I was talking about the falsettos on two coasts,
there's Brian Wilson singing falsetto in those Beach Boys records and there's Frankie Valli
singing with the Four Seasons those those, all those falsetto parts on the east coast. Here, in
Motown we've got Eddie Kendricks with maybe the, the, the his number three in that sort of, of
triumphant of great sort of falsetto vocals especially if you listen to the tune The Way You Do the
Things You Do from 1964, a number 11 hit written by Smokey Ro, written and produced by
Smokey Robinson. Smokey went on to have a hit with more hits with the group including My Girl,
which was number one on both the pop and R&B charts in 1965. And then things begin to slip a
little bit for Smokey and so, Barry Gordy Jr turned it over to Norman Whitfield and Whitfield sort
of carried The, The Temptations for the rest of the 60s and into the 70s. Ain't Too Proud to Beg
was a number one R&B hit in 1966, 13 on the pop charts. And I Know I'm Losing You was
number one on the R&B charts, number eight on the pop charts in 1966. So The Temptations
again, another great example of some of the Motown artists in the mid 60s. Others Marvin Gaye,
a fantastic singer who worked with a variety of Motown producers producing several hits, Pride
and Joy from 1963 was with Mickey Stevenson.How Sweet To Be Loved By You from 1965 was
a hit that HDH did with him and Ain't That Peculiar from 1965, was done with Smokey Robinson.
we'll talk more about Marvin Gaye when we talk about black pop in the 70s because his album,
What's Going On becomes not only an important record for black pop, but one of the first
Motown concept albums. And by the time we get to there also with Stevie Wonder, who we'll talk
about next. by the time we get to there we're going to have artists play a real kind of a role in
producing their own records. Something that's very much at odds with what's happening at
Motown right now, which is about producers, artists, studio band, all having their own separate
jobs. Finally, let's talk for a minute about Stevie Wonder who starts out as a child star at, at
Motown singing and, and playing the harmonica. Initially not really thought of as a songwriter or
producer in his own right, which is kind of strange to think of because now that's primarily what
we, we think of Stevie Wonder as being one of these guys who can play everything, do
everything, a fantastic musician. But at the time he was a performer, singing playing the
harmonica. His first big hit, number one on the pop and the R&B charts in 1963 was called
Fingertips, Pt 2 and it was actually almost recorded by, recorded by mistake. In other words, it
was a, it was a live recording that that it went so well that they ended up releasing it. In fact it
was, it was, it was so loose, the live recording was, that the bass player had left the stage to get
ready for the next act that was coming out afterwards, I think it was Mary Wells or something
because all these Motown groups would perform together on the same show. And you can hear
him sort of run back out on the stage, pick up his bass and you can hear on the recording he's
saying, what key, what key, you know? So he can get back in on the tune, anyway, that was a
big hit for Stevie Wonder, that, all that sort of, infectious Stevie Wonder sort of energy. Really
that's the first time it sort of hits the hits the airwaves. Berry Gordy Jr is listed as the producer for
that, but as I said, that was not really a produced session. Mickey Stevenson produced Uptight,
Everything is Alright, from 1966, another big hit for Stevie Wonder, a number one on the R&B
charts, number one on the pop charts. And as I said, with Marvin Gaye, Stevie Wonder will be
somebody we really want to talk about in part two of this class when we talk about black pop in
the 1970s because both of these guys are, become extremely important figures in the, in the
history of black pop music in the 1970s not withstanding the great role that they play in the
1960s. So, that wraps up our discussion of Motown. We next turn to to Memphis, south south of
Motown into southern soul. Stacks, or, as they called themselves, Soulsville, USA

Soulsville, USA: Stax and Southern Soul

(7:25)
Having now discussed the the role of Motown in black pop of the mid 1960's. Let's now turn our
attention to Soulsville, USA Stax and Southern Soul. In order to start our discussion, let's take a
look at what was happening with Atlantic Records. Atlantic Records is one of the most important
labels that we talk about as we talk about the history of, of rock music. Of course, they're there at
the very beginning, even before rock and roll with releasing records in R&B, they're very
important in the first wave of rock and roll, that period between 60 and 64. There very, very,
important there with Ben E King, The Drifters, a lot of those kinds of a records. and so Atlantic
Records, it's, it's important how the morph. And we're going to talk about what happens with
them here in this period in the 60's. And then of course as you get into the late 60's and early
70's, they become one of the labels that signs a lot of the really big rock and roll acts. Led
Zeppelin, yes, a lot of those groups signed to Atlantic Records. But for now, what's happening at
the, Atlantic Records is they're starting to make the transition from sweet soul to southern soul.
Sweet soul, you'll remember is that style characterized again, like Ben E King, The Drifters, acts
like that. That's a very kind of elegant, restrained, kind of smooth blending of rhythm and blues
music with, with strings and sometimes Latin beats, that kind of thing. Southern soul, however is
a lot more of an enthusiastic kind of music. It's a little bit more unbuttoned its gospel influences
are right there on the surface. and so it's seen as maybe a more spontaneous and raw, although
the recordings are oftentimes quite refined most of a raw kind of form. Wexler starts to head in
this direction, when he produces an artist named Solomon Burke. he's working also with Bert
Berns. We've talked about Bert Berns a couple of times at, at, at Atlantic there having a number
two R&B hit in 63 with, If You Need Me, that's Solomon Burke. also a, a number one R&B hit in
1965 with, Got To Get You Off My Mind. but one thing that, that Jerry Wexler, one of the guys
responsible for Atlantic at this time. Starts to find out is that in order, in, in, in addition to
producing his own artists for Atlantic they can have pretty good success if they find R&B hits that
have been regional hits and licensed them. We've talked about this idea of licensing hits
nationally. So, Atlantic could re-brand a song, buy the licensing rights off of off one of these
smaller labels, and, really make make, something that had been a regional hit, into a national hit.
And so they sort of looking, Wex has started looking for these kinds of things, looking for these,
these, these re-releases as another possible way of a, of, of bringing out a hit records with
Atlantic Records. and he starts to get into a relationship With Stax Records from Memphis. Now
Stax was formed in 1960 by Jim Stewart, and his sister Estelle Axton. So, you've got the Stewart
is the ST part of it, and the Axton is the AX part of it. Put ST and AX together you get Stax. based
as I said in Memphis Tennessee. They came to be licensed and then distributed, a, by Atlantic
Records. At that time that meant a very close business relationship with Jerry Wexler. But also
with Tom Dowd, the legendary recording engineer of, of Atlantic Records, who actually came
down to Stax Studios in Memphis, and help them kind of upgrade or rewire some of their
recording gear. Because Dowd was very concerned about the quality of Atlantic Records and
even if they, if they were going to be using the Stax Studio a lot more now. Because they were
developing a closer relationship, he wanted to be sure that the equipment was up to, up to his
standard. So, when we talk about Stax, we're, our story usually starts with the actual Stax label
and the actual Stax Studio. But then as the story begins to unfold a little bit more, you'll see that
it, it starts to become more inclusive, as well, to include other studios in other parts of the south,
even in New York City, as part of a general southern soul. Whether the records were actually
recorded in the south, are not, it's kind of a stylistic thing. So, people often refer to this as Stax,
you know sometimes people refer to the label Volt. Stack, and Volt was kind of a subsidiary label
of Stax. The Stax, Volt, refers to a whole sort of style, more specifically it refers to just the artists
that were on those labels. So, what particularly interests me is not only the music of southern
soul, and something that we want to talk about here, but also the parallels between Motown and
Stax. Because a lot of times, the way Motown and Stax are set up is somehow like they're polar
opposites from each other, and we talked about this in the introductory video. You know, Motown
is this, is, is characterized sometimes as selling out as blackness for a white audience. And Stax
is seen as more authentic, because it stays, stays closer to its black routes, gospel, more kind of
unbuttoned kind of approach. But what's amazing to me is, for all that difference people usually
find in it, how similar the two labels were in the way that they, the way that they acted. first of all it
turns out that there were there was actually devoted songwriters and producers at Stax, although
not in a same kind of organized way that Berry Gordy had done. We had Issac Hayes and David
Porter working together as songwriters and producers for the act, Sam and Dave. and we also
have Steve Cropper, the guitarist in the studio band, working really closely with Otis Redding. So,
there is a sense in which you've got some people writing songs and other people doing
performing. You know the biggest parallel, of course, is the studio band. We talked about the
Funk Brothers with regard to Motown. But, with regard to the Stax Studio, that is the specific Stax
Studio in Memphis. We're talking about Booker T, and the M.G.s, and these guys all of four of
them kind of legends in the history of, of black pop music. Booker T Jones, on the organ, Steve
Cropper on the guitar, Duck Dunn on the bass, and Al Jackson Jr, on the drums. Booker T, and
the M.G.s had instrumental hits on their own, Green Onions is maybe the most, the most famous
of that. And they were the backing band Working with a lot of these Stax groups when they came
into the studio. And this was even a looser and more cooperative situation than the one that we
saw in Motown. where you know a lot of times they would not only be working to tune out with
the artist, but they would be sort of writing as they went in a kind of very cooperative kind of
environment. Remembering that still at some place like Atlantic the norm was to have people
come in with charts all written out and the musicians would read the charts just like they did for
all intents and purposes, back in the Big Band days, back in the 40's and into the 1950's. Also,
when we talk about Stax we have to talk about the use of horns. There aren't, the Stax horns
don't appear on all of the records. But they appear in enough of them that this sort of, horn band
thing that people talk about from the 1960's. that was so influential something that Paul
McCartney was thinking about when the Beatles did Got to Get You Into My life, this sort of like,
tight rhythmic thing happening with the hip horns. this is, sort of, this part of this Stax sign, It's the
Stax horn, that people often refer to as being responsible for part of that sound. let's turn our
attention now to some of the performers at Stax, and we'll deal with that in the next video.

The Stax Performers (12:06)

Stax records or Southern Soul of more broadly especially Stax and Atlantic together, had a whole
stable of artists who helped developed what we think of as Southern Soul. And as I said in the
previous video, kind of seen in contrast to what was happening in Motown which was seen as
sort of a slick professional kind of sound. These stack artists were seen as more authentic and
maybe a little grittier, a little bit more raw, a little bit more unbuttoned and enthusiastic in their
performances. So let's turn to some of those performances. Let's start with Otis Redding. It's
important when we think about these Stax, artist to understand which ones were actually signed
to Stax and which ones were actually signed to Atlantic, because of the closeness of this
relationship that Atlantic and Stax were in. Otis Redding was actually signed to Stax, and he's
got early hits in the 60s crossing over already in 1965 with tunes like "Mr. Pitiful", which was at
number ten RnB hit but got to number 41 in the pop chart. And "Respect", Otis Redding is the
first one who wrote and performed Respect, later it would become almost a signature song for
Aretha Franklin, we'll talk about that in just a minute. But "Respect" was a hit for him in 1965,
number four in the RnB chart but only at number 35 in the pop chart. Remember, think about
what the Motown numbers were like that I referred to a couple videos ago. We're talking about
Otis Redding crossing over with hits that made it to number 41 in the pop charts, number 35 in
the pop charts. We get into 1966, "Try a Little Tenderness" a kind of emblematic song for Otis
Redding, number 25 in the pop charts, number four in the RnB Charts. So we think about Stax
and Motown, I think that if you just do the chart numbers in many ways. Motown comes out on
top that way, although in many ways looking back at Stax a lot of people we're more influenced
by what happened musically and stylistically with what happened at Stax. The thing about Otis
Redding, he performed at the big Monterey Pop Festival in the spring of 1967, with Booker T.
and the M.G.'s. Steve Cropper has said, he thought that was kind of a weird booking because
they showed up with little club amps and mohair suits. And this kind a thing and they show up
and there are all of these painted hippies with Marshall Stacks and Les Pauls and all this kind a
thing. And he thought, what are we going to do with these little amps that we're carrying around
but they went on, they did the show. And it became a kind of legendary moment for Otis
Redding, there'll really help sort of launch his career with the hippie movement and with a lot of
those folks
bringing his music to a wider audience than it might of gotten otherwise. Unfortunately, that
success was rather short lived because he died In a plane crash in December of 1967, having
already recorded maybe we might think of his signature song, "Sittin' On the Dock of the Bay"
which after his untimely death went to number one on both the pop and RnB charts in early 1968.
Not so good for Stax from a business point of view because one of the few of these artists that
we're going to talk about that was actually signed to Stax. When Otis Redding passes away, it
leaves a big hole in the Stax sort of business model although. I know it's can be kind of thought
of as disrespectful to think of it that way, that's kind of what happened. Now we turn now next to
Sam & Dave. That's a group that was signed to Atlantic, but "loaned" to Stax. So in other words,
Jerry Wexler had already signed these guys, but said I'm going to send you down to Memphis
and have you work with the guys at the Stax because I like what they're doing down there. So,
Sam & Dave started working very closely with Isaac Hayes and David Porter and that produced a
whole series of hits using the Stax band and the Stax horns and all that, maybe the most
important of those songs or the one that everybody knows is "Soul Man". A number one RnB hit
from 1967 went to number two in the pop charts and that's the one that was in 1979 among
much of these songs, covered by the Blues Brothers. In 1979, when John Belushi and Dan
Aykroyd put that first Blues Brothers band together first appearing on Saturday Night Live and
then making their own movie and all that, it really reignited the passion for all of this music. And a
lot of these guys, Duck Dunn, Steve Cropper, Aretha Franklin all appear in the film itself. The
version the Blues Brothers had on the radio in 1979, was actually a very very close cover version
of what Sam and Dave had done. Of course for Sam and Dave it was fantastic, it reignited their
careers that all of a sudden they started getting better paying gigs that they hadn't been getting
before, it was fantastic. So, we're talking about now Sam & Dave, a group that as I said before
was signed to Atlantic but loaned to Stax. That's very much like the situation with Wilson Pickett,
who was also signed to Atlantic and started out recording at Stax records. In fact, one of his most
famous records "In the Midnight Hour", was a number one RnB hit in the summer of 1965,
number 23 on the pop charts. Was actually written by Steve Cropper and Wilson Pickett together
and recorded in Memphis with the Memphis studio band. As Steve Cropper tells the story about
this In the Midnight Hour thing was something that Wilson Pickett used to sort of do when he was
sort of improvising over vocals while trying to find things. Really the coming out of a gospel
tradition, my Jesus comes to me In the Midnight Hour, In the Midnight Hour, this kind of thing.
And so Cropper kind of pulled this together, corralled together some of what Wilson Pickett was
doing and they wrote this song. In the course of writing this song, Jerry Wexler who was
supervising the sessions Tom Dowd was often at these sessions, came in and told him about a
dance that the kids were doing back in New York. And he kind of danced it around from, and
what they could figure out was that the beat was going one, two, three, four, but the two's and
four's were slightly delayed. So instead of being metronomically one, two, three, four, it was one,
two, three, four. They were just a little bit behind the beat. So they tried to capture that in the feel,
this became the feel that was called the delayed backbeat. And when "In the Midnight Hour" was
such a success they tried to reproduce that feel. And sometimes that delayed backbeat feel, is
one that's often associated with Stax Records and again came out of this session. But something
happened, it's not really quite clear what happened but somehow. Jim Stewart of Stax Records
kind of forbid Wilson Pickett from recording in the Stax studios in Memphis. And so, Jerry Wexler
was familiar with another studio in the South in Muscle Shoals, Alabama. That had produced hits,
that he liked the sound of those records too. They'd already licensed Joe Tex's record "Hold On
to What You've Got", which had been a number five pop hit, a number two RnB hit in 1965. That
was recorded at FAME studios in Muscle Shoals. The one that Jerry Wexler really liked from
Muscle Shoals, was a record that they licensed by Percy Sledge called "When A Man Loves A
Woman" what a fantastic tune that is, number one on the RnB charts, number one on the pop
charts in 1966. But that record actually wasn't recorded in FAME studios in Muscle Shoals, it was
recorded in a different studio in Muscle Shoals called Quincy Studios. But the person he knew
down there that he worked closely with, was a fella named Rick Hall at FAME studios. So, what
he did is he started to move Wilson Pickett down to Muscle Shoals. In fact, in order to get the
stax horns. He didn't tell Jim Stewart he was doing it, he paid Stax horns guys to like drive down
to Muscle Shoals and do the tracks there because he really wanted that horn sounds. But all of
those classic Wilson Pickett records after In the Midnight Hour were all done. And Muscle
Shoals, Alabama which quickly developed this reputation as being sort of like one of the hippest
rhythm sections, the hippest places to record in all of popular music. "Land of 1000 Dances" from
1966, "Mustang Sally" from 1966, "Funky Broadway" from 1967, all of these hits on both the RnB
and the pop charts, and all of them recorded at Muscle Shoals, Alabama. The last of the
Southern Soul figures that we have to talk about, is perhaps the one who towers over all of them
in terms of reputation and importance in the history of Southern Soul in many ways. Aretha
Franklin comes to the picture fairly late and we start to talk about Aretha, we're really talking
about the very end of the 1960s certainly not right in the middle of the 60, 64, 65. So she comes
a little bit later than the other artists, but sort of towers over all the rest of them. Aretha Franklin,
with a fantastic background in gospel music. Her father, the Reverend C.L. Franklin was minister
at the New Bethel Baptist Church in Detroit, Michigan. He was a real celebrity in the sense that
he was a very very well-known pastor, not just in Detroit but nationally attended a lot of kind of
national events. His radio show, he's services were on the radio it was a very sort of famous man
in his own right. And there was his daughter Aretha, along with her sisters all sort of hearing all
this fantastic gospel music getting to meet a lot of the most important gospel performers of the
time, having dinner with them and mixing with them socially. And sort really of getting to see all of
it very up close while she was just a child. So, what a fantastic background, for somebody who
would go on to become a professional singer. She was initially signed to Columbia Records, in
the first half of the 1960s but it was like Columbia didn't quite know what to do with Aretha
Franklin. Like they thought she was some kind of a supper club singer or maybe a kind of a jazz
singer or something like that. And so she did some recordings that really didn't go anywhere, and
her contract came up for renewal at Columbia and Jerry Wexler was aware of Aretha Franklin
and thought he had a pretty good idea of what she was capable of and so convinced her to move
to Atlantic. First thing he did was he took her down to Muscle Shoals, Alabama. Got her in
FAME's to do this with Rick Hall and with that studio band and started working with her to
develop a kind of a more gospel influenced approach to her music. Well the first session went
pretty well at least initially they got the track finished "I Never Loved a Man" which was released
in 1967, went to number nine in the RnB charts, number 37 in the pop charts but something
happened in the studio, people got into disputes with each other. There was some drinking
involved and the session dissolved before Wexler had even his B side completed. So he decided
that he wasn't going to take Aretha Franklin back down to Muscle Shoals because there was
some bad blood down there. So, he finished the single off in the New York studio and in fact it
turned out that Aretha recorded much of the rest of her music her Southern Soul, in New York
City. Sometimes, Wexler would fly the Stax horns guys in or musicians in, from the South to play
on the recorders but they did it in New York. Aretha subsequently had fantastic success, all the
tunes that you know from her from the 60s were recorded during this time. "Respect" which was
number one on the RnB and the pop charts in 1967. Wilson Pickett or I mean Otis Redding
saying, after he'd heard Aretha's version of Respect, he said I might have written that song and
recorded it but she's the one that owns it now. "Chain of Fools" number one on the RnB charts,
number two on the pop charts in 68. And "Think", number one in the RnB charts, number seven
the pop charts in 1968. Another track in the Blues Brothers movie that Aretha, sings as a guest
star in that movie. So in many ways Aretha Franklin coming at the end of this Southern Soul
thing and what's ironic is that she's not on Stax. The records are not even recorded in the South,
but they still are emblematic of this Southern Soul style, which is seen in juxtaposition to the
music of Motown. In our next video, we're going to consider Motown, Stax, the British invasion,
and the American response. That is everything that was happening in the middle of the 1960s
and see if we can sort out, what the various influences and effects between all of these different
musical activities were

Motown, Stax, the British Invasion, and

the American Response (6:37)
Let's take a minute to take stock of some of the styles we've been talking about this week and,
and the two previous weeks and kind of add them all together because in many ways we've
talked about parallel tracks through the mid-1960s. We start talking about the British Invasion in
1964 through 66 or 67. Really from I want to Hold Your Hand to the release of Sgt Pepper in the
summer of 57. The American response to that after initially a lot white pop musicians kind of
feeling like they've been knocked, had the pins knocked out from under them, are back by the
summer of 1965. Bob Dylan, The Byrds, the folk rock, a lot of the folk rock stuff that we were
talking about last week. And now we've talked about Motown, who, whose success really sort of
paralleled that of the British Invasion, having, even having hits before the British Invasion, but
continuing to go strong through that period. Seemingly unaffected by the British Invasion. And
Stax, who really kind of rise a little bit later after the British Invasion. So we get into 65 and 66.
We're talking about Aretha Franklin in 67, 68, the southern soul kind of sound. so what exactly is
is the influence there? I would say that through Motown black pop really remained on the pop
charts in a way that is almost continuous with what was happening at the 60s. So if you take
groups like the Charelles, and the Ronettes, and the Crystals and Benny King and the Drifters
and then you transition over to groups like The Supremes and The Temptations and The Four
Tops and Martha and the Vandellas. You get a relatively continuous stream of black pop artists
at the top of the, of, of the charts, even if the location seems to move from New York based to
Detroit based. The rise of Stax, however, in pop, really sort of broadened the market for black
pop by the second half of the decade, because Stax music really brought in a lot more of the
more sort of unabashedly black influences, especially those derived from the church from the
gospel tradition. And as I said before, when we say Stax, we're really sort of talking about
southern soul, because a lot of this music wasn't really recorded in the Stax studios or, or, or
Memphis at all. One important thing to, to know is that old school music business practices really
remained enforced in a lot of this new music and the, the roles of producers and song writers,
especially. And black pop during this period. and I think it's also important to as I've said in a
couple of different ways to just to reinforce that black pop was not really forced off the charts by
the British Invasion. in many ways the British Invasion was important because it, it was
something new that added a new potent force into popular music, but it didn't really shut down a
lot of things that other people were doing. It changed things, but it, it didn't, it didn't force black
music off the charts. I would say Motown and Stax did not react as much to the British Invasion
as white pop did. so, in many ways, black pop seemed relatively un, not unaffected but far less
affected than those groups, the White pop groups that thought they had to come back with
something in response to the Beatles, the American response, Paul Revere and the Raiders, The
Byrds, some of these folks. what really strikes me are the similarities between Motown and Stax,
because as I said before a couple of times in this video, they've always been sort of set up as
almost like sort of polar opposites. And you know and the whole question of whether or not Stax
music is somehow blacker that Motown music. But we look at it. And if you look at the
similarities, you know, both labels had their own studio in which they did all their recording. that is
Stax studio specifically. And even if we include the Muscle Shoals Sound Studio, that sort of
broadens out, broadens out the Stax side. Still, it's an individual studio devoted songwriters
studio bands, a lot of it is, is, is very similar between the two. so is Stax really blacker than
Motown? Remembering that we have to be sensitive when we talk about these issues of these,
these racial kinds of issues. Let's just do a quick sort of comparison here. The Motown musicians
and artists were almost all black. There were some white artists involved in with a guitar player or
two, couple of folks who were white who were involved in the Motown operation. But, you know,
it was, it was black owned and almost everybody there was black. Now Stax, on the other hand,
was white owned and the studio band which was a great thing, was integrated but still it was, you
know, two white guys. And two black guys. So in terms of just you know for just sort of counting
heads, in a certain sense Motown was really the blacker label than Stax from that point of view.
Now sound wise, stylistic wise, lot of people would, would say that's, it's very different, but, it's
worth pointing out anyway that, that these things are never as simple and as facile. especially
when it comes to issues of race, as they're, as they're often portrayed to be. So it's good to into
some of the other kind of other kind of sort of facts surrounding this. it's true. The Stax recordings
were much more un, unbuttoned and loose sounding. When you listen to a lot of those Stax in
Southern Soul recordings you hear, especially the singers doing things that never would've
shown up in, in most Motown recordings. there's a kind of improvisational, Gospel influence kind
of element that Berry Gordy probably would have tamped down a bit because he was afraid of
alienating a, a certain element of the white, audience. So, in, in, in effect Motown Records
sounded very produced, very controlled ironically a lot like the way Atlantic Records production
sounded in the 50s when they're juxtaposed against somebody like Chess Records. Of course
now we're talking about Motown being the polished record. And the label that's associated with
Atlantic Stax being the one that sounds more unbuttoned and, and, and looser. Motown was
obviously more pop oriented and concerned with mainstream crossovers. So when we think
about this Stax, Motown thing it's good to turn all of these different variables around. and think
about develop your own opinion on whether or not you think Stax was somehow a label that was
blacker or more authentic and embraced its own blackness more than Motown records did. Or do
you think it's an unfair criticism of Motown, to think of them as somehow selling out their
blackness for the sake of a white audience. I won't give an answer to that. I'll leave it for you to
decide. In the mean time, let's, let's turn our attention to somebody who's never been accused of
selling out his blackness in any way, shape, or form, and that's the godfather of soul himself,
James Brown.
James Brown (12:44)
We now turn to the music of James Brown. And the strange, in terms of the discussion that we've
already been having, the strange kind of situation where James Brown, in his music, makes
hardly any contentions to what might be thought as of preferences and white taste. Nevertheless,
he releases record after record in the 1960s, the 1970s, that crossover on to the pop charts and
have tremendous success. So how can this be? How can this be, when Barry Gordy, Jr., had it
all sort of worked out what it would take to get these records to crossover that James Brown,
who's not doing any of those kinds of things, is having such success? Well, let's talk about the
career of James Brown, because he's a very interesting figure not only in the history of Black
pop, but certainly in the history of American popular music in the 20th century. His early career,
James Brown was born in South Carolina but raised in Southern Georgia. He had regional
success in the mid 1950s with his group The Fabulous Flames who were booked by Little
Richard's manager. Little Richard, remember, came out of the Southern Georgia area as well.
And in fact, when Little Richard's Tutti Frutti caught on nationally, all of the sudden he was a hit
artist and all that kind of thing
The manager for Little Richard still had a bunch of gigs booked that Little Richard was supposed
to do, but he didn't want Little Richard to do them because he wanted to send him off to do
television dates and other kinds of things that were out of Georgia and out of the region and
much, much bigger. And so, actually, James Brown did those gigs for Little Richard. I can't tell
you for sure whether or not they even bothered to tell the people who bought the tickets that that
wasn't Little Richard they were seeing. But nevertheless, James Brown got one of his first big
breaks by sort of being Little Richard at gigs that had been booked fro Richard. James Brown's
first big hits Please, Please, Please, number six on the R&B charts in 1956. James Brown was
signed to King Records in Cincinnati, which was run by Syd Nathan and had a very long standing
relationship with King Records in Cincinnati and with Syd Nathan who became a kind of mentor
figure to James Brown in many ways. James Brown's music in the 1950s is mostly in the Doo-
wop style. If you listen to Please, please, please I think you'll say that it sounds an awful lot like
some of the other Doo-wop of the era, maybe a little sort of rawer in a certain kind of way,
because already there's that kind of passionate, enthusiastic James Brown vocal sound. Kind of
this sort of aggressive vocal of his. A little bit over the top with the pleading on the please,
please, please. But we will begin to see a change in that style when we get into the 1960s.
Before we talk about that, though, it's important to acknowledge the central role of the stage
show in the James Brown experience. Often referred to as the hardest working man in show
business,

LSD, Music, and the Trip

Well now we get started with week seven of the course, the final week of this part one of the
history of rock. We'll be talking about the Psychedelic era, which is generally thought of the time
from about 1966 through 1969, the very end of the 60's, I call this chapter I think in the book
"High Times and Big Ideas. And I say that somewhere, I'm not really quite sure where. but let's
review where, how we got to this point. we talked about the British Invasion, The Beatles coming
to this country in 1964, February 1964, and starting a craze for British music. we talked about an
American response, The Byrds and Bob Dylan, the summer of 1965 and their response to the to
the the music of the Beatles and the British invasion, and bringing the, the rise of folk rock and,
and a lot of the music that came with that. and then we talked about at the same time. The rise of
Motown and Stax during the mid 60's and this the black pop scene during those years. And so all
of that is kind of blending together as we get into 1966 and. we have a psychedelic scene that
begins to arise. So, we're going to talk about that this week and I, I want to, just before we start, I
want to talk about some of the main ideas that are going to come up during this week's lectures.
One of the most important ones that we're going to talk about is the idea of mainstream. Versus
subculture. when we talk about subcultures, musicial musical scholars like to talk about this topic
an awful lot because a subculture means something that's going on in a musical scene that's sort
of off the mainstream radar. So, in, in this case, for example, we're going to talk about a
psychedelic subculture that's happening in San Francisco. And a parallel one that's happening in
London. And for the first year and a half, maybe two years of that scene, it's pretty much off the
radar. The only way you would know about the Psychedelic subculture is if you actually went
there and visited. Every now and again it was in the news, but not really sort of mainstream. So
you've got mainstream acts doing one kind of thing, sort of in the public eye nationally and
internationally. And you've got other acts that are, that are developing something as well, what
we're going to call the psychedelic movement, the psychedelic, psychedelic music, is happening
in a subcultural thing. And so we're going to make a distinction between mainstream acts and
subculture acts, and talk about, a bit about the subcultures in San Francisco and London, and to
a certain extent, Los Angeles. The second big idea is what we're going to call the growth of
musical ambition and the formation of something I call the hippie aesthetic. this is the idea that as
we, as we go. From the end of the 50's through the 1960's, we can begin to trace a pattern of
musicians, at least some musicians getting increasingly ambitious about what the music should
do. The music starts to become much more important as a kind of artistic utterance. An artistic
creation. As opposed to just being a kind of a, a kind of thing that where the music is made and
then easily disposed of like a paper towel or a dixie cup or something like that, use once and
throw it away. Instead, they start having much more ambitious ideas about what their music can
be, that they can start with, really sort of start to become art. We talked a bit about that with
regard to The Beatles and The Beach Boys and Dylan in previous weeks. So here's for all that is
really going to come together for us. We also want to ask the question, how can music be
psychedelic? I can, I can understand how drugs can be psychedelic but how can music be
psychedelic? And the, one of the distinctions we're going to make here is the idea of music
accompanying the drug trip as opposed to music being a kind of trip of its own. So we will follow
those themes all the way through this week. So let's dive right in now. And let's talk about the rise
of LSD. When we talk about psychedelia, we really can't talk about psychedelic music without
saying something about drug use. And I don't want it be understood that somehow I am
endorsing drug use, or telling people who watch these videos that they should go out and try this
because it's fantastic. None of that is what's going on here. As a historian we're just looking at
this objectively, trying to figure out exactly what went on. LSD, while there were a lot of drugs
circulating around during this period. LSD is the one that's usually sort of focused on because it's
a hallucinogenic drug that has some of the effects, at least according to its proponents, has some
of the effects that comport with some of the counterculture ideas and the aesthetic that goes with
it. LSD itself was developed by a Swiss chemist by the name of Albert Hoffmann in 1943. He was
looking for a cure for migraine headaches. and so had been handling this particular formulation
of the drug in the in the lab and, and as the story goes did not really ingest it. But the drug was
absorbed through the skin, through touching a formulation of it. And so it was absorbed into this
bloodstream through the skin so he maybe wasn't so aware that that had occurred. After all,
even if he was aware of it, what's the worst that could happen? He would be protected maybe
against migraine headaches, because that's what he was shooting for. Scientists work on a lot of
drugs, but most of the don't pan out, and so he probably had no real fears about that. Well, the
story that's often told, who knows whether it's true, a lot of times these things are apocryphal,
but, and exaggerated, but his lab assistant saw that he was acting a little bit funny as he was
getting ready to leave the lab that day. And, apparently both he and the lab assistant rode to
work on bicycles. and so Hoffmann gets on to his bike and is going to be driving home and the
lab assistant thinks well just for safety sake I think I better follow him. apparently as the as he
was taking this bicycle trip home the LSD started to kick in. And according to Albert Hoffmann's
perception of what was going on, he was going very, very slowly and the horizon was rising and
falling and he was having all these experiences with color and it was like it was, the whole thing
was happening in slow motion. According to the lab assistant, he was going like crazy on this
bike and what we had there essentially in 1943 in Switzerland was the first real. LSD trip, but
Albert Hoffman saw what he could do, he sort of wrote up his his findings and the drug was
people would look for what can we do with the drug that has these kinds effects. The CA, CIA,
the American Intelligence Organization got involved and thought well maybe this would be a
great truth serum to use like on Russian spies or whatever, to get them to spill the secrets that
were, were, we, we, we would like to hear about. And it was also thought of for a while by
psychiatrists. As a possibly treatment, in lower doses of course, a possible treatment for
alcoholism. and so the people who knew about this drug were people in the intelligence
community and people in the medical community, psychiatrists, doctors, dentists, people like
that. Because it was being written up as a kind of a scientific find. We'll talk in a minute about
Timothy Leary. He was one of those kinds of scientists who understood what LSD was. Really
until late 1966, October of 1966, LSD was perfectly legal. Because it really wasn't seen as much
of a threat. It was just a drug that was possible for treatment. people started using it. At first it
was outlawed in California in October, 1966, and then it became illegal around the rest of the
country. one consequence of all this is that the people who knew about LSD and its possible
recreational effects were people sort of in the upper crusts of society, doctors, dentists, perhaps
the people that they mingled with socially, lawyers, business people. who would often take, well
sometimes would take, LSD at the end of an evening while they were having their coffee after
dessert. They would drop a tab of acid and trip. And that was not thought of as dangerous as
long as you were in a confined situation and and so that's what went on. In fact the Beatles, at
least John Lennon and George Harrison were the first, if you might say, victims, of this that we
can think of among the big bands in popular music. This happened already in early 1965, The
Beatles, John and George with their wives, went to dinner with a dentist in England that they
knew. And afterwards, they were having a coffee unbenounced to them, he dosed it with a little
bit of LSD. And all of them began to trip. In fact, it didn't happen initially and the guy kept asking
him, how are you feeling? How are you feeling? And they were getting a little bit creeped out by
this. They thought he was trying to get something going on maybe sexually or something. And so
they left and as they were leaving, in the car all of a sudden LSD clicked in and the rest of the
night was a full blown LSD trip. The Beatles actually I think probably liked it. Pretty okay,
because they took again again and again for a while there. But again it came to them through
this in sort of elite party time. We talk the Beatles doing LSD in early 1965, except for Paul
McCartney who was the last one to try. Well, we don't really hear about LSD on a large scale
until the summer of 1967, which is thought of as the summer of love, and so a lot of this stuff
going on under the radar. Now, why would people want to take LSD? I mean, we, we hear what
the, what the effects of it are, what, what would be the value in that? Well one of the values of it
could be that it's just fun, you know the world is full of people who want to take drugs just to get
messed up and have a recreational time. But LSD was really invested in a more serious-minded
kind of counterculture idea. LSD was mixed up in the idea of higher consciousness. That is by
taking LSD, you could kind of break down all of the barriers that had been built up by conforming
to society's lies they would say, or the rules of society. So somehow by taking LSD you could
become more what yourself, more authentic what you had always. Maybe intended to be by
nature, but were denied by the way that you were brought up and made to conform within
modern society. So it was seen as a way to wisdom, a, a, a way to higher consciousness, and
so. This idea was very consistent with the idea of a counter culture which the hippies at the end
of the 60's began to sort of rebound this idea that we could create a culture that didn't make the
kinds of mistakes that our parent's culture made. Our parents who lied to us, our teachers who
lied to us, the government who lies to us, the church who lies to us, everybody was lying to us.
Waited to get back to the truth, and LSD could be the, kind of, magic bullet that would help you
get that higher consciousness that would be able to help you re-calibrate your mind a little bit and
see this truth. This, of course, the LSD use led to the idea of the trip. Because the LSD
experience, it was experienced as a trip. But i, the idea of, of trip became this. This sort of word
that was said, was in the the vocabulary that most people are talking about, the counterculture,
so if somebody was a-having a bad trip, it could either be a real LSD trip or could just be a bad
experience. I might say about somebody you know, what's his trip. So this idea of trip comes in
to it. Now you can think of music fitting into this in two ways. Music could be used to enhance the
LSD trip and is sort of secondary to the drug experience this is kind of what Ken Kesey and the
Merry Pranksters were about. We'll talk about them in the next video. That is that music would be
used as, as something that would be going on while you were having the drug trip as a way of
making the drug trip maybe more intense. Or, or creating some sort of stimulus that would, would
allow things to happen. But it also started to be that music itself could be the trip in absence of
the LSD or the acid itself. The idea that music takes you on a kind of journey. Then in order to do
this the music has got to become more conceptual. Musically speaking, probably more
ambitious, more seriousness of purpose. Longer certainly to take you on a trip unless it's going to
be a very short trip. Interestingly these hippies with this sort of spiritual music as a trip kind of
idea started to recreate an attitude toward especially toward absolute music which had already
been prevalent in 19th century European art music. So people had talked about Beetohoven
symphonies in a lot the same way. So what we want to do in the next video is we want to
concentrate on. How music gets serious and ambitious. If music itself is going to become kind of
a trip. Or even if it's going to enhance the trip, how does music get serious and ambitious in order
to to accomplish that goal? That's where we'll turn with the next video.

The Beginnings of the Hippie Aesthetic

In the last video, we talked about the rise of LSD and the most important thing for us to keep in
mind about this rise of LSD is that not only that there was a lot of sort of use of psychedelic drugs
going on. first of all, in a sort of subculture and then in more in the mainstream culture into 1967,
68, 69, but that LSD was used. As a way of creating a kind of a trip, and a lot of musicians either
created music that would go along with the drug trip. Music that was meant to sort of enhance
that. Or got the, having had the experience of the drug trip, tried to get music to do a similar kind
of thing. So if you listen to the, an album, could you kind of go on a kind of musical trip. Without
the LSD. Would that be possible? And so we're going to talk about. How music gets serious as it
begins to how rock music gets serious is it begins to sort of address this challenge of creating
music that could be substantial enough to, to become a kind of a trip in that way. This is the
beginnings of something that I call in the book and we'll talk about in part two of The History of
Rock, something called the Hippie Aesthetic. What makes up this Hippie Aesthetic of music? you
can begin to trace this musical ambition all the way back at least to The Drifters, There Goes My
Baby from 1959. A track produced by Leiber and Stoller. There, you begin to see them using the
orchestra in ways that are not just sweetening with strings. They're using, sort of motivic things
that really draw attention to the kind of classical character of strings and this kind of thing. we can
talk about the ambition of Phil Spector and The Wall of Sound in creating the biggest possible
sound there is, sort of teenage symphonies that kind of idea. We can talk about Brian Wilson's
studio experimentation after he stops touring with the Beach Boys and stays in the studio
constantly looking for new kinds of sounds using the studio as his kind of compositional sketch
pad, finding new sounds, the music gets increasingly ambitious. We can certainly talk about The
Beatles increasing seriousness. In fact when we talked about The British invasion. We kind of
track The Beatles movement from crafts persons to artists. That kind of thing. We can talk about
Dylan and the seriousness of lyrics and how that emerges in the mid 1960's. So by the time we
get to 1966, 1967, musicians are starting to think how can we make the music serious. We've
already had a kind of a. Serious engagement, to a certain extent, with a lot of the kinds of factors
that are going to that, that are going to make the music serious. So, here are what some of these
kinds of things are. let's first talk about serious lyrics. One of the things about the hippie aesthetic
and a lot of psychedelic music is that the lyrics should deal with serious themes, not just teen life
and romance. I want to hold your hand, she loves you, yeah, yeah, yeah. But something that
really sort of deals with serious things like spirituality or society or the role you know, the, the
terribleness of the, the terror of war and all these kinds of, serious kinds of topics that are. That
are not just frivolous kind of romance kinds of ideas. Of course, Dylan had sort of paved the way
for this kind of seriousness of purpose with his lyrics. Also, for artful crafting of the lyrics
themselves. this is part and parcel with the idea of the development of the concept album, an
album that would sort of be bigger than would be bigger than the sum of its parts. The album
itself that would sort of deal with the kind of concept and follow it all the way through. And the
album packaging would often times participate in this too. So you've got an album with serious
lyrics that all kind of deal around this, deal with a sort of central kind of topic, and then you've got
album art that participates in that. It gets much more ambitious in that way. Serious music, that's
another way in which the music can get serious. you, you appeal to musical styles that already
have a kind of cache for having seriousness of purpose. And the two, the two that are used most
are classical music. In jazz, in terms of classical music there are probably two kinds of classical
music that appeal to. One is kind of 19th century traditional classical music, the kind you might
find on the program of most classical music radio stations today. the more orchestral music,
string quartets, that kind of thing, Brahms, Beethoven to a certain extent. Haydn, Mozart
elaborate piano things, Chopin maybe even into 20th century Rachmaninoff. But very tonal
classical music and then on the other hand, avant-garde music. Tape music, synthesizers, all
kinds of sort of crazy, creative stuff that in the 60's would've been probably personified by
somebody like Karlheinz Stockhausen. in jazz it really had to do probably more with modal
improvisation and some of the kinds of things that Miles Davis started with Kind of Blue at the
end of the 50's and some of the other players, John Coltrane, and some of the others that had
gotten involved in that. But both of those styles. Classical music of both stripes. And jazz, we
thought of any communities within the community at large as being as being serious style. So if
you brought them into rock, you were making your music a lot more serious. People also start to
focus on virtuosity, and we'll talk a little bit later about the, the development of virtuosity in rock,
Jimmy Hendrix, Eric Clapton, the development of the guitar hero. It now meant something that
you are actually good at playing your instrument. You weren't just somebody standing up there in
a matching suit kind of. Playing along while somebody sang, but you actually had skills on the
guitar, or the keyboard, or the drum, or base. this kind of thing and so virtuosity starts to become
important thing. Again, drawn from those two styles are classical virtuosity or jazz virtuosity so it's
either, Itzhak Perlman or John Coltrain or Charlie Parker, for example, who are Miles Davis?
Who are some of your kind of, your idols with regard to virtuosity? The use of technology is
another thing, which helps make the music more serious. and this could be, this could be
devoted following the most recent developments in recording technology, being able to put more
and more tracks on these recordings, being able to manipulate the sounds in various kinds of
ways in the recording studio. As, as we talked about with Brian Wilson, the studio kind of
becomes a sketchpad now, it's a place for your sort of sketch out ideas. and this becomes
increasingly the, the norm at the end of the 60's. It really becomes important in the 70's, and we'll
talk about that in part two of the course. And we find the first use of synthesizers. Mostly the
Moog synthesizer, and this starts to happen sort of late 68, 69 but the Moog synthesizer initially
not being the kind of thing you could take on stage with you but being the kind of synthesizer that
would have to stay in one room. So complicated and so big, difficult to operate that you had to
hire a separate guy to come in just to work the synthesizer. And then the first sampling synthizer
which we've already encountered in The Beatles Strawberry Fields Forever. for example, which
is the Mellotron, which had each key had a separate recording of a, of a maybe an orchestra or a
choir or flutes playing that particular note. So when you played all the keys together you got a
recording of the orchestra playing a C an E and a G, and it sounded like an orchestra playing.
The earliest sampler, an analog sampler, these things start to work their way into everybody's
music because they're new sounds. They're sounds nobody's heard before. And as you get
ambitious as a musician you start to try to create something new, something that's never
happened before, something that's experimental, something that's trippy maybe. most important
thing that comes out of this is the solidification of the idea. That the rock musician now becomes
an artist. Not simply an entertainer, not simply a pretty face that shows up on the Ed Sullivan
show but now somebody who has a kind of artistic integrity which they need to develop and
which they need to protect in order to have credibility in the community. and so this idea is that
they're always exploring new possibilities, always pushing musical boundaries. So take all of
those kinds of things together, lyrics, music, virtuosity, technology, this general sort of sense of
responsibility for their music as, as, as artistic. And we can trace it as I say back to the late
1950's and forward. And by the time we start to get this. 66, 67, 68, 69, it starts to become the
dominate model. And that's mostly because these instrum, these musicians are looking for a way
to make their music more serious of purpose. Have more seriousness of purpose because they
want the music to take on a little bit more weight as listening music. And that's partly because
they're, they're, they're following the idea of the trip. And this is maybe in some ways, how music
can become psychadelic. So as we start to look at the music itself, we'll turn first. To the
innovations of the Beatles and the Beach Boys as they pushed the envelope and help us further
understand how music can be psychedelic.
Pushing the Envelope Beatles and Beach
Boys
We turn now, to the music of the Beatles and the Beach Boys. as I think I said a couple of weeks
ago. Here are two bands that not only share the same listeners, in many cases, but they share
the same label Capitol Records in Los Angeles. At least, in the United States. Now, the Beatles
were signed to EMI, and that was the the Important signing for them in the UK, but in this country
they were on the same label with The Beach Boys, Capitol out of Los Angeles. So, they not only
shared common listeners, they not only shared a common label, but they also shared a lot of
other characteristics that are maybe sometimes overlooked as they begin to sort of push the
boundaries of what it means to be a musician. With artistic ambition for their music. Now we
talked a bit about this when we talked about The Beatles earlier and we talked about The Beach
Boys earlier. So, we're going to sort of continue that story for a minute as a way of setting the
scene for the psychedelic musicians that come after them. both of these bands explored new
possibilities. And enjoyed freedom in the studio because of their success. Because their records
had been successful they were able to do things in a studio environment which was in those
days a very expensive environment to be in. Record companies weren't interested in giving just
any group hours, days, weeks in the recording studio, they had to be clear there was going to be
some financial return. And with the Beatles and the Beach Boys it was, to continue to push the
envelopes and experiment. They both used the recording studio as a kind of compositional tool,
as a way of expand the possibilities of what could be done in the recording studio and search for
new stand, new sounds. And both of them used classical features. in their music, drawing both
from the nineteenth century tradition and from Avant-guard. So in this case, we can talk about
the use of strings or orchestra instruments generally, tape editing, tape loops. These kind of
things you find, you find throughout the music. of The Beatles and The Beach Boys to some
extent with both groups. we turn now to the music of The Beach Boys and how it became
increasingly ambitious from about the mid 1960's through 1967 or so. we need to remember that
Brian Wilson is now at this point. But after about 19's, certainly by early 1965 in the studio full
time. He's no longer touring with the group as they tour because he's had a problem being able
to get onto an airplane. So he stays home and works on the music and the other guys go out and
tour it. And so he's got the luxury of being able to sit in the studio. He's sold a lot of records. He
can book studio time without any problem. Sit there and experiment with things. He's using some
of the best session musicians in L.A. A group called The Wrecking Crew. Well a group of sort of
a kind, a bunch of musicians, not just one band. There were, there were probably a dozen that
were involved in The Wrecking Crew. But they're the top studio musicians and they're coming in
and he's working on all kind of music. There's a There is a box set for Pet Sounds that you can
get that's four cd's worth of of stuff to make up one album that maybe lasts maybe 35 minutes
top to bottom. and, and that's, even that's just a selection of the tapes that were there. I mean the
guy did a lot of recording, he did a lot of experimenting. Probably the first sign we see of that is
his, is his track California Girls, which we talked about earlier. but the big album that sort of is the
arrival of the Beach Boys Sort of more experimental artistic approach is Pet Sounds from mid
1966. That album is influenced by Rubber Soul, the Beatles had released in late 1965. Probably
the two tracks on Pet Sounds you really want to check out to get the idea of the Beach Boys at
their most ambitious is a track called Wouldn't It Be Nice and most especially, A track called God
Only Knows. They then went on to do Good Vibrations in late 1966, which was released after
The Beatles album, Revolver. Which had been released in August of 1966. Good Vibrations is a
track where you can clearly hear Brian Wilson setting the different sections up, and sort of editing
them together to create this kind of composite very, very kind of trippy. a kind of peace. We're
talking about late 1966 now, and what Brian had intended to do was to release an album called
Smile. It was even advertised for release in 1967 but didn't seem to pull it all together, too much
music going on, maybe too much acid, whatever, in the studio, and so that fell apart. In the
meantime The Beatles in 1967 released Penny Lane and Strawberry Fields as a double sided
single so the sm-, the Smile Project falls apart and the, the Beach Boys instead release an album
called Smiley Smile in August, 1967, which was released after Sgt Pepper, which had been
released in June of 1967. So by comparing the releases of these two groups you can see that
they get increasingly ambitious. Brian Wilson, I guess, kind of loses in the, the, the ambition sh,
sweepstakes because he isn't able to bring Smile out, although it's been rerecorded in recent
years. We talked about this a couple of weeks ago. and it's a fantastic record on its, of its own
merits. Had it been released I think it would have had a tremendous amount of. influence, but it
wasn't. you can see the kind of back and forth between the two groups, a friendly kind of
competition. Maybe friendlier from the Beatles side than from Brian Wilson's side. I don't know for
sure. let's turn now to the, the Beatles themselves and what they were doing. Of course Revolver
is usually seen as sort of the album that really introduces at least some element of psychedelia to
The Beatles music, released in August of 1966. Primarily because of the last track on that album.
Tomorrow Never Knows, which is certainly the most avant guarde, experimental, ambitious piece
the Beatles had released up to that time. we talked a bit about that a couple of weeks ago. As I
said before, they followed with Penny Lane and Strawberry Fields. They, those two tracks were
originally going to be part of a concept album When they decided to stop touring in 19, in August
of 1966, they decided they would do, they would just be a studio band. This new album was
going to be written purposely to be not, that they would never have to worry about performing.
They were going to try to do all kinds of things in the studio that they never had to worry about
doing. live. The first two tracks, Penny Lane and Strawberry Fields were going to be on that
concept album which was going to be all about growing up in Liverpool. but because they had
used those two tracks, they didn't want to use them on the album that followed. So the concept of
the album became Sergeant Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band. The Beatles would actually be
Sergeant Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band. They would come out, they would say, we're
Sergeant Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band and the tunes would go one into each other and, as
you notice at the beginning of that album, you get Sergeant Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band
and they say, and now here's Billy Shears. Of course there's Ringo, who comes on to sing With
A Little Help From My Friends, but as they get into the second tune, they kind of drop that format
and just do tunes, until they get to the very end there's a reprise of the Sergeant Pepper music
and then they go into a Day In The Life on the second side. But, because of the packaging which
participated in this Sergeant Pepper idea. There was a gate fold cover that opened out like this,
that had a picture of the Beatles. When you brought, when you pulled the record out it had a
sleeve that had a, a little sort of cardboard mustache and a little sort of cardboard patch you
could put on. Really participated a whole lot. And the back cover had the lyrics, all of the lyrics
written out. Now surprising as it may seem today. This is the first big pop album that actually had
the lyrics written on the back of the cover. Like, you could read em without listening to the music.
Right? Of all those Dylan albums that we've talked about, the importance of Dylan as a lyricist,
the lyrics were never written out on those albums. Right? So here is already a kind of a a step
forward, a sort of putting into greater relief the context of the lyrics themselves. the album itself is
often viewed as the first concept album. Even if it were a concept album, if that, e, even if that
question, there was not a question about that, it probably still wouldn't be the first concept album.
This i, this idea can be traced back. Even back before rock and roll, back to people like Frank
Sinatra, maybe John Coltrane in jazz. But nevertheless, it was thought of as the first concept
album because of the Sergeant Pepper idea. John Lennon always said, my songs could have
appeared. On any Beatles record. I don't know what the Sergeant Pepper idea is. My songs
didn't have anything to do with it. It doesn't really matter what John said. What matters is what
people thought it was, because bands started imitating what they thought Sergeant Pepper was.
They started imitating the concept album. Idea and that's what made the album so influential. If
you're looking for the, the, the, the tracks that are perhaps the most ambitious, musically
speaking certainly a track like Being for the Benefit of Mr. Kite is one because of the sort of use
of tape loops that occurs there. But, A Day in the Life, the one that follows it is a fantastic most
of, sort of most epic five minutes of music, a lot of people have said in the rock catalogue. you
know there's two transitions where they're done totally by chance. Where the orchestra players
are just playing any instrument and any note on the instrument they just have to come together at
a particular time at the end of it on these big sort of crescendos. I'm sure if you've listened to the
track you know what I mean. And the whole thing of piecing together a John song at the
beginning, a Paul song in the middle, and then returning to a John song, putting together
fragments, doing this chant sort of orchestral build-up crescendo, all of those things make that
track the most ambitious one that they had done to date. And really sort of set a model, raised
the bar, for all those musicians that would follow and many of them began to imitate them. They
tried to continue this idea with Magical Mystery Tour, which was released in late 1967, December
of 1967, and they also did their own movie to go with it. But the movie flopped and most people
didn't think the movie was very good. They loved to see The Beatles, they loved to see the
music, hear the music, but the movie was not very good. and now the jer, now the journalists
finally could say The Beatles had finally done something that's flopped. Now they're done for. Or
of course, they weren't done, we know the story. But, even here at this late date, into 1967, into
1968, they still wanted, to write the story, that said The Beatles were all done, they'd finally
flopped. I am the, Magical Mystery Tour does contain the video for I Am the Walrus and Paul
McCartney has said a number of times he defends it on the on the value of that. also in 1967, in
August of 1967, their long time manager, or the manger since 1962 anyway, Brian Epstein dies.
apparently of a drug overdose. and so the Beatles are left without a manager at about the same
time as they're getting involved with the [UNKNOWN] yogi and transcendental meditation. and
so, in this I think we can read two things about The Beatles' career. One is that they've now got
some management issues they're going to have to deal with, and it takes them a while to sort of
get that together, and they lose a lot of money in the process. But also, this turn toward the east.
We already heard the sitar. In Norwegian Wood going back to Rubber Soul. and George
Harrison's interests in eastern music generally Within You, Without You on Sergeant Pepper.
Now this east meets west thing that The Beatles sort of enact by getting involved in trans-
elementation, going to India to visit with to study meditation with the Maharishi really sort of put it
into the mainstream. Remember, when we talk about the Beach Boys and the Beatles, we're
talking about the mainstream artists not the psychedelic underground. So by the time we get to
the summer of '67, this east meets west thing, India as the source of wisdom and a kind of
alternate spirituality really starts to come together. Of course, the Beatles after all of this sort of
psychedelic stuff, take a real trip sort of step in reverse. The White Album from November of
1968 is really more of a songwriter's collective. they begin to sort of look back to their roots more
and more. The most ambitious piece on The White Album is a taped piece by John Lennon
called Revolution number 9 which probably has the distinction of being the most widely heard
electronic music piece in the history of music. Although many people probably only heard it once
and maybe didn't even let it play to the very end. Nevertheless, it exposed a lot of people to the
idea of what electronic music could be. The Get Back project which ended up being the album,
Let It Be followed in January 1969, again. Getting back to their roots and then finally, the last
album The Beatles released in September of 1969, Abbey Road. and probably the most
ambitious things that sort of fit with our psychedelic ID here. Alright at the end of side one. I want
you she's so heavy which ends with a big creshendo of noise and looping of guitar chords and
then a very sudden stop. And the side two where Paul put together many many fragments to
create this sort of suite which kind of creates an extended piece. So now having seen what the
Beatles and the Beach Boys are doing to kind of bring some of this ambitious stuff into the main
stream. let's turn to the psychedelic sub-culture in San Francisco to hate Ashbury and see what
was happening during just at the same time. But sort of off the radar developing out in San
Francisco

Psychedelia in San Francisco -

Subculture
We turn now to San Francisco and the idea of Haight Ashbury being the heart and center of the
psychedelic movement in the late 1960's. One topic that we can engage that I've, I've mentioned
before is this idea of sub cultures and how they work in popular music. A lot of scholars are really
interested in sub cultures because it's interesting. To be able to get into a culture that's small
enough that you can really tell how music is used as ways of forming identity, and various kinds
[INAUDIBLE] how people use the music to affirm values and this kind of thing. So subcultures
are something that a lot scholars talk a lot about. So when we talk about psychedelia. with regard
to Haight Ashbury we are for first while, first couple years of it anyways talking about a subculture
because in many ways you didn't really know about what was going on in Haight Ashbury.
Maybe, early 1967 with the human being which we'll take about in just a minute. But certainly by
the summer of 67. The summer of love. Scott McKenzie. You come to San Francisco with
flowers in your hair, this kind of thing. That's when San Francisco really starts to hit the
mainstream. But we can trace the history of psychedelia in San Francisco all the way back to
1965 easily two years before it hit the mainstream. So for those two years it was kind of a sub-
culture scene. So as I said before psychedelia in San Francisco developed around the Haight
Ashbury district which is the district of fantastic sort of little neighborhood of nineteenth century
homes with a street down the center of it, the Haight. with shops and Ashbury as one of the cross
streets there goes right up against Golden Gate Park. As you get to the end of the Haight
Ashbury district you can. Cross the street and you're in Golden Gate Park, which if you've never
been there is a fantastic park in San Fransisco. I don't know how people who live in San
Francisco can ever get out of that park. it's a fantastic place to hang around. The first stirrings of
psychedelia, that is the use of LSD, trips and you know, parties where people got together with
LSD and listened to music can actually be seen out. In Virginia City, Nevada in the summer of
1965. So just a couple months after The Beatles had first had their first dental experience as
George Harrison called it. we see a lot of students going out to a place called the Red Dog
Saloon. In Virginia city, not a very long car ride to get out there. And dropping acid while they
listen to music of artists like the Charlatans, right. These are the first real sort of acid parties, that
become the kind of prototype for what's going to make it's way. back to to San Francisco. By the
fall of 1965 so that summer ends. So that summer ends we get in the fall of 1965 you start see
the first psychedelic events occurring. A group that helped organized a lot of them was a group
called The Family Dog. That's what they called themselves. They would organize these evenings
and have a couple of bands on, there would be a light show, I mean everything we've come to
associate with the San Francisco psychedelic event. They would get, you know, Longshoreman's
halls, you know, anything they could rent out fairly cheap and inexpensively, and then call the
evening a couple of the evenings that the Family Dog put on were A Tribute to Dr Strange and
what I like this one a lot, A Tribute to Sparkle Plenty. You start to see the posters for these, it
starts to have all that kind of psychedelic San Francisco poster art that we're used to. And
remembering that we're talking about the fall of 1965, so no, if you're not there. You don't even
know this is happening. This is not happening nationally, internationally, it's only happening in
this neighborhood, Haight Ashbury, you gotta be there to know that it's happening. now the, the
important person on this scene is a guy by the name of Ken Kesey, an author, One Flew Over
the Cuckoo's Nest, one of his classic novels and the idea of the acid test written about by Tom
Wolfe as the Kool Aid acid test. The acid tests were basically Ken Kesey and his bunch of
followers, the Merry Pranksters or his buddies or whatever you, whatever they may have been.
going around and, from town to town on a bus, a psychedelically painted bus, that where the
destination would be on most buses like Detroit, Chicago, you know. Boston. Instead, it says
further, right? Because they're going to take people further. They're going to go to a town. They
hand out flyers. They tell 'em there's going to be an acid test out past the city limits where the,
they can't get into trouble with the law and, for a dollar, you come in, you buy your tab of acid and
you hang out all night and you trip. They were sort of the Johnny Appleseeds of acid in the, in the
sort of drivable area around San Francisco. Now, as I said before, there're two ways maybe that
you, you want to think about. LSD one is the more idealistic way. A guy like Timothy Leary, for
example, a psy, a, a guy trained in psychology, psychiatry wrote act, actually wrote a book,
called the, the a psychedelic experience, Influenced by part maybe by the Aldous Huxley book
"The Doors of Perception", but Timothy Leary writes a kind of a clinical book about the
psychedelic experience. And when he's sayig to kids is, you know, they need to turn on tune in
and drop out, but what he really tried to do was to raise their consciousness. So is Ken Kesey
and Merry Pranksters, they're just looking for a good time. They're a little bit sort of like Dadaist,
you know anti-conformist kind of crazoids, and that's sort of what that's about. Well people start
to get in [UNKNOWN] start to get real turned on to LSD and this sort of counterculture and
experience that they're trying to develop. Mostly young people we're talking about but college
age. We're not talking about teenagers, here, we're talking about kids who are old enough to be
in college or older than that. living at homes there in the, in the area. And in January of 1967,
they put together something called, The Human Be-In, right? Sort of playing on the idea of
human being, human be-in. Well this idea of be-in. It start to get, once it starts to hit the culture
people start to do all kinds ins. There's sit-ins, love-ins, Rowen and Martin's laugh-in. Everything
becomes a kind of an in but the first one was this human be-in. So called Gathering of the Tribes
where they got music together and beat poets like Allen Gensberg. The guy who developed a lot
of this acid, a fellow named Owsley Stanley. Timothy Leary was there and they got all these,
guys together in Golden Gate Park and had this big free festival that was sort of the beginning of
the whole counter-cultural thing. It actually got national press col, coverage and people couldn't
believe the crazy people showing up. Doing crazy things in San Francisco and of course, they
attributed it to those doggone drugs that were making them lose their mind. Anyway that's the
first moment that we see that the subculture is starting to sort of make an appearance on the
national radar. What's starts to happen in San Francisco is. And Bill Graham opens up a placed
called The Fillmore which becomes a key venue for these psychedelic events and concerts and
Chet Helms opens up the Avalon Ballroom. So now there are two two concerts halls that are
pretty much devoted and outfitted for sound and for lights to create these kinds of psychedelic
evenings and so now it's starting to become more organized. Actually the Fillmore and the
Avalon start to become the kind of model for what will become venues all across the country in a
couple years, that will become the places that groups play. At this time, if you're The Beatles, or
something, going around, you're playing stadiums. You're playing places that were never really
designed for rock concerts. But now, with the Fillmore, with the Avalon, you could play places
that were design, that are primarily designed to be places where rock concerts will, will take
place. Also in San Francisco at this time a fellow by the name of Tom Donahue who had been
involved with the development of AM radio, gets the idea that it would be nice to have a radio
station. That just played the music the DJ wanted to play, which is something you could not do
on top 40 radio. And so, as the story goes, he wanted to get a station he could get cheap, FM
radio was largely unused at that time. It was mostly used by religious groups for evangelical
purposes or by universities for correspondence courses, maybe played classical music. so FM
then was really, a lot of people didn't even have FM on their radio. If you got a car you only had
an AM radio. and so Tom Donahue, as the story goes, called around FM stations in the area until
he found one that had had its phone disconnected, figuring that things must really be bad at an
FM station if you can't even pay the phone bill. I'll go talk to them. I'll bet they won't have any
problem with me going on the air. So, he goes on the air and starts to play all kinds of things he
couldn't play on AM out of his own album collection. And it turns out, people in the Haight-
Ashbury were tuning in and listening. And this whole idea of developing FM radio based around
a kind of free form, format based around album oriented kind of tracks. I mean, you, a DJ could
have said you know, I want to talk about. we're, we're going to do a set of tunes that have to do
with flying. And then like, try to drag out of his record collection, different tunes that he thought
had to do with flying or something like that. And then it could be any topic or it didn't have to be a
topic at all, who knows. Great guitar solos, whatever it took, you can do whatever you wanted.
And was kind of trippy, right? And it people in Haight Ashbury started to tune in. Well, the FM
radio format really start to catch on with them. And, like anything that catches on, somebody
comes in and figure out there's going to be way to make money and before you know it. We get
in the 70's, there's FM radio all across the country but really starts right here in San Fransisco.
There were other FM free form stations that arise at about the same time. So we shouldn't say it
was only happening in San Fransisco, but it was certainly is important it was happening there at
this time via Tom Donniehue. Also we get for the first time. magazines that are specifically
devoted to rock culture. There have always been teen magazines. Teen Beat. Pictures of you
know Paul McCartney and Peter Noon and people like that on the cover, but now we're talking
about newspapers like The Oracle first. And then Rolling Stone which came out of San Francisco
during these years. Which were really devoted to the music itself and the culture around it. The
first head shops opened in San Francisco. The most important of those. Being the psychedelic
shop where you could go and get music and beaded curtains and incense and incense burners
and drug paraphernalia, rolling papers, bongs, water pipes, whatever you might need. And it was
all there really catering specifically to this kind of hippy culture kind of thing. It didn't take too
much longer, we get into the late, the very late 60's, the early 1970's when you could find head
shops. All around the country. Where this kind of thing went on. And they became kind of HQ in
that town. Headquarters in that town for what was going on in the counter culuture in that town.
But a lot of it starts right there in San Fransisco. Well that gives you an idea of what was
happening in the San Francisco subculture. In the next video, we'll talk about some of the groups
who we are important in this San Francisco culture.