chapter zero
THE STORY SO FAR
Selection at Village Music, Mill Valley, California, circa 1980 (Photo by Mush Evans; courtesy of John Goddard)
The coming of rock and roll to postwar America was just one of the many shocks that era gave the world at the time, but it wasn’t so much the screaming teenage girls (they’d appeared with Frank Sinatra in the ’40s) or the sexually suggestive records (they’d been coming out all along) that seemed to threaten society. It was the fact that, as the form rose in popularity and began to become the default style of popular music in America, it wasn’t the wise elders of the music business who were calling the shots. You could groom a nice teenage boy, give him good material, put him on television, and promote the hell out of his records and still be met with indifference by the very kids you were trying to sell him to. This had never happened before: those kids were supposed to be passive consumers. Also, in the beginning, the real pioneers—Elvis Presley, Jerry Lee Lewis, Little Richard, Fats Domino, Chuck Berry (who was almost thirty when his career began), et al.—were a few years older than their young fans, but as the 1950s faded into the 1960s, this gap began to narrow. At first, the emerging teen stars such as Ricky Nelson and Brenda Lee were carefully managed so as not to offend parents, but with Nelson in particular, there were a lot of kids who saw him on his parents’ TV show each week and thought, “I could do that.” Maybe, maybe not. Those backup musicians were also kids, but they had experience in the studios, particularly guitarist James Burton, who’d found his way to Hollywood via the country circuit and was on other people’s records at the same time, most notably laying the snaky guitar line on Dale Hawkins’s “Suzy Q.” But some kids just flat out could “do that”: Buddy Holly went to see Elvis when Presley played Lubbock on his first tour of Texas, talked to him between sets, and found a kindred spirit. It would take Holly and his group, the Crickets, a bit longer before they were joining Elvis on the charts, but it would happen.
And on the rhythm and blues charts, lots of the vocal groups’ singers were young—Frankie Lymon and the Teenagers really were teenagers, and the Chantels’ Arlene Smith was thirteen when she sang “Maybe.” But for many white teens, that was an unknown world.
This would last for only a short time: television awaited, ready to start beaming images of these new young performers nationwide on Dick Clark’s ABC network dance party show, American Bandstand, which aired in the dead zone of late afternoon (right after school), and although the performers never played live but instead mimed to their records, they were at least visible. So were the ultra-hip—or so they appeared—Philadelphia kids who gathered at the studio to dance the latest dances on the show while wearing the latest clothes. This spawned imitators, shows that localized the phenomenon and also had touring acts on to play live when they could. The downside of Bandstand was that when a few Philadelphia-based people (such as Dick Clark, the show’s host, and some of his music biz cronies) decided they could safely take the reins of this teen phenomenon, they perpetrated those nice teenage boys and foisted them on an audience that had lost Elvis to the army, Jerry Lee Lewis and Chuck Berry to sex scandals, and Little Richard to the ministry.
But in the West, they weren’t buying this. For one thing, starting in Seattle in the mid-’50s, combos that were all electric guitars and drums, like the Ventures, the Wailers, and Paul Revere and the Raiders, were the rage, albeit for the most part only locally. This band template made its way south, where a virtuoso guitarist, Richard Monsour (who, like his father, worked in the aircraft industry just south of Los Angeles), relaxed by enjoying a sport that had sprung up after the war: surfing. He also had the itch to perform professionally, and with his father’s help, he formed a band, cut some records, and instituted weekly dances in Balboa Beach. Rechristened Dick Dale, Monsour and his band, the Deltones, referenced surfing in the title of their first hit, “Let’s Go Trippin’” (tripping being simply a slang term the kids he knew used for surfing), and wound up with a hit. Soon, surfing instrumentals were being recorded in LA and selling well even in places with no surf—and no ocean, come to that.
In nearby Hawthorne, California, a bunch of kids, three brothers and a couple of others, had been rehearsing vocal group music and, of course, hanging out at the beach, although only one of them, Dennis Wilson, actually surfed. He snapped to an intriguing fact: none of these records had words. Nobody was actually singing about surfing. Soon, his brother Brian was writing lyrics, and through their father’s connections, the group signed with Capitol Records, which, having lost its big stars Frank Sinatra and Dean Martin to Warner Bros., was desperate for hits. With the Wilsons’ group, the Beach Boys, it got them.
This wasn’t the only “I can do that” movement going, though. Starting in the mid-’50s, New York, Boston, Chicago, Philadelphia, and Denver, and college campuses all over the country, started seeing a new wave of folk revivalism. There had been one in the 1930s, fueled largely by left-wing politics and the labor movement, that had led to the ascendance of the Weavers, who had heavily orchestrated hits in the early ’50s and were brought down by the Red Scare. Performers in this new movement often shared those politics, wedding them to the current struggle for civil rights and nuclear disarmament, but their music also had a whiff of scholarship to it, largely influenced as it was by a six-LP set on Folkways Records, the Anthology of American Folk Music, which had been compiled by an eccentric named Harry Smith. The three double-album packages, labeled “Ballads,” “Social Music,” and “Songs,” exposed a world of rural recordings only thirty-five years old that had vanished almost entirely. The Anthology, and various bootlegs of country blues 78s, prompted college-age amateur researchers to head South to see if some of these people were still alive—they were—and to record them and bring them back to play concerts. The researchers also learned instrumental techniques, and many of them began playing themselves. For older teens who were becoming disillusioned with the insipidity of current pop music, this was a great way to plug into a nationwide network of like-minded individuals: show up with a guitar or a banjo and you’d meet interesting people. Some, such as teenage Robert Zimmerman, who’d left the town of Hibbing, Minnesota, for college, not only warmed to the local folk scene but also decided to start writing their own songs, mostly about injustice and contemporary society, but that hung on traditional melodies the way ’30s protest singer Woody Guthrie had done. Soon enough, Zimmerman, who’d rechristened himself Bob Dylan, was off to New York City to try to make it in the folk clubs there.
This folk thing also started appearing on the radio and the charts, at first with a group called the Kingston Trio, whose main repertoire wasn’t folk music at all but show tunes and other sophisticated composed songs that had a wide appeal to college kids. The trio’s freak hit, however, was their arrangement of a genuine folk song, “Tom Dooley,” by a banjo player named Frank Proffitt. The Kingston Trio’s basic configuration spawned a number of other commercial folk groups, as well as Peter, Paul and Mary, who bridged the gap between pure commercialism and the underground with their first hit, Bob Dylan’s “Blowin’ in the Wind.” These groups managed to set off yet another folk revival, in England: the skiffle craze. The idea of easily portable instruments and good-time sing-alongs caught on with the bohemian crowd in London’s Soho, as well as on British college campuses and among the country’s nuclear disarmament crowd. The skifflers’ repertoire was largely American folk music from the first American folk revival, heavy on hokum tunes and songs that the black singer Lead Belly had recorded in the ’30s.
The skiffle fad spread like crazy in Britain, which had largely missed the first wave of rock and roll (and whose attempts to replicate it ranged from lame to horribly embarrassing). Soon, singers such as Nancy Whiskey and Lonnie Donegan were climbing the British charts. Donegan even had an American hit with “Rock Island Line,” a Lead Belly tune, and an even bigger one with a music hall tune, the unfortunately unforgettable “Does Your Chewing Gum Lose Its Flavour (On the Bedpost Overnight)?” But the key to skiffle’s popularity was its simple demands: a couple of guitars and a bass made from a length of wash line and a lead-lined tea chest, which you could pick up behind your local grocer’s—anyone, it seemed, could do it. It soon spread out of London and all over Britain, even to Liverpool, in the north of England, where a skiffle band called Johnny and the Moondogs tried, with little success, to adapt rock-and-roll tunes to the form. The group’s leader, John Lennon, was obsessed with rock and roll, and haunted local record shops seeking out records to hear in the shop’s listening booth and shoplift or, if he had to, buy. Before a Moondogs performance at a church fête in Liverpool, a friend of Lennon’s introduced him to a kid named Paul McCartney, who had a similar obsession. McCartney had a friend who was a much better guitarist than he or Lennon but who was younger than them: George Harrison. Soon, an actual rock-and-roll band began to form. They needed work, they needed a drummer, and, well, they needed a lot of things.
Back in London, the jazz scene, which had inadvertently given birth to the skiffle scene, also developed another subgenre, blues, which several players attempted to play as break music at jazz gigs, most notably Alexis Korner and Graham Bond, who’d been listening to Muddy Waters and Sonny Boy Williamson, Chicago bluesmen with current American hits. This produced an interesting phenomenon: young fans were coming to hear them, not the main band, and had a cultish interest in the music these older men were playing. Soon, Korner had broken away from his regular employer to form Blues Incorporated, with a regular club gig that began attracting young fans of what they called rhythm and blues. One of the loudest of these fans was a young man from the suburbs named Brian Jones, who wrote impassioned letters to the music press advocating for rhythm and blues and sat in with Korner on harmonica. Eventually, Korner introduced the young fanatic to two other kids, Michael Jagger and Keith Richards, who’d bonded over their love for blues on the Chess label (including Chuck Berry), and the three holed up together in a miserable flat in Chelsea working things out. Their personnel still fluid, they eventually debuted in a South London club as the Rollin’ Stones.
This book starts a little while after that. The Beach Boys have established themselves as genuine hit makers, not just faddish promoters of fun in the sun; the Beatles have conquered England; and Capitol, which owned the rights to both of them, still needed hits. It passed on the Beatles’ first records, but in late 1963, it decided to give them a whirl. The Rolling Stones would take longer but would inspire another rush of I-can-do-that from teens eager to make their own music. The music business, the music scene, and youth culture itself were about to be transformed.
* * *
There’s a lot more complexity to the backstory here, and you should seek out and read volume one of this history to find it, which doesn’t mean you won’t get a great story if you start with this one. More important, readers who were there when all this happened will note some curious omissions or underplaying of events toward the end of this volume: disco, electronic pop, and a small revolution in country music, to state the most glaring examples. There’s a reason for this. It became evident during the writing of this volume that a third, and final, volume would be necessary to treat these and other developments with the detail and care they needed. This final volume is in the process of being written.
Another thing: the period treated in this book saw a massive outpouring of popular music. It is more than likely that some of your favorite artists from this period aren’t mentioned or are treated with a lack of the detail you may feel they deserve. There’s a reason for this: since this period saw the rise of the rock press, it also saw the rise of writers who felt they were capable of treating these subjects in great detail. You could fill several bookshelves with nothing but Beatles books, Stones books, Grateful Dead books, books on labels, books on individual albums, books on posters and album covers, as well as books of criticism and theory. I urge you to read further on topics that interest you: books consulted in the writing of this one are listed in the bibliography, but it’s far from an exhaustive one. This book is an overview, nothing more. Its purpose is to show how movements arise, how they interact with their intended audiences, and how they die. And so, on to December 1963.
chapter one
YOUR SONS AND YOUR DAUGHTERS ARE BEYOND YOUR COMMAND
A Fab Four, definitely not authorized Beatles product (Photo courtesy of Debbie Hudson Baddin, from her collection)
The world of American popular music changed forever on December 26, 1963, although nobody realized it at the time. Oh, there had been ads in the trade magazines showing four disembodied haircuts floating above the words “The Beatles Are Coming!” but so what? Hype was the lifeblood of the record business, and all it meant was that Capitol Records had (perhaps reluctantly) given in to its British parent company’s Parlophone subsidiary and decided to put out a record by an act who’d already had records out on two other U.S. labels—records Capitol had passed on. But it was undeniable that the lads were shifting units at home, so it couldn’t hurt to try the act out in the States: the band had a new record out, “I Want to Hold Your Hand,” and in the new year, Capitol would give it a shot.
It got beaten by Carroll James, a disc jockey at Washington, DC’s WWDC-AM, who got a British Overseas Airways Corporation flight attendant friend to slip him a British copy. Listeners seemed to like it, but it wasn’t for sale. TV host Jack Paar said he’d be showing film of the Beatles on his January 3 show, and that other notable TV host Ed Sullivan announced that he’d have them on his Sunday night shows on February 9 and 16.
The start of a new year is always an occasion for optimism, though, and the record biz trade magazine Billboard ran a big black headline on its January 4 issue (Billboard appears in print several days earlier than dated): FORECAST 1964 AS HOTTEST YEAR YET. Well, one would expect nothing less, but in this case it was right: two weeks later, the headline was BRITISH BEATLES HOTTEST CAPITOL SINGLES EVER. This had data behind it: “I Want to Hold Your Hand” had broken into the charts at an unprecedented 45, orders for the record had passed the million mark (200,000 of which had to be farmed out to an RCA pressing plant), and Capitol was hoping to present the Beatles with a gold record when their plane landed in February.
By the next week, war had been declared. Vee-Jay, the Chicago-based rhythm-and-blues label, had licensed a couple of Beatles tracks that Capitol had passed on in 1963, and was now claiming that it had the band under contract, filing injunctions against Capitol and Swan, a sketchy Philadelphia label that had issued “She Loves You,” which Vee-Jay had passed on. Capitol, for its part, filed an injunction against Vee-Jay, and Swan looked on as “She Loves You” broke into the charts at 69. The Beatles themselves were preparing for the American tour the way they knew best: by playing a residency at the Olympia theater in Paris from January 16 to February 4, sharing the bill with American singer Trini Lopez and French yé-yé singer Sylvie Vartan. The French reviews were lousy, but manager Brian Epstein kept getting reports from New York that made them irrelevant.
Copyright © 2019 by Ed Ward