In the beginning, rock and roll music was a provocation, an affront to parents and proper citizens. As rock
critic Jim Miller put it, "It was the music you loved to have them [parents] hate." The name itself was
sexual, deriving from black slang for copulation. Dominated by a heavy back-beat and amplified guitars,
the music was crude, raucous, easily accessible, and within a few years of its inception, tailored and
marketed specifically to the young, now a consumer block of singular importance. And rock was
inherently democratic. Any kid could muster up enough money for a guitar, and, gathering together three
or four like-minded souls, start a band—many of the best groups were started in precisely this manner.
But if the music itself was simple, its origins were not. In fact, rock and roll was the culmination of more
than a century of musical cross-pollination between white and black, master and slave; a music born of
miscegenation. It was in essence a post-modern medium, one of the first true products of the consumer
society. With a whole array of gestures, attitudes, styles, inflections, and narratives, it was endlessly
receptive to outside influences and was thus endlessly adaptable—a ground to receive all the narratives
of youthful rebellion. Hence, it was far more contingent on history than other musical forms.
When parents first heard rock music in the 1950s, they heard only cacophony. They were unaware of the
rich tradition behind rock and roll, that it was playing out a cultural evolution begun in slavery, a blending
of musical and cultural forms—African and European, religious and secular—a syncretistic blending of
two traditions of music. Prior to the Civil War, white minstrels began to copy the styles of the plantation
orchestras, becoming the rage of Europe and America. These slave orchestras had learned a smattering
of European dance tunes, which they combined with traditional African forms played on European
instruments (not too dissimilar from the lutes and fiddles used by African griots —storytellers—of the
Savannah), adapting their traditional music in ways both overt and clandestine, and thereby continuing a
cultural heritage that had been in effect outlawed by the slaves' owners. By the time of rock's inception,
this musical cross-fertilization had already occurred several times over, creating jazz, blues, gospel,
western swing, and rhythm and blues.
These new musical forms—western swing, rhythm and blues, jump blues—proliferated in the years
following World War II, the result of migrations out of the rural South and Southwest, as well as greater
dissemination through radio and records. Many country musicians introduced blues tunes into their
repertoire, while Delta blues musicians adapted to urban nightclubs with electric guitars and small combo
arrangements. In the Southwest, small combos and jazz orchestras were combining blues vocals and
arrangements with raucous saxophones and a backbeat-heavy rhythm section that spread from its
Texas-Oklahoma roots west to Los Angeles and San Francisco. The birth of rock, however, centers
around Memphis and a few farsighted individuals. Sam Phillips moved to Memphis in 1945, lured by the
black music that had been his lifelong passion. He set up Sun Studios, recording Beale Street blues
musicians, moonlighting and engineering demos to make ends meet. In 1951 he recorded "Rocket 88" by
Ike Turner. It became a number-one rhythm and blues hit and is considered by many to be the first rock
and roll song. Phillips himself was not concerned with race, but he knew intuitively that all the music he
recorded would remain "race" music until a white man recorded it. He boasted to friends that if he could
find a white singer who sang like a black man, he would make them both rich.
Memphis was home to a particularly energetic urban blues movement and a magnet for poor blacks and
whites seeking to escape the grinding poverty of the countryside. The Presley family was characteristic of
this pattern, moving there from rural Mississippi after World War II. They lived in the federal housing (the
best housing they had ever had), and the illiterate Vernon Presley got a job driving a truck. Their son
majored in shop at Hume High School, where he was regularly beaten for his long hair and effeminate
appearance, but despite these eccentricities, it was anticipated that he would follow in his father's
marginal footsteps, working some menial job and perhaps playing music on the side.
Elvis Presley's genius lay in his capacity to absorb different influences. He watched Rebel without a
Cause a dozen times, cultivating a James Dean sneer and memorizing whole pages of dialogue, and
visited the late-night gospel revivals, absorbing the religious frenzy. He listened to the radio, to the black
gospel stations and groundbreaking DJ Dewey Phillips on WHBQ. At a time when Memphis itself was
thoroughly segregated, Phillips was one of the first DJs in the country with an integrated set-list, playing
blues and country alongside each other, and his influence on Elvis was evident by the songs on the
singers first legendary Sun single—"I'm All Right, Mama," a blues by well-known Delta transplant Arthur
"Big Boy" Crudup, and bluegrasser Bill Monroe's country hit "Blue Moon of Kentucky." The bluesy "I'm All
Right, Mama" was countrified, featuring a country-style guitar solo, while Monroe's classic was delivered
with a rollicking back beat and a vocal delivery unlike any country singer; Presley sang with the fervor of
the gospel musicians he loved to watch. This single 45, the culmination of two hundred years of musical
cross-pollination, changed the music forever, and because Presley was white (an early radio interviewer
made a point of asking what high school Elvis went to simply to prove that this was so), the entire nature
of the music industry was stood on its head.
The music had arrived in the night, as it were. Like Dewey Phillips before him, DJ Alan Freed began
mixing black and white artists on his late night show, The Moondog Show, after a Cleveland record store
owner mentioned the droves of white teenagers buying black music at his store. Freed was soon
promoting live rock events, drawing crowds well in excess of capacity, and alarming Cleveland's powersthat-be with integrated audiences and performers at a time when the city was largely segregated. "This
unprecedented convergence of black and white," wrote cultural theorist Dick Hebdige, "so aggressively,
so unashamedly proclaimed, attracted the inevitable controversy which centered on the predictable
themes of race, sex, rebellion, etc., and which rapidly developed into a moral panic." Freed became a
champion of scandal, an unashamed proponent for the young, and one of rock and roll's first martyrs,
suffering legal harassment throughout his career and later an indictment in the Payola Scandal (he died
sick and penniless in Palm Springs), but he was a crucial figure in its dissemination, especially when his
1954 move to WINS in New York blanketed the East Coast with rock and roll music.
Having seen the commercial potential of rock and roll, the large record companies were eager to profit
from the craze but were not altogether enthusiastic about the music itself. Rock and roll was not
respectable, nor proper; it was redolent of the kind of culture mainstream America had tried to keep at
arm's length for years. Its growing popularity fed into middle-class anxiety that their children were being
inextricably corrupted; a study on juvenile delinquency by a Dr. Walter B. Miller asserted among other
things that the parental anxiety was not attributable to any increase in delinquency as much as to the
adoption by middle-class youth of conduct formerly reserved to the working class; that is, the adoption of
a whole array of slangs, styles, and attitudes—proletariat chic—that comprised rock and roll in its
essence. Needless to say, the corporate record companies were uncomfortable with Southern and black
musicians alike. They were suspicious of rock, could not fathom it, and, as history will attest, did their
utmost to tone it down whenever possible. Rock's original journeymen were replaced by sanitized teen
idols—Bobby Rydell, Fabian, Frankie Avalon—scrubbed and polished little gems, carefully groomed for
their role as sex symbols minus the sex. "It [the music] tended to become bowdlerized, drained of surplus
eroticism, and any hint of anger or recrimination blown along the 'hot' lines was delicately refined into
inoffensive nightclub sound," wrote Hebdige of jazz's mutation into swing. The same could be said of rock
and roll in the late fifties. There was pressure to cleanse the music of unwholesome (black or the more
obvious poor Southern musician) influences. Jerry Lee Lewis fell victim to this cultural sanitation,
convicted by public opinion of incorrigible perversity after he married his teenage second cousin. His
music was as heavily influenced by white Pentecostal ecstasy as by black gospel, but Lewis's very
personal battle with sin made him an obvious target for the legions of decency. Chuck Berry was
dispatched first through violation of the Mann Act, and then by internecine squabbles with the IRS that
netted him several jail terms, but it was the infamous Payola Scandal (payola being a term for the bribery
to which many small record companies resorted in order to get airplay) that broke the market power of
small, independent labels and cleansed the airwaves for the sanitized dreck of the teen idols.
As it was, most of the original rock-and-rollers fell victim to a premature anachronism. Of all the pioneer
musicians who carved rock and roll out of the musical wilderness, only Johnny Cash and Elvis survived
the early 1960s as anything more than an oldies-but-goodies attraction. A list of these performers reads
like a litany of bad luck and willful destruction: Buddy Holly, Ritchie Valens, and the Big Bopper dead in a
plane crash, February 3, 1959; Chuck Berry and Jerry Lee Lewis, who found out too late that fame could
not insulate them from the law; the flamboyant Little Richard, who traded in rock and roll for the Bible;
Carl Perkins, destroyed by alcohol and drugs; rockabilly legend Eddie Cochran, killed in an automobile
accident in England just after rock's first decade came to a close. Pioneering always exacts a heavy price
on body and soul, and it would appear that bringing rock and roll into fruition turned out to be one of the
more lethal endeavors in the creative history of the modern era.
While the pioneering musicians' music and influence was being subsumed in the United States by teen
idols, in Great Britain rock and roll was undergoing a parallel evolution that started where stateside rock
left off. Vintage rock, blues, rhythm and blues, and country were originally brought over by American
servicemen following World War II. For the British youth, it was a revelation, a welcome change from the
threadbare music hall tradition of British jazz. The ensuing generation of British rock stars, from ardent
blues revivalists to their pop-inflected cousins, all credit the importation of American music as being
central to their musical evolution. The British heard rock and roll through a cultural scrim, a sensibility
expertly attuned to picking up the subtleties of class differences. With its introduction, the music was
formed amid a complex, invisible relationship between its roots in the working-class American South and
the chronic dissatisfaction of the British working class, curtailed by the accident of birth from anything
more meaningful than menial labor. The British absorbed blues and rock like holy writ, bringing to the
music an insouciance born of desperation that had withered in American pop. The British groups that
would emerge as vanguards of the new style—the Beatles, the Animals, the Rolling Stones, the
Yardbirds, Them, the Dave Clark Five, not to mention a whole host of lesser names—introduced an
enthusiasm for American forms that seemed fresh and vital. Incidentally, it caused near riots, panic in the
streets, and all sorts of other commotion when it returned to American shores, capturing a new generation
grown quite bored by Frankie Avalon, Annette Funicello, Connie Francis, and company.
The expropriation of rock by British artists had a profound effect on rock music and rock fashion, as if,
seen through the alien lens of another culture, rock music was revealed as at once more complex and
more immediate to American musicians. Many of the British musicians—John Lennon, Pete Townshend,
Keith Richards, to name a few—were the products of the English art school system and took influences
from the world of art, especially the pop artists and their preoccupation with the language of advertising
and their enthusiasm for obliterating the traditional demarcation between high and low art. In fact,
Townshend borrowed the idea of auto-destruction from a lecture by artist Gustave Metzke at
Townshend's art school, Ealing. As Chris Charlesworth wrote shortly before that crucial year, 1967, "Pop
music was no longer aimed directly at young fans who screamed at their idols, and neither was it looked
upon by its creators as a disposable commodity, good for a quick run on the charts and little else." Rock
strove to make statements and be considered as serious art. In the Beatles' single "A Day in the Life" (on
Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band), one can hear echoes of John Cage, Nam June Paik, and the
whole current of high art. "How does the musician compose," wrote Dave Marsh, "when what's being
heard is not the noise that the instrument and/or orchestra makes but the noise that the instrument and/or
orchestra makes many times removed, on a piece of black plastic with a context of its own? This is what
John Russell refers to as the 'element of exorcism' in pop, and it functions as effectively in a Who 45 as in
an Oldenberg sculpture.… Thus were barriers—between art objects and everyday stuff, between the
theory of avant-garde viewers and unaesthetic masses, between high culture and low, between
respectability and trash—not simply eradicated but demolished."
The ecstatic communion of a Fillmore West concert (very similar to the ecstatic communion of the "holy
rollers" who so influenced Elvis, Jerry Lee Lewis, and others) was a connection to rock's past, but rock
music was fundamentally at odds with mainstream culture in a different way than in the 1950s. No longer
was it a matter merely of social stigma or cultural chauvinism on the part of the dominant culture. "For
performers like John Lennon, Bob Dylan, and Pete Townshend, Vegas and supper clubs, Hollywood
movies and glittering television specials weren't a goal, they were a trap to avoid," wrote Marsh. "Very few
of the post-Beatles performers courted the kind of respectability that Col. Tom Parker or Larry Parnes
would have understood." For generational reasons and in large part because of the Vietnam War, which
many rock performers viewed as symptomatic of a larger rot, the options that had satisfied previous
generations of performers were no longer open to rock musicians. But as a music, rock was more
dependent on the whole armature of consumer capitalism than any previous genre, and in the ensuing
decade, these contradictions became glaringly apparent.
Rock is a porous music; this is its value as a social glue and, like other essentially postmodern arts, also
its weakness. It is wholly contingent on historical circumstance, not divorced from it, and with the end of
the 1960s, rock would once again be in the position it had occupied in the early 1960s—a holding period
until the next big thing came along. Early in the 1970s, 1960s rock had become but a vivid memory, with
many of its best talents dead or in retirement: Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, and Jim Morrison were dead; the
Beatles had broken up. Those bands that remained intact could offer little more than a gesture of
resistance (the gesture being an important figuration of the music—think of Pete Townshend's
upstretched arm about to rip through his guitar strings, or Mick Jagger's effeminate stage persona,
mincing and limp-wristed). Without the cohesion of the Vietnam War behind that rebellious, defiant
gesture, it was employed as mere dramatic embellishment. It might be striking, but rock had become
essentially hollow.
With nothing left to rebel against, rock devolved into specialized subgenres that bore only a passing
resemblance to each other—heavy metal, the singer-songwriter, country rock, disco. The music was
reflective of lifestyle choices as much as generational identity, and it no longer spoke to issues of class
and youthful rebellion, except in the most base, degraded manner. The gentility of a Joni Mitchell listener
bespoke sensitive college-educated professional; Fleetwood Mac and the Eagles, a relaxed middle-class
hedonism—nonintellectual, but respectable; while the testosterone bluster of heavy metal—the music of
choice for teenage boys and a certain type of blue-collar post-adolescent, hence its status as keeper of
rock's rebellious flame—was critically derided. Critics might deride both disco and heavy metal, but
appropriately enough, it was these two genres that transcended class distinctions in a similar manner to
1950s rock: as constituting a craze.
In the 1980s, rock, its fire stolen by the punks, appeared even more moribund. Its leading proponents
were either aging or one of a variety of manufactured anonymous drones producing vapid, formulaic
music not so dissimilar in content from the offerings of the teen idol years. Rock music had been
assimilated, contained, and with the advent of MTV, entrenched in an "entertainment" industry to a far
greater degree than ever before. Even punk, which had begun its life as a brutal caricature of consumer
culture, insisting that rock must be detourned, as the French would say, led away from its intended
signifier, was finally integrated into the mainstream fifteen years after the fact. One could see the
commercial acceptance of bands such as Nirvana, Rancid, and Green Day as evidence of some final
cooptation, or the stardom of Marilyn Manson as a final embrace and integration of the other (when all is
familiar, nothing is strange) or as punk rock's final triumph. More likely, punk's popularity was proof that
the gestures of youth rebellion, as they had been since James Dean, were implicitly exciting and thus
easily marketed given the proper incentive, which is, if one is a record executive, to swallow one's
revulsion all the way to the bank. Was rock finally a dead form, as safe and nonthreatening as swing
music?
With such theorizing, it is easy to lose sight of rock's essential nature as being anti-high-art, proletarian,
and egalitarian. What was true in the 1950s—that rock in its fundamentals was easy to play, hence easily
accessible—remains true in the present, though some rock music is indeed as difficult and as rigorous in
composition as any classical music. But there is a possibility inherent in rock, a possibility inherent in all
folk forms. The music is not owned by experts or specialists, but by the people; rock celebrates the
potential of four kids getting together in a garage and playing. And as a legacy of rock's roots in slave
music, where the slave master's strict prohibitions necessitated concealment, rock encodes within it a
hidden corrosive message, a secret, a call to arms based on symbols and repetition discernible to anyone
with a mind to decipher it, broadcasting its complaint despite the manipulations of record executives.
"According to one theory," writes Lester Bangs, "punk rock goes back to Ritchie Valens's 'La Bamba.' Just
consider Valens's three-chord mariachi squawkup in the light of 'Louie Louie' by the Kingsmen, then
consider 'Louie Louie' in the light of 'You Really Got Me' by the Kinks, then 'You Really Got Me' in the light
of 'No Fun' by the Stooges, then 'No Fun' in the light of 'Blitzkrieg Bop' by the Ramones, and finally note
that 'Blitzkrieg Bop' sounds a lot like 'La Bamba.' There: twenty years of rock & roll history in three chords,
played more primitively each time they are recycled."
—Michael Baers