When The Music Died The Guitars Cried

Part 1 - the life and death of rock'n'roll

Kenton Nelson

That feeling Mark Fisher had in the 2000’s, that musical progress had stalled, is a variation of something that’s happened before. I don’t doubt Beethoven felt it, I know Schoenberg did, and the subculture felt it when Syd, Jimi, Janis and Jim were killed by the man, or by Hell’s Angels at Altamont, accounts differ. The punks even felt it when Nancy Spungen died, despite punk’s built-in mortality clause, and the deaths of Kurt Cobain and Shannon Hoon also seemed to threaten progress, though progress was becoming a more fragmented thing by then, so that the recent spectacular rise and fall of Juice WRLD has left little mark in the mythos; Spotify sells kitsets if you want to keep his music alive without even knowing who he was.

There was perhaps no more disastrous end to a revolution than that which befell the first electric rock revolution. That music, OG rock’n’roll, didn’t die on any particular day, but the Beatles didn’t kill it either, they reanimated its corpse. And in the meantime, something had happened to guitar music that made the Beatles phenomenon a second revolution that successfully completed the work of the first.
Who invented rock’n’roll? Its core idea, a 12-bar based dance music, had been around for quite a while. Glen Miller’s “In The Mood”, the jump jazz of Louis Jordan, boogie woogie piano – these just needed toughening up and electrification, preferably with the brutal electric guitar sound coming from Chicago blues players. Some say Ike Turner was first on the job with Rocket 88 (1951) which even has a nasty fuzz tone (you can hear it best at the end) on Ike’s rhythm guitar because his amp fell off the back of his truck on the way to Sam Phillips’ Memphis studio and had to be stuffed with paper to stop it rattling.

Rocket 88 was the juke box hit of 1951, and its lyrics – the car as metaphor for musical motion, worldly success, and sexual prowess – were also genre-inspiring. Ike would later say "I don't think that 'Rocket 88' is rock 'n' roll. I think that 'Rocket 88' is R&B, but I think 'Rocket 88' is the cause of rock and roll existing", which seems about right as he never followed up as a rock’n’roll artist and had a long career in R&B. Songs like Rocket 88 had existed before, all from black musicians on segregated playlists, but the important thing is that “Rocket 88” jumped the colour bar in its popularity; rock’n’roll was a revolution that required that jump from its (mostly young) listeners and performers, and it was a jump the establishment were not going to appreciate. The rock’n’roll songs we know today didn’t hit the charts until 1955; Little Richard’s “Tutti Frutti”, a piano driven 8-to-the-bar – crucially, the swing is removed, every note given equal emphasis, increasing the sense of speed – with more-or-less nonsense lyrics, which in repressed times sound sexy, especially yelped at fever pitch like Little Richard yelped them. Bill Haley and his Comets were a group of older white musicians with a western swing background (western swing was a kind of jazzed up country music featuring electric guitar and saxophone) who had studied the precursors well and were keen to join in after playing “Rocket 88”, with a series of covers and novelty songs (which would become the norm as the genre deteriorated). It was their “Rock Around The Clock” which led the vanguard of the revolution in Great Britain when it appeared in a film about juvenile delinquency, Blackboard Jungle, and caused riots in movie theatres there.

Juvenile delinquency had been growing since the War and was associated with the souped-up cars known as hot-rods (in the US), the carrying of knives and razors, teen pregnancy and the occasional violent crime. It was the moral panic of its day and reactionary parents and rebellious youth both wanted rock’n’roll to be associated with it. This didn’t necessarily suit the musicians, but they had no choice except to sweeten up and add strings, or in the Deep South, to find God. If rock’n’roll was the music rebels liked, then it was also the Devil’s music because Satan is the god of disobedience. This was a catch that made some stars raised in church music, like Little Richard and Jerry Lee Lewis, repent now and then, but it meant nothing to Chuck Berry, the true genius of the genre, who had made his own deals with the Devil and generally gotten good terms. Berry’s first hit Maybellene (1955) was led by his electric guitar and combined electric blues sounds and country rhythms; the use of guitars to replace the parts played by horns, and of Johnny Johnson’s piano to colour and differentiate each song rather than lead the rhythm, were key innovations.¹ Chuck began to combine blues and country changes into original structures, and would sometimes throw in Latin rhythms, popular in the jazz of the 50’s – “Rock And Roll Music” incorporates “La Cucaracha”, “Havana Moon” was an original experiment in sustaining a Latin style, and in “School Days” we have perhaps the first twin guitar attack in rock; Chuck Berry has perfected rock’n’roll (all of these songs were released in 1957), but more than that, he has invented guitar rock – except for one thing; the singing, single-line melodic solo.

Rock’n’roll was by definition a teenybopper phenomenon, something made for kids; the concept of cool, Lester Young’s revenge on white society, barely applied to it yet, although the personas of James Dean and Marlon Brando that the fans adopted predicted future schisms. The stars were all happy to appear in the corniest films. But if we choose to see it as a musical revolution it’s an object lesson in how revolutions fail – its leaders brought low by hubris, fate and the power of the State, its potential for radical change syphoned off and diluted by lesser opportunists and captured by the institutions it threatened to overthrow.
Elvis Presley was the greatest publicist for the new sound, beautiful to look on, polite and obliging in person, wild and sexual on stage. His “Heartbreak Hotel”, which powerfully tapped into teen self-pity with a grown up, Nicholas Ray sense of drama, was a promise of something heavier, deeper and darker to come, but “Heartbreak Hotel” was the composition of professional songwriters² and Elvis, who, having a relatively rare first name, usually a feminine attribute, could have dispensed with his surname, was too much at the mercy of outside influences once lured away from Sam Phillips’ care, and in any case had too wide a love of music to commit to any genre. Rock’n’roll was an artform based on 7” singles, and albums put out at the time often contained substandard filler material, but the early Elvis recordings at Sun Studios, collected as The Sun Sessions, make it one of the indispensable rock’n’roll albums, as is the Chuck Berry collection “The Great 28”.

In December 1957, Presley received his draft notice, enrolling in the US Army on March 1958; he was out of circulation for two critical years and although the album made on his release, Elvis Is Back (1960), was a strong collection, and he would continue to render outstandingly effective, often definitive interpretations of great songs throughout his life, his increasingly fraudulent early 60’s movie career and corny (mom and) pop singles like “Wooden Heart” made him appear tamed, if not gelded.

Meanwhile, in May 1958, Jerry Lee Lewis ran into scandal when he tried to tour Great Britain with his 13-year old first cousin once removed, Myra Gale Brown, the 22-year old’s third wife. The DJ who had done most to promote the new music, Alan Freed, was discredited by a payola scandal which revealed that not only had he accepted bribes to play records (made illegal in the US in 1962 but still pretty much the norm one way or another today), he’d also taken co-credits on songs, like Chuck’s Maybellene, before promoting them, so that he could collect royalties from those he made into hits. Little Richard, conflicted between his religious upbringing and a growing awareness of his gayness, underwent a religious conversion on tour in Australia in 1957 and retired temporarily from secular music. In 1959 Chuck Berry was charged under the Mann Act, a law passed during the “white slaving” panic that criminalized the transport of minors across state lines for “immoral purposes”; the Mann Act had been employed to jail the first black world heavyweight boxing champion Jack Johnson, after he travelled across America with his young white wife. Berry had met a 14-year old Apache girl in a bar in El Paso Texas, Janice Escalante, who, implausibly convincing him that she was 21, was invited to travel with him and work in the club Berry owned in Saint Louis, where she later fell out with him. He would not be jailed till 1962, for a year-and-a-half, but publicity around his trials and appeals damaged his popularity.
The removal or cancellation of the main players in rock’n’roll, all Southerners, left the field open to imitators and manufactured teen idols from more sophisticated parts of the Union. Bobby Darin, after several unsuccessful goes at writing hit records, had hits with “Splish Splash” and “Queen Of The Hop” in 1958, and would go on to have a rich and varied career that included his own moment of anticommercial redemption, but most of the others are best forgotten.

New blood should have reinvigorated the art form – Texan Buddy Holly had hits with “That’ll Be The Day” and “Oh Boy” in 1957, pop songs played in rock style with his backing band The Crickets, and notably popularized Bo Diddley’s unique contribution to rock in “Not Fade Away”; yet his final sessions were not rock’n’roll but attempts to turn himself into a pop singer with a string orchestra backing; he had split amicably with The Crickets and planned to move to New York.³ Holly died in a plane crash in 1959 alongside up-and-coming stars Richie Valen (“La Bamba”) and The Big Bopper, whose “Chantilly Lace’ improved on Jerry Lee Lewis’ style with eloquent inarticulacy.

Eddie Cochran’s “Summertime Blues” (1958) was the most important new record of this period; a state-of-the nation report on the teen condition that starts to get political; recorded with a chunky acoustic sound, a driving scotch snap bass line and minimal percussion, it still sounds fresh.

I'm gonna take two weeks, gonna have a vacation
I'm gonna take my problem to the United Nation
Well I called my congressman and he said quote
"I'd like to help you son, but you're too young to vote"
Sometimes I wonder what I'm gonna do
'Cause there ain't no cure for the summertime blues

In April 1960 Cochran, after touring the UK, was travelling in a taxi from Bristol to Heathrow airport with Gene Vincent and songwriter (and unofficial fiancée) Sharon Sheely, who co-wrote (with Cochrane’s brother Bill) “Something Else” (later covered by Sid Vicious).⁴ The car hit a lamppost, Vincent and Sheely were seriously injured, and Cochran, thrown from the vehicle – these were the days before seatbelts, and airbags hadn’t even been imagined – died from brain injuries the next day. Gene Vincent’s injuries required him to perform in calipers for the rest of his life – Vincent, the leather clad survivor, became the rocker’s rocker, the tragic hero who couldn’t sell out, as memorialized in Ian Dury’s “Sweet Gene Vincent”.

If some of the great rock’n’rollers were dangerous and somewhat predatory men, their music sounded best, and would be most influential, when it reflected those personas and gave them room to stalk around in, much as their electric blues contemporaries – Howling Wolf, John Lee Hooker, Muddy Waters – did. Their influence was strongest in Britain precisely because the Brits, obsessively listening to imported records for their exoticism, ignored the false distinction between R’n’R and R&B, between “Long Tall Sally” and the Motown hit “Money”, between the 1940’s blues songs Elvis first covered and his countrified versions of them that became rock’n’roll. Looking for the originals of songs Elvis covered would have been an education for many. Thus Syd Barrett, in Pink Floyd, a band named after two obscure bluesman, and whose first recordings are of obscure blues songs, quotes Mack David’s “I Don’t Care If The Sun Don’t Shine” in “Jugband Blues”, one of his last recordings with the Floyd - a song written for the Disney animated feature Cinderella and covered by Elvis as the B-side of his second single “Good Rocking Tonight”, a cover of a 1947 jump blues song by Ray Brown.

John Lennon used Chuck Berry’s “You Can’t Catch Me” (“here come old flattop he come movin’ up slowly”) as the kick-off-point for “Come Together” on Abbey Road and was sued by the canny, and notoriously tight, old rocker, resolved by John pledging to record and release two of Chuck’s songs, leading to his Rock’n’Roll album. Marc Bolan, a long time fan of Eddie Cochran and a slew of minor rockabilly acts, who informed his succinct, reductive songwriting style, plundered Berry’s louchest and best “Little Queenie” (“she’s too cute to be a minute over seventeen”) for “Get It On” (“meanwhile, I’m still thinking”) when he decided to transform himself into a sex symbol, somehow avoiding a lawsuit.

(note than in this movie clip Berry is miming with white musicians who didn’t play on the Little Queenie session, which included Willie Dixon on bass)

Hendrix (who had briefly played with Little Richard, who didn’t like being upstaged any more than Hendrix liked being fined when he didn’t toe Little Richard’s line) covered Berry’s “Johnny B Goode” as if it was about him and made a fiery monster out of the great riff from “Summertime Blues”, as did The Who and Blue Cheer. The Who also did a scorching live version of a song that didn’t need reinvention, the first totally convincing original rock song by a British band – Johnny Kidd and the Pirates’ “Shaking All Over” (1960). Johnny Kidd and the Pirates always performed dressed as pirates, possibly inspiring David Bowie, who tried a pirate look before inventing Ziggy Stardust. Their song, which made #1 in the UK but was little known elsewhere, was the first sign that the torch had been passed, and that rock’n’roll was morphing into the monster that would become known as ROCK.

Algorithmic violence erupts as Fleetwood Mac perform “Somebody's Gonna Get Their Head Kicked In Tonite”! A reminder that rock’n’roll, once a revolutionary force, became a symbol of reaction in Britain during the mods and rockers schism of the mid-60’s.

1. The title of Maybellene was taken from a box of mascara seen in the studio as the song was being recorded, with its spelling changed to avoid copyright disputes, after producer Leonard Chess criticised Berry’s original “Ida May” as sounding too rural. Such is the songwriting process. The song’s rhythm was based on a 1938 western swing song “Ida Red” by Bob Wills and his Texas Playboys – Chess was taken by the sound of a black singer recording country music his way, just as Sam Phillips was taken by the sound of a white singer reinventing the blues.

2. A cowriter of “HeartBreak Hotel” was Mae Boren Axton, whose son Hoyt Axton would write “The Pusher” and “Snowblind Friend”, perhaps the most realistic drug song of its time, for Steppenwolf, and star as the dad in the movie Gremlins.

3. “That’ll Be The Day” was a quip of John Wayne’s character in John Ford’s The Searchers (1956) , as was The Pixies’ EP title “Come On Pilgrim” (1987)

4. In 1958 Sheely, at 18, had become the youngest woman in the US to write a number one hit, “Poor Little Fool” for Ricky Nelson. She later collaborated with Jackie De Shannon and co-created the music TV show Shindig.