Rock 1970
There is a lack of excitement in the air—it’s like the days before the Beatles. Bob Dylan has lost much of his impact, even though his records sell more than ever. The end of the Beatles as a group is now irreversible. Even the Stones have fallen into the ranks of the merely human, unable to sustain the fantasies of a new generation the way they did those of mine. There are no longer any super-humans to focus on. And the wellspring of rock has failed in the last three years to produce a new, dynamic R&B singer with anything approaching mass appeal.
Creative moments come at slow intervals and last a short time in any popular culture. Rock ‘n’ roll was a distinct musical form for only a few years—according to Charlie Gillett, 1954-1958. The years 1959 through 1963 were years of transition in which the music manipulators became temporarily more important than the artists themselves and in which the artistry of the rock ‘n’ roll years were formalized and plasticized by unimaginative record companies and A&R men.
Rock: Old and New
Only in the hands of a few independent minded artists like Phil Spector and the Beach Boys, and companies like Atlantic and Motown, did the music continue to grow. In 1963 the Beatles shattered the dreariness of the music business. And with them came rock, the music of the Sixties, and music quite different from rock ‘n’ roll.
Of the two, rock is music of far greater surface seriousness and lyric complexity. It is the product of a more self-aware and self-conscious group of musicians. It is far more a middleclass music than the lower-class one its predecessor certainly was. And, while it borrowed extensively from rock ‘n’ roll styles, it was a fundamentally different kind of music.
It was mainly played on guitars instead of pianos and horns, mainly by whites instead of blacks, mainly in groups of three, four, or five musicians, instead of in nine and ten piece bands, mainly on FM radio (after 1967) instead of AM, and mainly in concert halls and specialized clubs, instead of in bars and state fairs. To replace record hops, liquor and transistor radios here were light shows, dope, and headphones.
And yet both were essentially folk musics. The best music in both idioms came from men who recorded their own material, or worked very closely with a collaborator on it. While producers have been important in both fields, the music was essentially controlled by the performing artist—unlike the music from 1959-63. And in both situations there existed a strong bond between performer and audience, a natural kinship, a sense that the stars weren’t being imposed from above but had sprung up from out of our own ranks. We could identify with them unhesitatingly.
As we move into a new decade and the Beatles recede into our musical past, one gets the sense we are moving into a new, constructive period of transition—a prelude to some new approach to music in the Seventies. It may well be that when someone writes a history of rock ten years from now he will identify its creative period as 1964-68. Certainly the year 1970 will be viewed as one of the decline of one set of artists (groups) and the emergence of a new set (individuals, solo artists, acoustic artists).
Looking back at the last ten years, it seems obvious that the atmosphere of low expectation, common during the early Sixties, contributed to the growth of many artists who became popular in the later Sixties. It gave them time to learn their craft in an unhurried and unpressurized period. When fame finally summoned many of them in the wake of the Beatles, a surprising number were more than ready with their own musical statements.
In America, colleges, coffee houses, and independent record companies like Elektra, Prestige, and Vanguard became the haven of aspiring musicians seeking refuge from the poverty of commercial recording scenes during those years.
In England, the established music scene was dominated by people even stodgier than their American counterparts. With Cliff Richard’s self-righteousness acting as a kind of norm of acceptability, few new groups were even given an opportunity to record. And yet, despite its inaccessibility through records, increasingly well-educated British young people turned away from pop and found a haven in small clubs where groups like the Stones, Animals, and Mayall’s various bands played blues and early American rock ‘n’ roll.
As in the States, the commercial potential of this new thing was ignored by established companies which in turn gave musicians a chance to grow without being hustled into record contracts prematurely. The Beatles themselves were the classic example. It is therefore not surprising that when the Beatles proved the commercial viability of rock in 1964, there were so many groups prepared to follow through with their own distinctive music.
Rock 1970, Page 1 of 11