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1970s Music Journalism History

The Best Thing to Happen to Music Since Jazz

“The Best Thing to Happen to Music Since Jazz”

By Jonathan Yardley

New York Times Jan. 17, 1971

Chuck Berry’s exuberant declaration of musical independence – “Hail, hail, rock ‘n’ roll! Deliver me from the days of old!”—commands the sympathy even of a moldy devotee of Jelly Roll Morton and Jack Tea garden. No question about it: rock and roll, in its many and varied manifestations, is the best thing to happen to music since the great jazz years of 1910–40. The blessing is, however, decidedly mixed, for rock’s musical vigor, insouciance and inventiveness too often go hand in hand with the youth culture’s mind less political preachments and sleazy commercial exploitation. Consider the journalism of rock.

Rock journalism is a pop‐culture phenomenon of the first magnitude. In a space of time that seems as long as one finger‐snap, it has risen from the underground explorations of Paul Williams’s short‐lived but influential newspaper Crawdaddy! to the imperial ambitions of Jann Wenner’s journal Rolling Stone and its burgeoning parent company, Straight Arrow. Indeed, a case could be made that the entire underground press is rock journalism, since it derives from “the revolution” for which, virtually all rock. journalists would have us believe, rock is the martial music.

The rise of rock journalism has been no less spectacular in the “straight” press. Ellen Willis and Ellen Sander have provided excellent, if regrettably infrequent, criticism in the pages of The New Yorker and The Saturday Review, respectively. Time magazine greets major rock recordings with a breathless enthusiasm once reserved for Madame Chiang Kai‐shek, and Newsweek follows suit. Section Two of the Sunday New York Times has become the stomping ground for rock writers of what seems every conceivable political, cultural and musical persuasion.

Then there are the rock books. Quick as ever to capitalize on public fancy, passing or otherwise, the publishing industry has released a flood of rock books that is at least as over whelming as the Great Civil War Flood of the early sixties or the Civil Rights Flood now receding. Whatever one’s rock taste, it can be fed by one rock book or another: a paperback with the arguable title of “The Poetry of Rock” or “Rock Is Beautiful,” an impenetrable pseudo academic exercise such as R. Melzer’s “The Aesthetics of Rock,” an as‐told to autobiography or an “official” biography, a grab‐bag of critical ephemera, a glossy picture book with scanty text.

One of the best of the latter is by Douglas Kent Hall and Sue C. Clark, and despite the unfortunate title of “Rock: A World Bold As Love” (Cowles, $7,95), it has the refreshing virtue of modesty. Hall writes: “with a subject as new and transitory as rock it is too easy to make mere pretentiousness look like truth,” and then proceeds to do otherwise. Would that more rock journalists would follow suit. Instead, they too often lard over their journalism with excess academic baggage, prose that manages to be at once turgid and studiedly hip, and highly debatable cultural political posturings.

Each of the four books under con sideration here demonstrates, in one fashion or another, all these faults, but each also has its merits. Though some of its interpretive claims are questionable, “The Sound of the City” is the best history yet written of rock and roll. “Rock Folk,” in seven portraits of rock people, provides an intelligent look at the music in most of its important forms. “Goldstein’s Greatest Hits” is an entertaining col lection of pieces by rock’s answer to Rex Reed. Eisen’s second panorama of “The Age of Rock” offers a useful, if generally unappetizing, survey of rock journalism as practiced at the underground, or semi‐basement, level.

Because rock is still young, no one has the perspective to give the music and its world the thoroughgoing interpretation that social history eventually will demand. One comes to an understanding of rock, however limited, through the accumulation of small insights rather than a sweeping overview. It is for those insights that these books are valuable.

Several strains, run through them with remarkable consistency. Perceptive rock people are deeply troubled by the commercialism of the rock world, frustrated in what one contributor to Eisen’s anthology calls, with characteristic rock‐world sentimentality, “the attempt to develop a truly human, revolutionary life style within the confines of an exploitive commercial system.” The rock world has suddenly discovered the roots of its music, and there is a pell‐mell rush to the “purity” of fifties rock and roll that is reminiscent of Hughes Panassie’s ardent defense of le jazz hot. Though rock people continue to sentimentalize themselves, their culture and their politics, the un fortunate Rolling Stones concert at Altamont (four dead, one of them murdered) has left them confused and somewhat disillusioned. But the pervasive demand for instant fulfillment and the insistence that the world owes rock people not merely a living but a “life style” seem as dominant as ever.

Bleatings about commercialism from authors of commercially published books must, obviously, be greeted with some skepticism. Still, the horror of the flower children at finding themselves smack tin the grips of a cynical, exploitive commercialism is very real. “Hype,” defined as the overpromotion of the shoddy, occurs in rock journalese with the frequency of four‐letter scatology. Richard Goldstein has an uncommonly keen nose for hype; tin the best parts of his book he dissects the exploiters and analyzes the wants they seek to create and exploit.

Jonathan Eisen’s anthology is carefully built around the theme of commercialism, its contributors discussing with varying success such examples as the “Boston Sound,” the post‐Woodstock gold rush, and a disarmingly self‐confessed “kept hippie” who works as liaison “between the turtle‐necked titans of the record industry and the un punctual, crazy monsters called musicians.” The best rock‐biz piece in Eisen’s book is by Michael Lydon, whose own “Rock Folk” treats it more in directly. The real subject of Charlie Gillett’s “The Sound of the City” is the commercialization of rock music itself. He has written a richly detailed account of the changes in rock: from rhythm and blues (“music by black people for black people”) to rock ‘n’ roll (“music by black people for all people”) to bubble‐gum rock (white, commercial, adolescent) to “uptown rhythm and blues” (black, commercial) to, finally, British rock and its American kinfolk. His analysis of the pivotal role of the small, independent record companies, notably Sun Records in Nashville, is especially helpful and places credit in de serving hands. Their labors led, inevitably, to an awareness in the offices of the major companies of rock’s sales potential and to their subsequent takeover of the music, a development that Gillett views with the greatest gloom.

Gillett is no less gloomy over what he sees as the abandonment, or dilution, of true rhythm and blues and rock ‘n’ roll. Nostalgia is a hot commodity in rock these days; Gillett and Richard Goldstein are enthusiastic advocates. To the extent that their efforts restore to pro per admiration such performers as Chuck Berry, the Clovers, Gene Vincent, Ruth Brown and the early Elvis, more power to them. The difficulty is that they have fallen into precisely the kind of purist snobbery that marks jazz traditionalists.

In particular they scorn post “Sgt. Pepper” Beatles. Gold stein’s famous New York Times attack on that record is of course in his collection; as for Gillett, he contends that by the time of “Pepper” the Beatles “no longer had anything much to say, and amused themselves by seeing how many different ways they could say nothing.” Drivel, pure and simple, their sentimentalization of “the old forms” which Goldstein finds “so un blemished, so incorruptible” reveals nothing so much as a severe limitation in musical taste and imagination.

Ah, but sentimentality runs cancer‐like through the world of rock, especially in the form of self‐adoration. (Perhaps one reason why later Beatles does not always find favor is that it contains some devastating satire of flower‐powerdom: “All You Need Is Love,” “Revolution” and “Baby You’re a Rich Man” must seem downright subversive to many rock people.) Lydon, in his otherwise excel lent book, romanticizes the LSD trips and antisocial posturings of the acid‐rock Grateful Dead, and reports without batting an eye such solemnly empty Dead utterances as, “Music is the timeless experience of constant change.” Still, Lydon ends his fine portrait of the Rolling Stones with a sad picture of Altamont ringing an end not merely to the Stones American excursion but to the innocence of that “ugly, beautiful mass,” the rock audience. Or, as a contributor to Eisen’s rockfest floridly puts it:

“In the beginning there was rock ‘n’ roll. The Beatles came and made it good with love and the bluebird of Paradise. But even while the children lifted their faces to the sun, Mick Jagger coiled himself around the tree of flesh, offering a sweet bite of chaos. At Altamont the children swallowed that bite, after chewing and tasting their alliance with evil for nearly a decade.”

The growing‐up process is, however, far from complete. These affluent middle‐class white kids are not about to abandon their big rock‐candy mountain. One of Eisen’s young writers actually defends those who have forced free ad mission at festivals in Atlanta and elsewhere on the preposterously self‐righteous ground that “no one has a right to demand big money for rock music which belongs to the people.” Lydon, writing about Janis Joplin, claims that “for the millions of kids who know that NOW is more important than the deferred gratification their parents and The System are pushing, Janis is the belle ideal.” Everyone knows what Instant Utopia got Janis Joplin.

His sentimentalizing aside, Lydon is generally a careful and thoughtful writer; so too are Gillett and Goldstein, and their books show it, Goldstein in particular having a deft touch. But Eisen’s book (not Eisen himself) is another matter. His first “The Age of Rock” was an important book whose contributors, many of them pop‐music Establishmentarians, wrote with distinction; the second book re lies almost completely on the rock people themselves, and it suggests that they hold the English language in low regard. Much of the prose reads as if written on some acid plateau, some of it is prolix mush (Richard Meltzer, who seems inexplicably to be a rock guru of sorts, being the chief culprit), and very little of it betrays any effort at discipline or subtlety.

The same carelessness, the same indifference to detail and even fact, are evident in writing about the music itself. Gillett, for example, contends that rock music is “The Sound of the City,” the music of an urban society. Perhaps. But how does Gillett dismiss the urban environments (New Orleans, Mem phis, Kansas City, St. Louis, Chicago, Harlem) that produced jazz? How does he account for the move in rock itself, led by Dylan, the Band, Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young, James Taylor and others, to a heavy rural orientation an both music and lyrics? Does Lydon completely ignore the history of jazz when he finds something unique in rock as “a racial and musical hybrid”?

In the Age of Rock, alas, in difference to history, like in difference to self‐discipline, is no novelty.

Jonathan Yardley wrote for the New York Times and was the book critic at The Washington Post. He received the Pulitzer Prize for Criticism in 1981.

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