Arnold Shaw - The Rock Revolution - 1969

 

This geezer was fast approaching sixty years old (born 1909!) and a seasoned veteran of writing about Tin Pan Alley and American vernacular music forms (first book published 1945!), when he finished writing The Rock Revolution. It was one of the first of that spate of books about rock that came out in 1968-70.  They must have all been commissioned by publishers in 1967 when they abruptly realized that rock was not just a teen fad but was going to stick around. It had an audience now that a/ liked to read b/ would also like the whole phenomenon they'd been caught up explained and historicized. Furthermore there might also be a market of elder outsiders who wanted to understand what their kids were into.

Younger critics of that time didn't reckon much on Arnold Shaw's effort - they thought he was an old, square, clueless interloper... a hack... and perhaps they were jealous of the fact that he'd got the book deal and not them. 

But I must say I was surprised by how perceptive and well organized these opening chapters are as an argument. 

I was also struck by the chapter sub title "The Recording Studio Is The Instrument".

Could this be the first iteration of the studio-as-instrument idea, years before the likes of Eno talked it up? Or was it just a commonplace idea by the late Sixties, in the wake of Sgt. Pepper's?

This extract is another example of the way that people then talked about "electronic rock", meaning not just the use of Moogs and synths, but the painting-with-sound enabled by multi-track recording, a.k.a. psychedelia.  See this Lillian Roxon Rock Encylopedia entry. 

Faust feast + Gills galore (John Gill / Sounds + Andy Gill / NME on Faust reissues, 1980)

 

Sounds and Reggae

Picking up from the other post, one thing that has struck me for a while now, thanks to Soundsclips and Zounds Abounds scanning issues of Sounds from the late '70s and early '80s, is how regularly they covered Jamaican music.

You think of Sounds and the things that spring to mind would be Oi! and Bushellism, and the New Wave of British Heavy Metal. And maybe if you knew your British rock paper history, you would also think about Jon Savage and New Musick, and the "grey overcoat" Fac-loving thing associated with Dave McCullough, at least until he flipped for Postcard and his own version of poptimism. 

But alongside all that - the many flavours of ROCK -  Sounds consistently covered reggae and dancehall. Put Jamaican and Black British artists on the cover. 

(They also covered funk and soul, did pieces on early rap and hip hop). 

NME was probably even better at covering these areas, but Sounds did a creditable job.  

Especially considering this was verily the Dark Age of Rockisme. Or so we are told. 

A lot of the late '70s coverage is coming from Vivien Goldman, before she jumped to first Melody Maker and then to NME. But there were other writers who kept it going deep into the Eighties, including Jack Barron and Edwin Pouncey. 

And not just the roots-rock-rebel stuff, they also covered reggae at its poppiest - lover's.

Even Gaz Bushell wrote a bit about reggae now and then

And not just reggae...