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.
And here I thought Gleason (b. 1917) was the oldest contemporary observer of rock. If you want a deeper dive into the older-generation-looks-at-rock/younger-generation-looks-at-them-looking-at-it:
ReplyDeletehttps://www.amazon.com/When-Genres-Collide-Alternate-Responses/dp/1501319027
Besides 'recording studio as instrument', there are two other threads in the intro: 'rock as Esperanto', the intrinsically polygot music possibly expanding to bridge multiple cultures, idioms, traditions, and perhaps even classes and races; and 'under-thirty culture', that this was all not just 'music FOR the under-thirty', but 'BY and OF' them.
DeleteAs it happened, I think those two threads were subtly against each other - the expansive, all-encompassing approach butting up against the categorized, exclusionary approach. This came to a head ten years later around punk, and despite the spurts of polygot post-punk, the latter approach pretty definitively won (rhetorically, anyway) by placing hard limits on how far that could go (see Burchill's 'wonderful tapestry of rock', a sarcastic takedown of exactly the Esperanto concept). Some of that is due to musical conservatism, but I wonder how much of it is due to the simple fact that under-thirties seldom remain under-thirties, and eventually a binary conclusion presented itself - either somehow make it an explicitly multigenerational affair, or split it in twain with each succeeding generation, making the 'generation gap' a permanent state of all against all.
I can remember reading "Rock's Rich Tapestry" the week it came out, when she did the singles column.... Rather than hybridity and eclecticism within rock music, what I think what she was getting at was the idea of an emerging canon, a sense of rock heritage, in which all these achievements piled up in their diversity and were all honored and accepted. It was partly inspired by seeing by an early "rock so far" type history of the music program, or series - in which Sex Pistols were pointedly not included but Elvis Costello was. To her that signified the erasure of antagonism and intra-rock generational war. She was speaking up for the tunnel vision view, the Rotten stance of dismissing everything previous and most everything current.
DeleteCostello was actually just as much part of that New Wave versus Old Wave thing, at least then - the sparring with Bonnie Bramlett.
Of course both Rotten and Costello would quickly mellow - Rotten as early as the Capital Radio show where he's playing all the pre-punk faves, Beefheart and Hammill. Costello winds up doing that show Spectacle (?) in which he's palling around with Elton John and talking about their mutual love of Leon Russell. But long before that he'd revealed himself to be a tolerant and eclectic listener.
The specific context was hazy (I knew it was 'tapestry' something), so thank you for the reminder.
DeleteBurchill is almost unfair to bring up, because it's hard to think of another music critic for whom the music itself was so secondary - it seemed to be more the attitude punk unleashed (or seemed to unleash - see her initial misreading and eventual scorning of Patti Smith) that she was invested in. Her later shift into general-interest columns and right-wing commentary make more sense if you posit that the things she claimed to care about early on - punk, leftism, youth, etc. - were really then-fitting outlets for this overall sense of antagonistic war against everything - punk softened, leftism was too damned Good, she stopped being young.
Electric Ladyland often gets cited as a landmark in the history of the studio-as-instrument, but was that recognised at the time, or is it just hindsight? And is musique concrete really the most applicable for early Pink Floyd?
ReplyDeleteI've no idea - I think it was acclaimed at the time but whether that was more for the titantic blues of "Voodoo Chile" side of it and less for the ambient sub-aquascape of "Mermaid Turn To Be" and "Moon, Moon, Gently Turn the Tides" aspect, I'm not sure. There was already a major backlash against psychedelic studio artifice by that point.
DeleteYeah I wouldn't have thought of Pink Floyd in those terms. Although if they had done the Household Instruments album it might have qualified.
Aside from anything else, I love the cover illustration for this book, with the contemporary Rock God being carried on the shoulders of what looks like a black soul man, a country n' western singer, an African tribesman(?!?) and a Jerry Lee Lewis-esque rockabilly guy(??).
ReplyDeleteA nice visual summation of the "this is where your flash new music all came from, kids" argument which I'd assume Shaw, as an older critic, probably dwells on within.
Certainly looks like a far better early rock-theory book than Richard Meltzer's 'The Aesthetics of Rock' anyway, which I believe saw print in about 1970 is almost totally unreadable.
I never looked closely at the cover, just picked up a general vibe of freakadelic snazziness! You are right, it's clever.
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