Doug Glant's History of Rock and Roll Bohemian Club

The birth of rock'n'roll: 1954 - 1965. A cultural earthquake. 

By Doug Glant.

Bohemian Club Library Notes, Number 138, 

Fall 2005. 

Preface

Two years ago, a front page Wall Street Journal article addressed the music revolution going on in the hallowed Bohemian Club and at the Grove, the so-called battle between the traditionalist devotees to the swing-era and classical music and the (mostly) younger rock adherents. No matter which side you take (though some enjoy it all), and not forgetting Dr. Johnson, who remarked about two women shouting at each other from adjoining houses on a London Street, "They will never agree because they are arguing from different premises," it's clear that rock'n'roll, like it or loathe it, has had a profound impact on our culture.

For the sake of discussion, I'll use theologian Richard John Neuhaus's definition of culture: "Culture is the way we live, and the way we live in argument with the way we think we ought to live. It has to do with what we eat, wear, watch, admire, and abhor. It has to do with dating, and marriage, and raising children, and trying to get a grasp on what it means to live a good life before our lives are over." There's been a multi-millennial debate as to whether politics drives culture or vice versa. I'm with Confucius and Socrates, both of whom summed up the culture side of the argument thus: "You write the laws, let us write the music," "music" meaning the performing and literary arts.

Two phenomena of the early 1950s (television and rock'n'roll)1 changed the global culture (and political) landscape forever. Though rock's ascent was inseparable from and accelerated by the TV boom, I will focus on the music and its first decade (which for me is 1954 - 1965). Some date rock's birth earlier,2 some a year later (when the original white rock'n'roll hit, Bill Haley's "Rock around the Clock," went gold. I choose 1954 because that's when a real black R&B tune (not a pale white cover) reached a  huge (national) white audience; the song was The Penguin's "Earth Angel." The music and the culture had already changed dramatically by 1965 when the Rolling Stones "shocked the bourgeoisie" with "(I Can't Get No) Satisfaction," and quickly, it changed a lot more.

In the beginning. 

Rock began in the American South and Southwest, where approximately fifty years ago a confluence of many musical streams and the relatively new phenomenon of the teenager combined with a new rebelliousness (partially fueled by poverty and Bible Belt constraints, especially racial and sexual) to produce a new music rock'n'roll (R&B on the black side, rockabilly on the white). It was a place of high-spirited, even physical religiosity, racial tensions, steamy sensuality, and poverty. When combined with teenage hormones, you had quite a stew from whence to brew a "Devil's" music as many early rockers thought, especially Jerry Lee Lewis and Little Richard. The rebelliousness was perhaps best expressed in the movies by Montgomery Clift, James Dean, and especially Marlon Brando in the Wild One (1954), when a young waitress asks him, "What are you rebelling against?" Brando: "Whaddaya got?" Interestingly, the soundtracks of The Wild One and Rebel Without a Cause were jazz, not rock. Rock did not spring suddenly, Minerva-like, from the head of Jupiter, but had its roots deeply embedded in the black music of jazz, blues, and gospel, while the white roots were in country, church music, hillbilly, bluegrass, and (country) swing. These flowed together during the Eisenhower years to create rock'n'roll. It was an evolutionary process - we just looked around and it was here; it seemed to come out of nowhere. "The blues had a baby and they called it rock'n'roll."3

Rock wasn't something that was created, overnight or consciously, but rather it sprang up out of social and economic and musical and cultural forces ranging from the migration of millions of black and white Southerners to urban areas, to the vast industrial expansion of World War II, to the business pressures that forced big bands to break up into smaller units, to the trebling of the number of radio station licenses in the post-war period. The dramatic shift of adults to television helped convince executives to re-orient radio toward young people's music. By 1959, there were 156 million radios in the US, still three times the number of TV sets. It's when the music first started sounding a certain way and affecting people the way rock does that we all noticed it was here. Before the confluence of rock'n'roll, there was the blues of Robert Johnson, Howlin' Wolf, Muddy Waters, and BB King, the jump blues of Louis Jordan, Roy Brown, and Wynonie Harris, and the country swing (and boogie) of Bob Wills, Moon Mullican, and Bill Haley, but there wasn't rock'n'roll. Before rock, pop music of the early 1950s was smooth, polished vocal music set to an orchestrated background, much good, some not (e.g., Patty Page's 1953 hit "That Doggie in the Window" - arf arf). Seminal rock'n'roll was raw, rough, sexy, and it scared some folks. But it was also a music which expressed a kind of pure joyousness, a sense of soaring release that in our current sardonic and self-conscious age seems unlikely ever to recur. But I'm getting ahead of my story. Let's go back a few years. 

We're Gonna Rock: The Early Years. 

What is rock'n'roll? Well, as Justice Potter Stewart said (about pornography): "I know it when I see it." But do we? Is Pat Boone's "April Love" Rock? Elvis's "It's Now or Never"? Anything by Eminem? When does R&B or hillbilly boogie end and rock pick up? When does R&B become doo-wop? I'm not a musicologist, but there seems to be general agreement that rock (which was originally expressly for teens) is repetitive, loud, with simple chords, melody, lyrics, and a titanic backbeat. Among things that aided its growth were a new instrument, the electric guitar, and experiments in amplification by Les Paul (who had a profound impact on Bohemian Steve Miller.)4 The first mass-produced solid-body electric guitar, the Fender Esquire, was sold in 1950...

Just a few voices made the difference in determining how rock'n'roll sounds and why it is so powerfully different from other kinds of music. Elvis, Fats Domino, Chuck Berry, Buddy Holly, and Little Richard: their work defined what rock'n'roll was all about. And by 1956 they. had all crossed over to the pop charts. The rock era had begun.
At this point, it's useful to get a sense of the times as rock began. Cultural indices (including the seemingly trivial) can reveal and illuminate a sense of time and place like nothing else. So, let's take a look at some events and personalities of the early 1950's, a time later called bland by the 60's counterculture, a time of Cold War, and hot war in Korea, the discovery of DNA and a polio vaccine, TV's take off and it's Golden Age and also: The post-WWII baby boom continues; Mao; Tennessee and Hank Williams; train and Greyhound travel; bebop; Ella; Martin and Lewis; Soviet A-bomb; fallout shelters and air raid drills; ballpoint pens; M&Ms; JD Salinger's Catcher in the Rye; Nat King Cole; Dash-80 (Boeing 707 prototype); Rodgers and Hammerstein's The King and I; Uncle Miltie, Jack Benny; Howdy Doody; the Lone Ranger; U.S. households with TV (1950): 9 percent; average pay for teachers (1950):$3,010; women in U.S. workforce (1950): 28.8 percent; Luci and Desi; Groucho; Superman; Dragnet; suburbia; Ozzie and Harriet (with David and Ricky Nelson); Dr. Benjamin Spock; Roy Rogers; Bishop Fulton Sheen and Pope Pius XII; Norman Rockwell's Saturday Evening Post covers; Grandma Moses; Andrew Wyeth; Jackson Pollock; Billy Graham; Casey Stengel, Mickey Mantle; Ben Hogan; Rocky Marciano; Bud Wilkinson; Queen Elizabeth II; Mt. Everest conquered (Tenzing Norgay and Sir Edmund Hillary); Hemingway's The Old Man and the Sea; Truman and Eisenhower (V.P. Richard Nixon); B-52 and Strategic Air Command; Stalin dies; H-bomb; Playboy; TV dinners and Hula Hoops; crewcuts and ponytails.

(To be continued.)