'How the Beatles Destroyed Rock 'N' Roll' by Elijah Wald (book review)

"This history of American popular music culminates with the splintering of music culture by the Fab Four."

"It is often said that history is written by the victors, but in the case of pop music, that is rarely true," Wald writes. "The victors tend to be out dancing, while the historians sit at their desks, assiduously chronicling music they cannot hear on mainstream radio." It's a valid conceit, yet it's hardly revolutionary. In fact, it was much more clearly articulated 30 years ago, when the sage philosopher David Lee Roth noted: "Rock critics like Elvis Costello because rock critics look like Elvis Costello." Besides, Roth probably had no quarrel with the Beatles. Unfortunately, the title of Wald's book is a thousand-pound gorilla hovering over every page of this "alternative" history of popular music.

The author of books on bluesman Robert Johnson and folkie Dave Van Ronk, Wald takes a mostly reasonable, if contrarian, approach to the nation's musical past. He highlights the push and pull, the market forces and popular trends and not-so-popular technological breakthroughs that forced pop music's evolution. Because the mythology of the rock era tends to suffocate all that came before it, Wald's backroads journey has real moments of enlightenment.

Starting with ragtime, Wald recounts a nascent industry that was built around sheet music sales at a time when a piano was a common instrument in many homes. Eventually, ragtime gave way to jazz, swing and pop, along with advancements such as radio, records and jukeboxes, which musicians and the music business fought every step of the way (a reactionary behavior that still exists, given the music industry's reluctance now to embrace the digital marketplace)...

Where did the sound come from?

It all came from "of" something else. And not linearly.

Black R&B artists covered country songs and adapted them to their arrangements.

And Little Richard's Keep A Knockin' was a reworked of the same song that Louie Jordon had a hit with in the 1940s but that dates back to the 1920s.

The difference is that Little Richard's opens with a banging drum beat that is not at all genteel or polite and he's screaming his head off throughout the song (and Led Zepplin would later rip it off that drumbeat intro for "Rock and Roll").

Tiny Bradshaw may have originated "Train Kept A Rollin'" but the British bands (and later Aerosmith) all looked to the Johnny Burnette Trio's distorted rockabilly version.

These songs are not pleasant to tired ears and they don't play well with others. They ROCK.

At a point, rock and roll became "rock". But not everything called rock "rocks". (I'd say that you can DANCE more to rock and roll than to "rock"). But ultimately, the songs are about ****ing (initally) and then by the snotty 60s about the girl you can't have, or don't want.

And it isn't even right to say that "rock and roll is the white version of R&B" because not all R&B sounds that way but there are black performers who play rock and roll. And reading through a number of blues artists' interviews, they said that their parents didn't always allow blues records in the home. It was jukejoint music. Music from beer halls and the wrong side of the tracks about people doing wrong. Howlin' Wolf said that when you have evil on your mind, you got the blues.

Little Richard has been torn emotionally a number of times throughout his life for playing rock and roll (and the hedonistic excesses of his lifestyle he was living).

Rock isn't call "the Devil's music" strictly because it "is" black authored music (although there were racists in the 1950s and 1960s and beyond who levelled this charge).

I’d say one of the problems with classifying popular music is that all the genres are close to eachother anyway, and often people categorize them according to how they feel rather than their technical aspects.

Perhaps that’s the way it should be, since the writers/performers create it with a certain “feel” in mind. When it started out, you’re right, it was all about young people getting together to share the most primal of emotional drives: sex and anger. So it’s hardly fair to lump in softy crooning or doo-wopping into the same category. Of course, Pat Boone doesn’t express much more than Little Richard. Little Richard’s message is just different. It’s not puppy love; it’s f*****g.

The problem I have, I guess, is the same that comes up when I argue with people over what constitutes heavy metal. Most regular people recognize that the genre came from various hard rock groups of the late 60s, most importantly Led Zeppelin and Black Sabbath. But to die-hard metalheads, Black Sabbath and only Black Sabbath is the father of metal. They’ll point to those who came after, from Iron Maiden to Motorhead to Metallica as following the Sabbath paradigm.

Yes, they do, but what about all the others? Then I realize that metalheads intentionally restrict themselves to Sabbath because they don’t want to be responsible for 80s hair metal. But any objective listener will tell you, yeah, Poison, Bon Jovi, etc. are for chicks, but they’re metal, too.

I’m a gracious man, so I’ll settle and allow metalheads to have their subgenre. We’ll call it “heavy metal”; we’ll put it under a bigger heading called “hard rock”. Tehn we’ll come up with some other nickname, like “soft metal,” or something, which will include Zeppelin, Van Halen, and hair metal. We’ll also include further subgenres under the same heading like Glam, Shock, Punk, Grunge, and so on.

How does this relate to what we were talking about? As you said, they call pretty much all youth music “rock and roll” after some point in the 50s. But people who know what rock really means (i.e. sexy dance music) balk (rightly) at giving the same title to music by Little Richard and Paul Anka.

We really should have a better way to distinguish between the down and dirty Stones and the lovey-dovey Beatles. Calling one “rock” and the other “pop” is one solution. But “pop” is such an imprecise term, in my opinion. It could mean any sort of music that entertains the masses, from jazz to folk to hip-hop to heavy metal to blues to disco to salsa to rap to alternative, and so on into absurdity.

Why isn’t there a word for whatever Bobby Vinton or Celine Dion are, like there is a name for Black Sabbath? I don’t know. Call it what you will. I suggest dubbing everything the kids listen to Youth Music. Subdivide it from there. I have spent way too much time discussing popular entertainment, which is really one of those subjects that becomes less interesting the closer you get. So I’ll stop.

Thanks. Interesting. I’d like to find Wald’s book on Dave Van Ronk (Dylan lived with DVR for a while, and ripped an arrangement from him, putting it on his first album). Not sure I see his point about this one though.

The Beatles paved the way for the British Invasion (not to say that there had never been a British musician making it big in the US before that), which consisted (mostly) of a British retelling of various musical genres from the American cultural past. Sgt Pepper spawned a host of imitations from the Kinks, the Beach Boys, and many others. But “Revolver” and “Rubber Soul” (which preceded SP) were where the Beatles peaked, IMHO.

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