LITMIR.BIZ

      At the origins of rock music we find a minimal adherence to song form, distilled through a lot of energy, banging, and noise. Rock music has roots in folk and country music, but especially in rhythm and blues. This latter itself has roots in jazz, gospel, blues, the tradition of American popular song that we associate with such greats as Cole Porter, the Gershwin brothers, and Tin Pan Alley, and, of course, more generally in that untotalizable wellspring known as the African American Experience. It is not inappropriate to see a single individual, namely Ray Charles, as the “midwife” of rock and roll. Charles especially forms a link between jazz and rock, in the form of rhythm and blues. When one thinks of his piano style, both energetic and yet tightly controlled, then one also sees the influence of honky-tonk and boogie-woogie music in the process by which a new synthesis emerged. (Of the progressive musicians, Keith Emerson is almost alone in occasionally putting this style in the forefront of the mix.) Another tendril reaches out to ragtime music. Another key transitional figure was Louis Jordan, singer and alto saxophonist whose use of horns along with a raw, rocking sound formed a transition between swing-era big-band music and rock.

      What’s most interesting, then, is the way that this complex set of ingredients led to, at first, what seemed to be a rather simple style. Put this way, however, perhaps we should acknowledge that early rock was not as simple and straightforward as it first appeared to be. My own preference, in terms of the early rockers, is for a well-known triumvirate, namely Chuck Berry (b. 1926), Little Richard (b. 1932), and Jerry Lee Lewis (b. 1939). It boggles the mind to think that Chuck Berry, the oldest of the three, is now over seventy years old! This triumvirate represents an interesting mix: two black, one white—specifically “white trash”; one from the industrial north (well, St. Louis at any rate), the other two from the Deep South. At least two of them had serious church backgrounds, and have spent parts of their lives on fire with religion. All three have had skirmishes with the law, on and off. All three represent the synthesis of simplicity and complexity, on musical as well as more general social or cultural levels, that made for early rock. Indeed, and not to run this word into the ground, what gives their music such power is the way that it distills complex musical and social experience into a very direct and raw form.

      The best music of each is entirely expressible with just three instruments: either piano or electric guitar, and a rhythm section of bass and drums. And perhaps another key moment occurred when the piano was displaced from center stage by the electric guitar—“Move over rover, let Jimi take over!” Although it is difficult to displace talents with the intensity of Little Richard or Jerry Lee Lewis (“they don’t call me ‘the killer’ for nothin’”), in a sense the transition from piano to electric guitar is emblematic of a larger cultural shift. With the electric guitar at its core, rock music consolidated itself as just as much African as European, but also just as much American as African (I can’t help but recall that Lenin saw “American electrification” as one of the elements of the future society). The synthesis that emerged is part of what country-rocker Webb Wilder insightfully called “Afro-Celtic” culture. The formulation needs both expansion and narrowing. On the one hand, what Wilder is after is the synthesis of the storytelling traditions and tunefulness of the British Isles (England, Ireland, Scotland, Wales) with the story-telling traditions and rhythms of African and African American peoples. On the other hand, the influence of the Isles has been rewoven and distilled by its transplantation to a particular swath of the American South, namely Appalachia. So, perhaps we should speak of both rock music and many other distinctively American contributions to culture as having its basis in “Afro-Appalachian” culture. It turns out that what emerged from this cultural cauldron has been remarkably and improbably generous and synthetic—out of this mixture has emerged the first true “world music.”

      In rock music from Chuck Berry to now, from roots rock to world music, the bass and drums have provided an anchor. In much rock music, this occurs in a somewhat formulaic way: the bass is there to “lay down the bottom,” while the drums are there to “keep the beat.” Perhaps another way of coming at this is that rock music begins as dance music. “If its got a backbeat you can’t lose it”; but what if it doesn’t have a backbeat? Not to get too far ahead of ourselves, we can still take this moment to mark out three distinct differences between rock and roll and progressive rock; setting these differences out will help us see the developments that unfolded between the fifties and the late sixties. First, in progressive rock, the bass and drums are often not playing the traditional roles. In particular, progressive rock is generally not “dance music,” and the “rhythm section” is often just as much in the forefront as any of the other instruments. Second, the electric guitar is no longer at the center of things; it continues to play an important role (except, of course, in those bands that do not use the instrument), but this is in a situation of relative parity with keyboards, wind instruments, violins, and what have you—including the occasional sackbut or crumhorn (Gryphon) or space whisper (Gong)—as well as acoustic steel-string and classical guitars. Third, there is a shifting of the cultural balance back toward Europe, as well as an expansion outwards toward Asia and (to a lesser extent until more recent years) Latin America. At any rate, it can certainly be argued that progressive rock is less “Black” than most of the rest of rock music (with the possible exception of heavy metal).

      Whether this necessarily makes it more “white,” however, is a question I will leave for further exploration. What I will insist on, regardless of the answer to this question, is that the development of rock music up through progressive rock, and not merely around it, is what gives us the rich possibilities of rock music today. (Leave aside, for the moment, the commercial and technological forces that presently stand in the way of these possibilities.) In the fifties, composer and educator Gunther Schuller (president for many years of the New England Conservatory of Music) theorized the possibility of “Third Stream” music, which he saw as emanating especially from a synthesis of European classical music and jazz. In some sense, this Third Stream was already fully present in works such as George Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue, Scott Joplin’s opera Treemonisha, and Duke Ellington’s various “suites” and other large-scale, symphonic works (e.g., Black, Brown, and Beige from the 1943 Carnegie Hall Concert). As full-blown synthesis, however, I would argue that we do not see the real emergence of the Third

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