On March 21, 1952 in Cleveland, Alan Freed produced the first rock and
roll concert. The audience and the performers were mixed in race and the evening
ended after one song in a near-riot as thousands of fans tried to get into the
sold-out venue.
By the end of the decade, rock had spread throughout the world. In Australia,
for example, Johnny
O'Keefe became perhaps the first modern rock star of the country, and began
the field of Australian
rock.
Rockabilly
Main article: Rockabilly
It was two years later that the first major white rock star began recording.
In 1954, Elvis Presley began recording with Sam Philips, starting with the hit
"That's All Right, Mama". Elvis played a rock and country & western fusion
called rockabilly, and he became possibly the first celebrity musician and teen idol.
It was the following year's "Rock Around the Clock" by Bill
Haley & His Comets that really set the rock boom in motion, though. The
song was one of the biggest hits in history, and frenzied teens flocked to see
him, even causing riots in some places; "Rock Around the Clock" was a
breakthrough for both the group and for all of rock and roll music. If
everything that came before laid the groundwork, "Clock" certainly set the mold
for everything else that came after. With its combined rockabilly and R & B
influences, "Clock" topped the U.S. charts for several weeks, and became wildly
popular in places like Australia and Germany. The single, released by indie
label Festival
Records in Australia, was the biggest-selling recording in the country at
the time.
Covers
Main article: Cover
version
Through the late 1940s and early 1950s, R&B music had been gaining a
stronger beat and a wilder style, with artists such as Fats Domino and Johnny Otis speeding up the tempos and increasing
the backbeat to great popularity on the juke-joint circuit. Despite the efforts
of Freed and others, black music was still taboo on many white-owned radio
outlets. However, savvy artists and producers quickly recognized the potential
of rock and raced to cash in with white versions of this black music.
Covering was customary in the music industry at the time. One of the first
successful rock and roll covers was Wynonie Harris's transformation of Roy Brown's "Good Rocking Tonight"
from a jump blues to a showy
rocker. The most notable trend, however, was white pop covers of black R&B
numbers.
Black performers saw their songs recorded by white performers, an important
step in the dissemination of the music, but often at the cost of feeling and
authenticity. Most famously, Pat
Boone recorded sanitized versions of Little Richard songs, though Boone found "Long
Tall Sally" so intense that he couldn't cover it. Later, as those songs became
popular, the original artists' recordings received radio play as well. Little
Richard once called Pat Boone from the audience and introduced him as "the man
who made me a millionaire".
The cover versions were not necessarily straightforward imitations. For
example, Bill Haley's incompletely bowdlerized cover of "Shake,
Rattle and Roll" transformed Big Joe Turner's humorous and racy tale of adult
love into an energetic teen dance number, while Georgia Gibbs replaced Etta James's tough, sarcastic vocal in "Roll With
Me, Henry" (covered as "Dance With Me, Henry") with a perkier vocal more
appropriate for an audience unfamiliar with the song to which James's song was
an answer, (Hank Ballard's "Work With Me,
Annie").
Rock spreads and diversifies
Diversification of American rock
Main article: American rock
With the runaway popular success of rock, the style began to influence other
genres. Vocalized R&B became doo
wop, for example, while uptempo, secularized gospel music became soul, and audiences flocked to see Appalachian-style
folk bands playing a rock-influenced pop version of their style. Young adults
and teenagers across the country were playing in amateur rock bands, laying the
roots for local scenes, garage
rock and alternative rock. More immediately, places
like Southern California produced their own varieties of rock, such as surf.
Surf Music
Main article: Surf
music
The rockabilly sound reached the West Coast and mutated into a wild, mostly
instrumental sound called surf
music. This style, exemplified by Dick Dale and The Surfaris, featured faster tempos, innovative
percussion, and processed electric guitar sounds which would be highly
influential upon future rock guitarists. Other West Coast bands, notably The Beach Boys and Jan and Dean, would
capitalize on the surf craze, slowing the tempos back down and adding harmony
vocals to create the "California Sound".
Australia
Main article: Australian rock
After Johnny O'Keefe's last major hit in 1961, Australian popular music was dominated by clean-cut
family bands. Bubbling beneath the surface, however, was a group of pioneering
bands like the surf band The Atlantics.
British rock
Main article: British
rock
American rock and roll had an impact across the globe, perhaps most intensely
in the United Kingdom,
where record collecting and trend-watching were in full bloom among the youth
culture prior to the rock era, and where color barriers were less of an issue.
Countless British youths listened to R&B and rock pioneers and began forming
their own bands to play with an intensity and drive seldom found in white
American acts. Britain quickly became a new center of rock and roll, leading to
the British
Invasion from 1958 to 1969.
In 1958 three British teenagers formed a rock and roll group, Cliff Richard and the
Drifters (later renamed Cliff Richard and the Shadows). The group
recorded a hit, "Move It",
marking not only what is held to be the very first true British rock 'n' roll
single, but also the beginning of a different sound — British rock. Richard and his band introduced many
important changes, such as using a "lead guitarist" (virtuoso Hank Marvin) and an electric bass. Richard
inspired many British teens to begin buying records and follow the music scene,
thus laying the groundwork for Beatlemania.
British Invasion
Main article: British Invasion
By the early 1960s, bands from England
were dominating the rock and roll scene world-wide. First re-recording standard
American tunes, these bands then infused their original rock and roll
compositions with an industrial-class sensibility. Foremost among these was The Beatles, who became the
single most influential act in the history of rock and roll. The Beatles brought
together an appealing mix of image, songwriting, and personality and, after
initial success in the UK, were launched a large-scale US tour to ecstatic
reaction, a phenomenon quickly dubbed Beatlemania.
Although they were not the first British band to come to America, The Beatles
spearheaded the Invasion, triumphing in the US on their first visit in 1964 (including historic appearances on the
Ed Sullivan
Show). In the wake of Beatlemania other British bands headed to the
U.S., notably the Rolling
Stones, who disdained the Beatles' clean-cut image and presented a darker,
more aggressive image, The
Animals and The
Yardbirds. Throughout the early and mid-60s Americans seemed to have an
insatiable appetite for British rock. Other British bands, including The Who and The Kinks, had some success during this period but
saved their peak of popularity for the second wave of British invasion in the
late 1960s.
1960s Garage rock
Main article: Garage
rock
The British Invasion spawned a wave of imitators in the U.S. and across the
globe. Many of these bands were cruder than the bands they tried to emulate.
Playing mainly to local audiences and recording cheaply, very few of these bands
broke through to a higher level of success. This movement, later known as Garage Rock, gained a new
audience when record labels started re-issuing compilations of the original
singles; the best known of these is a series called Nuggets. Some of the better known band of this
genre include The Sonics, ? & the
Mysterians, and The
Standells.
Bob Dylan and Folk-rock (starting 1963)
Main article: Folk-rock
As the British Invasion led by The Beatles picked up steam, a homegrown
American trend was making itself felt, led by Bob Dylan. By 1963 the 22 year old Dylan had assimilated a variety of
regional American styles and was about to work some alchemy to create an
entirely new genre, usually dubbed "folk-rock". From 1961 to mid-1963 Dylan had kept his distance from rock and
roll even though his first musical forays owed more to early rockers like Buddy Holly and Little Richard than to
any of the more obscure folk and blues artists he would later embrace. He and
others on the new folk circuit tended to view The Beatles as bubblegum, but admitted to
a grudging respect for their originality and energetic style. In 1963 Dylan's
release of the album The Times They Are A-Changin
was a watershed event, bringing "relevant" and highly poetic lyrics to the edge
of rock and roll. The Beatles listened to this album incessantly and moved away
from the romantic themes of their work to date. In 1964 and 1965 Dylan
threw off all pretense to roots purity and embraced the rock beat and electric
instruments, climaxed by the release of the song "Like a Rolling
Stone" which, at over six minutes, changed the landscape of hit radio and
ushered in a period of intense experimentation. Dylan would continue to surprise
fans and critics with tour-de-force albums, but, after 1964, rarely strayed far
from the rock and roll framework. His influence on all rock sub-genres is
incalculable, probably equaled only by The Beatles'. Among Dylan's most
important disciples was Neil
Young, whose lyrical inventiveness, wedded to an often wailing electric
guitar attack, would presage grunge.
Birth of a Counterculture (1968-1974)
Main article: Counterculture
As part of the societal ferment in North America and Europe, rock changed and
diversified in a number of subtle and not-so-subtle ways.
As early as the mid-1960s, the image of rock and roll became less like
previous musical forms. The Rolling Stones are credited with being
the first band to dispense with band uniforms; band members simply wore whatever
clothes they wished, and these clothes were often outlandish or controversial.
Hair styles also became longer and less tamed. As trivial as these changes may
sound today, this break from tradition was shocking to audiences used to
clean-cut musical groups in matching suits.
Psychedelic rock
Main article: Psychedelic rock
The music took on a greater social awareness; it was not just about dancing
and smooching anymore, but took on themes of social justice. The counterculture
that was emerging (partly as a reaction to the Vietnam War) adopted rock and roll as its defining
feature, and the music began to be heavily influenced by the various drugs that the youth culture was
experimenting with. In America, psychedelic rock influenced and was influenced
by the drug scene and the larger psychedelic lifestyle. It featured long, often
improvised jams and wild electronic sounds. Jimi Hendrix, Jefferson Airplane, and the Grateful Dead were leading
practitioners of psychedelia. A more esoteric form of British psychedelia and
the Canterbury
Sound is exemplified by the Soft Machine, who accompanied Hendrix on his first
U.S. tour. Pink Floyd found
their roots in British psychedelia, moving on to becoming more of a progressive
rock, and arena rock band later in their careers.
The culmination of rock and roll as a socially-unifying force was seen in the
rock festivals of the
late '60s, the most famous of which was Woodstock which began as a three-day arts
and music festival and turned into a "happening", as hundreds of thousands of
youthful fans converged on the site.
Progressive rock
Main article: Progressive rock
The music itself broadened past the guitar-bass-drum
format; while some bands had used saxophones and keyboards before, now acts like
The Beach Boys and The Beatles (and others
following their lead) experimented with new instruments including wind sections,
string sections, and full orchestration. Many bands moved well beyond
three-minute tunes into new and diverse forms; increasingly sophisticated chord
structures, previously limited to jazz and orchestrated pop music, were
heard.
Dabbling heavily in classical, jazz, electronic, and experimental music
resulted in what would be called progressive rock (or, in its German wing, krautrock). Progressive rock could be
lush and beautiful or atonal and dissonant, highly complex or minimalistic,
sometimes all within the same song. At times it was hardly recognizeable as rock
at all. Some notable practitioners include King Crimson, Genesis, Gentle Giant, The Nice, Yes, Gong, Magma, Can, and Faust.
German prog
Main article: Krautrock
In the mid-1960s, American and British rock entered Germany, especially
British progressive rock bands. At the time, the musical avant-garde in Germany
were playing a kind of electronic classical music, and they adapted the
then-revolutionary electronic instruments for a progressive-psychedelic rock
sound. By the early 1970s, the scene, now known as krautrock, had begun
to peak with the incorporation of jazz (Can) and Asian music (Popol Vuh).
This sound, and later pioneers like Kraftwerk, were to prove enormously influential in
the development of techno
and other genres later in the century.
Birth of heavy metal
Main article: Heavy metal music
A second wave of British bands and artists gained great popularity during
this period dominant; these bands typically were more directly steeped in
American blues music than their more pop-oriented predecessors but their
performances took a highly amplified, often spectacular form. These were the
bands that were led by the guitar; Cream and Led Zeppelin were early examples of this blues-rock form and were followed
by heavier rock bands including Black Sabbath and Deep Purple. This style of rock would come to be
known as heavy metal
music.
Corporate movements out of the counterculture
Main article: Arena
rock
The Beatles and the Rolling Stones had set the table for massive live
performances in stadiums and arenas. The growing popularity of metal and
progressive rock led to more bands selling out large venues. The corporate world
saw the chance for huge profits and began marketing a series of what came to be
called arena rock bands. Bands
whose roots were in other genres, like Pink Floyd and Genesis, paved the way by putting on
extravagent live shows drawing a large number of fans. Following in this wake,
Boston, Styx, Foreigner, Journey, and many other bands began playing
similar music, often less progressive and metal-like. This movement became a
precurser to the power pop of
future decades, and set the mold for live performances by popular artists.
Punk and New Wave (1976-1981)
Main article: Punk
rock
Punk rock started off as a
reaction to the lush, producer-driven sounds of disco, and against the perceived
commercialism of progressive rock that had become arena rock.
Early punk borrowed heavily from the garage band ethic: played by bands for
which expert musicianship was not a requirement, punk was stripped-down,
three-chord music that could be played easily. Many of these bands also intended
to shock mainstream society, rejecting the "peace and love" image of the prior
musical rebellion of the 1960s which had degenerated, punks thought, into mellow
disco culture.
Punk rose to public awareness nearly simultaneously in Britain with the Sex Pistols and in America with
The Ramones.
The Sex Pistols chose aggressive stage names (including "Johnny Rotten" and "Sid
Vicious") and did their best to live up to them, deliberately rejecting anything
that symbolized "hippies": long hair, soft music, loose clothing, and liberal
politics, and displaying an anarchic, often confrontational, stage presence;
well represented on their first two singles "Anarchy in the UK" and "God Save the
Queen". Despite an airplay ban on the BBC,
the record rose to the top chart position in the UK. The Sex Pistols paved the
way for The Clash, whose
approach was less nihilistic but more overtly political and idealistic.
The Ramones exemplified the American side of punk: equally aggressive but
mostly apolitical, more alienated, and not above fun for its own sake. The
Ramones reigned as the kings of the New York punk scene, which also included Richard Hell and Television, and
centered around rough-and-tumble clubs, notably CBGB's. Punk was mostly an East-coast phenomenon in
the US until the late 1970s when Los Angeles-based bands such as X and Black Flag
broke through.
New Wave
Main article: New
Wave
Punk rock attracted devotees from the art and collegiate world and soon bands
sporting a more literate, arty approach, such as the Talking Heads and Devo began to infiltrate the punk scene; in some quarters
the description New
Wave began to be used to differentiate these less overtly punk bands.
If punk rock was a social and musical phenomenon, it garnered little in the
way of record sales (small specialty labels such as Stiff Records had released much of the punk music
to date) or American radio airplay, as the radio scene continued to be dominated
by mainstream formats such as disco and album-oriented rock. Record executives, who had
been mostly mystified by the punk movement, recognized the potential of the more
accessible New Wave acts and began aggressively signing and marketing any band
that could claim a remote connection to punk or New Wave. Many of these bands,
such as The Cars and The Go-Gos were essentially pop
bands dressed up in New Wave regalia; others, including The Police and The Pretenders managed to parlay the boost of
the New Wave movement into long-lived and artistically lauded careers.
Punk and post-punk bands would
continue to appear sporadically, but as a musical scene, punk had largely
self-destructed and been subsumed into mainstream New Wave pop by the mid-1980s,
but the influence of punk has been substantial. The grunge movement of the late 1980s owes much to
punk, and many current mainstream bands claim punk rock as their stylistic
heritage. Punk also bred other genres, including hardcore, industrial music, and goth.
1980s rock
Main article: 1980s in
music
In the 1980s, popular rock included a
wide range of variety. The early part of the decade saw pop-New Wave bands
remain extremely popular, while the first pop-punk performers, like Billy Idol and The Go-Go's, saw widespread fame. Led by the
American folky singer-songwriter Paul Simon and the British former prog rock star Peter Gabriel, rock became
fused with a variety of folk music styles from around the world. This came to be
known as "world music", and
included fusions like Aboriginal rock and punta-rockero.
The heavy metal resurgence
Main article: Hair
metal
Heavy metal languished in obscurity during most of the 70s. A few bands
maintained large followings, like Kiss and Aerosmith, and there were occasional mainstream hits,
like Blue Oyster
Cult's "Don't Fear the Reaper". Music critics overwhelmingly hated the
genre, though, and mainstream listeners generally avoided it because of its
strangeness. It left its mark on hard progressive bands like Chicago and
flamboyant glam rock performers
like Gary Glitter.
Even while innovative metal bands like Metallica were forming numerous subgenres of metal,
and the New Wave of British Heavy Metal
was finding its own fans, a group of musicians were formulating what became
known as hair metal. Bon Jovi are often regarded as the
first of these bands to gain popularity. They were known for long hair and
feminized use of make-up, clothing and jewelry; nevertheless, their songs were
defiantly masculine, even macho, focusing on girls, drinking and violence.
Within a few years, hair metal dominated radio; bands like Def Leppard, Ratt and Extreme
rose to fame, often collapsing under pressure later. Many were one-hit wonders.
By the end of the 1980s, a formula was developing in which a hair metal band
had two hits, one a soft ballad, and the other a hard-rocking anthem. 1987 saw the release of Appetite
for Destruction by Guns n' Roses, which skyrocketed to the top of
the charts. Led by controversial frontman Axl Rose, Guns n' Roses rode the hair metal wave,
wearing long hair and playing pop-metal. In contrast to other bands, they were
not feminized in the slightest and incorporated influences from genres like thrash metal.
Birth of Chinese rock
Main article: Chinese
rock
Beginning about 1986, the Northwest Wind
(xibeifeng, ???) style of rock began to enter the burgeoning youth
culture in China. The first Chinese rock song may be "I Have Nothing" by Cui Jian, now the widely-admired
godfather of the Chinese rock scene. Spurred by pro-democracy activism, such as
at Tianammen
Square, and by governmental repression, rock flourished in the Chinese
counterculture. Of especial popularity later in the decade were melancholy tunes
called prison songs. By 1990, Chinese rock had begun to enter the
mainstream, but almost immediately incorporated sounds and styles from the Cantopop style. Though alternative
bands remained, Chinese rock became subverted, often by bands working in
cohesion with the Chinese government and in favor of the status quo; many of
rock's fans in China became disillusioned as a result, leading to a general
decline in popularity later in the decade.
Alternative rock and the indie movement
Main article: Alternative music
The term alternative music (also often known as alternative rock) was
coined in the early 1980s to describe
bands which didn't fit into the mainstream genres of the time. Bands dubbed
"alternative" could be most any style not typically heard on the radio, however,
most alternative bands were unified by their collective debt to punk. Although these groups never
generated spectacular album sales, they exerted a considerable influence on the
generation of musicians who came of age in the 80s.
Grunge and the anti-corporate rock movement
Main article: Grunge
music
By the late 1980s rock radio was dominated by aging classic rock artists,
slick commercial pop-rock and hair metal; MTV
had arrived and brought with it a perception that style was more important than
substance. Any remaining traces of rock and roll rebelliousness or the punk
ethic seemed to have been subsumed into corporate-sponsored and mass-marketed
product. Disaffected by this trend, some young musicians began to reject the
polished, glamour-oriented approach and created crude, sometimes angry music.
The American Pacific
Northwest region, especially Seattle, became a hotbed of this movement, dubbed grunge.
Early grunge bands, particularly Mudhoney and Soundgarden, took much of their sound from early
heavy metal and much of their approach from punk, though they eschewed punk's
ambitions towards political and social commentary to proceed in a more
nihilistic direction. Grunge remained a mostly local phenomenon until the
breakthrough of Nirvana in 1991 with their album Nevermind. A slightly more
melodic, more completely produced variation on their predecessors, Nirvana was
an instant sensation worldwide and made much of the competing music seem stale
and dated by comparison, hair metal faded almost completely from the
mainstream.
Nirvana whetted the public's appetite for more direct, less polished rock
music, leading to the success of bands like Pearl Jam and Stone Temple Pilots. Pearl Jam took a
somewhat more traditional rock approach than other grunge bands but shared their
passion and rawness. Pearl Jam were a major commercial success from their debut
but, beginning with their second album, refused to buy in to the corporate
promotion and marketing mechanisms of MTV and
Ticketmaster, with whom they
famously engaged in legal skirmishes over ticket service fees.
While grunge itself can be seen as somewhat limited in range, its influence
was felt across many geographic and musical boundaries; many artists who were
similarly disaffected with commercial rock music suddenly found record companies
and audiences willing to listen, and dozens of disparate acts positioned
themselves as alternatives to mainstream music; thus alternative rock emerged from the
underground.
Britpop
Main article: Britpop
While America was full of grunge, post-grunge, and hip hop, Britain launched
a 1960s revival in the mid-90s, often called Britpop, with bands like Oasis and Blur. These bands drew on a myriad of styles from the 80s
British rock underground, including twee pop, shoegazing and space rock.For a time, the Oasis-Blur rivalry was
similar to the Beatles-Rolling Stones rivalry. While bands like Blur tended to
follow on from the Small Faces and The Kinks, Oasis mixed the attitude of the
Rolling Stones with the melody of the Beatles. Both bands became very
successful, and for a time Oasis was given the title "the biggest band in the
world" but slowed down after band breakups and slightly less popular
support.
Indie rock
Main article: Indie
rock
Alternative music and the rebellious, DIY ethic it espoused became the inspiration for
grunge, the popularity of which, paradoxically, took alternative rock into the
mainstream. By the mid-90s, the term "alternative music" had lost much of its
original meaning as rock radio and record buyers embraced increasingly slick,
commercialized, and highly marketed forms of the genre. At the end of the
decade, hip hop music
had pushed much of alternative rock out of the mainstream, and most of what was
left played pop-punk and highly
polished versions of a grunge/rock mishmash.
Following the lead of Pearl Jam, many acts who, by choice or fate, remained
outside the commercial mainstream, became part of the indie rock movement. Indie rock acts placed a
premium on maintaining complete control of their music and careers, often
releasing albums on their own independent record labels and relying on touring,
word-of-mouth, and airplay on independent or college radio stations for
promotion. Linked by an ethos more than a musical approach, the indie rock
movement encompasses a wide range of styles, from hard-edged, grunge influenced
bands like Superchunk to
punk-folk singers such as Ani
DiFranco.
Currently, many countries have an extensive local Indie scene, flourishing
with bands with much less popularity than commercial bands, just enough of it to
survive inside the respective country, but virtually unknown outside them.
Current (1995-present)
With the death of grunge-rock pioneer Kurt Cobain, rock and roll music searched for a new
face, sound, and trend. In 1995, Canadian pop star Alanis Morissette released Jagged Little
Pill, a major hit that featured blunt, personally-revealing lyrics. It
succeeded in moving the introspection that had become so common in grunge to the
mainstream. The success of Jagged Little Pill spawned a wave of
popularity in the late 90s of confessional rock releases by female artists
including Jewel,
Tori Amos, Fiona Apple, and Liz Phair. Many of these artists
drew on their own alternative rock heroes from the 1980s and early 90s,
including the folksy Tracy
Chapman and various Riot
Grrl bands. The use of introspective lyrics bled into other styles of rock,
including those dubbed alternative.
The late 1990s brought about a wave of mergers and consolidations among US
media companies and radio stations such as the Clear Channel Communications
conglomerate. This has resulted in a homogenization of music available and the
creation of artificially-hyped acts. In the early 2000s the entire music
industry was shaken by claims of massive theft of music rights using file-sharing tools such as Napster, resulting in lawsuits against
private file-sharers by the recording industry group the RIAA.
After existing in the musical underground for decades, garage rock finally
saw a resurgence of popularity in the early 2000s, with bands like The White Stripes, The Strokes, Jet
and The Hives all releasing
successful singles and albums. This wave is often referred to as the garage
rock revival.
In Britain, there is a new trend in copying 1970s rock bands in the form of
wild clothing and long guitar solos, e.g. The Darkness. Though The Darkness have proved to
be very popular it remains to be seen if this trend will become mainstream, with
other bands emulating them.
External links
Oddity: The first gramophone record released in Britain to
feature the words Rock and Roll was "Bloodnock's Rock And Roll Call" a
1956 record from The Goon Show.
There have been many songs with the title "Rock and Roll" from The Treniers in the 1950s to Led Zeppelin and Gary Glitter in the
1970s.
