Unit 4

Readings and Resources

Textbook or eBook:

Campbell, M. (2019). Popular music in America. 5th ed. Cengage Learning.

In this unit, you will be learning and the changing scene in the business of rock music and the new ways that artists had to promote themselves as musicians as music became an industry. We begin to see musicians carving out unique identities for themselves as singer-songwriters and personalities begin to come through in their costuming, spectacular performances and the expansion of the rock and R&B styles of the 1960s.

· Chapter 13: Rock and R&B after 1970 (pgs. 234-250)

Articles, Websites, and Videos:

Led Zeppelin has its own band website, and this is an excellent resource for you to explore the music of this band, as well as its history. On this site you can locate photos, a “discography” of all of the albums Led Zeppelin recorded as well as the venues in which living members of this band are still performing in.

· . (2019). Warner Music UK Limited.

The SONY Walkman was one of the most influential portable music gadgets in music history. Read about the history of the Walkman on this site.

· Haire, M. (2009, Jul 1). . Time USA, LLC.

Ch. 54

Commerce and Technology in 1970s Rock

54-1 The Business of Rock

In the seventies, rock traded tie-dyed T-shirts for three-piece suits. In so doing, it turned its core values upside down. From the beginning, rock had portrayed itself as the music of rebellion. But as the market share of rock and R&B grew, so did the financial stake. It cost more to create and promote a record, put on a concert, and operate a venue. There was more money to be made but also more to be lost. Not surprisingly, a corporate mentality took over the business side of rock. It was evident to some extent in the music itself, in that some artists seemed to make commercial success their highest priority and let that shape their music: Elton John, the best-selling rock star of the seventies, was the poster boy for this path. However, the impact of profit-oriented thinking was far more telling behind the scenes. It determined to a great extent which music would get promoted and how. Its impact was most evident in the media and in the use of new market strategies designed to maximize sales.

54-1aCross-Marketing

A major business innovation of the seventies was . In pursuit of greater financial rewards, record companies used tours to help promote record sales. The stadium or large-arena concert became commonplace. More ritual than musical event, these concerts usually confirmed what the audience already knew about the music of a particular act. As a rule there was little, if any, spontaneity in performance, as acts drew their set list from current or recent albums.

Often the performances were more about show than sound, although there were plenty of both. Flamboyance had been part of rock from the start, and by the early seventies, spectacle had become part of the business. Lights, fog, costumes, makeup, pyrotechnics, and the like, were now the norm at rock concerts. Such productions were almost a necessity because performers had to seem larger than life in such huge venues. At its most extreme, outrageous dress, makeup, and stage deportment replaced musical substance as the primary source of interest. Acts like Kiss epitomized this theatrical aspect of seventies rock.

By the early 1970s, spectacle had become part of the business of rock.

54-1bRock as Big Business

The seventies proved that there was money to be made in rock and R&B on a scale that was hard to imagine even a decade before. Record sales had increased enough that the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) created a new category in 1976, the platinum record, which signified the sale of one million units. (The gold record represented sales of 500,000 units.) Moreover, the album had replaced the single as the primary unit, so revenues were even higher.

The increased sales, which occurred during a long economic recession, certainly reflected the deeper bond between music and listener, the “rock as a way of life” state of mind. But there were other causes. The ever-growing diversity of the musical landscape meant that there was music for almost every taste. Technology reinforced the personalization of musical taste: the development of cassettes meant that one’s music became increasingly portable and customizable.

54-1cTape Players

In the sixties, two important tape-based consumer formats emerged. One was the four- or eight-track tape. These tape players began to appear in cars (and Lear jets—Bill Lear had the technology developed for his line of corporate jets) in 1965 and remained popular through the seventies. The other, more enduring playback device was the audiocassette. A number of manufacturers, most notably Philips, Sony, and Grundig, worked to develop cassettes and cassette players and to come up with an industry standard. By the seventies, this new technology had caught on: cassette sales grew much faster than LPs (vinyl) and by 1982 exceeded them.

. In this format, disc jockeys could no longer choose the songs they played. Instead, program directors selected a limited number of songs designed to attract a broad audience while offending as few as possible. Often stations bought syndicated packages, further homogenizing radio content. Free-form radio all but disappeared, and so did the adventurous spirit that it symbolized. As a result, distortion was out; tunefulness was in. Acts like Barry Manilow, the Carpenters, Stevie Wonder, Chicago, the Eagles, Fleetwood Mac, Paul McCartney and Wings, and, above all, Elton John got a lot of airplay and topped the charts.

54-2 The New Mainstream

Rock not only reshaped the mainstream, it reshaped the idea of a mainstream. The term implies a single dominant trend. However, as the list of AOR and chart-topping acts suggests, the mainstream in the 1970s was instead a diverse array of melodically oriented styles. This is an expected consequence of the inherent diversity of rock.

If one had to reduce the relationship between sixties and early-seventies music to a single word, that word might well be more. Whatever happened in the sixties happened more in the seventies. Rock became diverse in the sixties; it became more diverse in the seventies as styles and substyles proliferated. Sixties musicians found the new grooves of rock and soul. Seventies musicians found them more easily; rhythms were often freer and more daring, or more powerful. The sounds of bands got even bigger in the seventies through more powerful amplification and additional instruments. Contrasts between styles and the attitudes that they conveyed also became more pronounced. The seventies both heard the intimate confessions of the singer-songwriters and witnessed the bombast of David Bowie’s grand spectacles. Sometimes these contrasts even appeared in the same song; Led Zeppelin’s “Stairway to Heaven” is a memorable example. Some artists, such as Joni Mitchell, created highly personal music. Other acts hid behind a mask: David Bowie is an extreme example.

The breakup of the Beatles symbolized the fragmentation of the new mainstream of the rock era. After they dissolved in 1970, each of the band members went his own way. Paul McCartney was the most active and the most commercially successful. Wings, the group that he formed in 1971, was one of five 1970s acts to reach the Top 20 in both singles and album sales. Another was Elton John, the top pop artist of the decade.

54-3 Elton John and the Expansion of Mainstream Rock

The career of Elton John (born Reginald Dwight, 1947; his stage name came from the first names of fellow band members in his first band, Bluesology) is a testimony to the power of personality. Off stage, he is an unlikely looking rock star: short, chunky, balding, and bespectacled. On stage, his costumes and extroverted style made him larger than life; it rendered his everyday appearance irrelevant. He was one of the top live acts of the seventies and the best-selling recording artist of the decade.

capable of creating a variety of electronic sounds. His first synthesizer, released in 1970, was a fairly large machine. His second model, the ARP 2600, which was released in 1971, was portable and flexible enough to be used in live performance.

The first synthesizers were cumbersome machines: The Moog synthesizer used by Wendy Carlos in her landmark 1968 recording Switched-On Bach looked like an old-fashioned telephone switchboard, with plugs connecting the various oscillators. By contrast, the ARP 2600 was one of the first to use transistors instead of tubes, which made the synthesizer smaller and lighter. It was limited, in that it was capable of producing only one sound at a time. However, as transistors became smaller and more powerful, improved models capable of simultaneously playing several sounds began to appear.

To promote his new instruments, Pearlman gave units to some of the top rock and R&B musicians of the era, in return for permission to use their names in advertising his product. Among his first clients was The Who’s Pete Townshend. Judging by the almost immediate results, Townshend was fascinated by the synthesizer and the cutting-edge technology it represented. The synthesizer played a central role in “Won’t Get Fooled Again,” a track from Who’s Next.

In “Won’t Get Fooled Again,” Townshend uses the synthesizer as a futuristic rhythm guitar, pitched in a high register instead of the more characteristic mid-range, but providing steady reinforcement of the rock rhythmic layer throughout the song. The insistent rhythm of the synthesizer chords seems to liberate the rest of the band. Townshend’s power chords and riffs, Entwistle’s active and free bass lines, and Moon’s explosive drumming all play off this steady rhythm. It is this interplay between the steady rhythm of the synthesizer and the rest of the group that gives the song its extraordinary rhythmic energy.

was anything but a monolithic style. Their similarities highlight the qualities that set heavy metal apart from other hard rock styles.

Power and craft are two outstanding qualities of heavy metal. Most of its musical conventions—distortion; massive amplification; use of modes, pentatonic scales, and power chords; basic rhythms; power trio instrumental nucleus—were also part of the vocabulary of all hard rock music in the early 1970s. What metal bands did was to take these features and streamline or amplify them to give them more impact. Metal bands used more distortion and played more loudly. They took rock’s shift away from traditional harmony several steps further by using conventional chords sparingly or, in some cases, abandoning harmony altogether. There is little harmony in “Black Dog” and it is based on modes instead of conventional harmony. Metal guitarists played power chords with more “power”—that is, greater resonance—and used them almost exclusively, and they developed more flamboyantly virtuosic styles. Metal’s riffs and rhythms were stronger and more pervasive: at times, vocal lines seemed to ride on the riffs like a whitewater raft.

All of this supported nonmusical manifestations of power. Heavy metal evoked supernatural, or at least paranormal, power, especially in the group personas of Black Sabbath and Led Zeppelin. Even as the women’s rights movement was in the ascendancy, metal bands projected masculine power, to the point where performers could sport skillfully styled long hair, wear makeup, and sing higher than many women without fear of abandoning their sexual identity.

The other was the mastery of craft. Like the alchemists of old, heavy metal performers diligently studied ancient formulas, from the modes of medieval music to the musical patterns of Bach and Vivaldi. These they adapted to rock, then juxtaposed them with elemental musical material. Guitarists like Page and Ritchie Blackmore of Deep Purple spent countless hours mastering their instruments. As a result, heavy metal has been, almost from the start, rock’s most virtuosic substyle. It is evident not only in the individual brilliance of the many technically fluent performers but also in the complex and intricate ensemble playing, often at breakneck speeds. Both individual and group virtuosity are evident in “Black Dog.”

Power and craft put the focus on the music. The music is there more; one of the qualities that distinguishes heavy metal from most other styles is the sheer amount of nonvocal music. Even more important, music is the primary source of heavy metal’s overwhelming impact and expressive power. Words serve a largely explanatory role. Most of the audience at a metal concert will know the lyrics to songs, but not from the vocal, which is often unintelligible.

In its emphasis on instrumental virtuosity and power, its distance from more mainstream practice (including intelligible, conventional lyrics), and its cult-like environment, heavy metal represents a more extreme point along the continuum of hard rock styles. This is evidenced in its reception during the 1970s: the relatively small but fervent audience, hand in hand with limited airplay on mainstream radio and negative press from rock critics. Still, it was one of the most influential and distinctive hard rock styles of the era.

55-4 A Timeless Music

“Won’t Get Fooled Again” and “Black Dog” exemplify a key moment in the history of rock. It is around this time that rock emerged as a fully developed style; what makes rock rhythm rock becomes common currency. Up to this point, we hear rock musicians restlessly seeking to discover the optimal approach to rock rhythm; they found it around 1970. From this point on, rock becomes a timeless music, in the sense that its conventions are clear and widely understood, and that musicians feel comfortable enough with them to play rock with great freedom. The rhythms and sounds of rock-era music would continue to develop beyond this point, as we will discover. But the rock that emerged around 1970 defines the core values of rock in a way that neither the rock that preceded it nor the rock that evolved beyond it does.

Ch. 56

Black Pop in the 1970s

Chapter Introduction

Among the people of the African diaspora, the impulse to play with sound seems almost as strong as the impulse to play with rhythm. Two aspects of this impulse that seem especially persistent are the discovery of found sounds and the quest to make multiple sounds at the same time. Found sounds have taken many forms: making instruments out of everyday materials, like the cowbell in Cuban music, the steel drums of calypso, or the turntables of rap DJs; using everyday objects—a toilet plunger, the neck of a wine bottle—to modify the sound of a conventional instrument; or simply inventing new ways of making sound from an instrument, like “patting juba” by tapping out rhythms on various parts of one’s body, or slapping an electric bass.

The most familiar instance of the impulse to play multiple instruments simultaneously is the drum kit. More complex expressions of this practice range from jazz multi-instrumentalist Rahsaan Roland Kirk’s ability to play the saxophone and two other instruments simultaneously to one-man bands like the obscure Abner Jay, the self-styled “last great southern black minstrel show,” who accompanied himself with an electric guitar, bass drum, and hi-hat while he sang or played harmonica.

With his emancipation from Gordy’s tight control, Stevie Wonder was able to combine both of these practices and take them high-tech. Both the electronic instruments (especially keyboards) that Wonder used on recordings like “Superstition”, and the twenty-four-track mixing boards that made the recording possible, were new, rapidly developing technologies. Wonder was the first major artist, black or white, to take them to their logical extreme: make a complete recording by not only assembling it track by track but also recording each track himself.

Wonder’s high-tech one-man band was one of several important new directions in black pop during the early 1970s. Motown continued turning out hits. The Jackson 5 was their biggest new act of the 1970s, but Motown was losing its dominant position in the marketplace. Former Motown acts like Marvin Gaye and Gladys Knight and the Pips enjoyed significant success. A diverse group of solo singers, including Roberta Flack and Bill Withers, offered mature expressions of love, whereas Barry White offered love without limits. Philadelphia superseded Detroit as the main hit-making locale in black pop. We sample this music through tracks by Stevie Wonder and the O’Jays, one of the top Philadelphia acts.

56-1 Stevie Wonder

There’s a certain irony that Motown’s most powerful and original talent, and its longest running success story, is in many ways the antithesis of the Motown image and sound. Stevie Wonder is a solo act; most Motown acts were groups. The visual element was crucial to Motown’s success: its groups, dressed in gowns or tuxedos, moved through stylized, carefully choreographed routines as they sang their songs. Our enduring image of Stevie Wonder? A blind man with sunglasses and long braided and beaded hair, sitting behind a keyboard and rocking from side to side in a random rhythm. Motown recordings were collective enterprises; behind the groups were largely anonymous songwriters and studio musicians. Wonder created his own recordings from soup to nuts, not only singing and playing all the instruments at times but also performing the technical tasks—recording, mixing, mastering, and so on.

There are also differences in subject and attitude. In the mid-sixties, Motown song lyrics talked mainly about young love, usually in racially neutral, often-idealized language. Only reluctantly did they begin to address “real life” in songs like the Supremes’ “Love Child.” By contrast, Stevie Wonder took on social issues from his self-produced first album; the vignette of an innocent man’s arrest in “Living for the City” is chilling. Stevie Wonder has advocated a long list of causes, from his firm push for a national holiday for Martin Luther King, Jr., to rights for the blind and disabled.

: Kenny Gamble (b. 1943), Leon Huff (b. 1942), and Thom Bell (b. 1941). All were veterans of the Philadelphia music scene; they had worked together off and on during the early sixties in a group called Kenny Gamble and the Romeos. A few years later, Gamble and Huff began producing records together. They enjoyed their first extended success with Jerry Butler, who revived his career under their guidance. Their big break came in 1971, when Clive Davis, the head of Columbia Records, helped them form Philadelphia International Records. The connection with Columbia assured them of widespread distribution, especially in white markets.

The artist roster at Philadelphia International included the O’Jays, Harold Melvin and the Blue Notes, Teddy Pendergrass (who left the group to go solo), Billy Paul, and MFSB, which was the house band. Their competition came mainly from Thom Bell, who produced the Stylistics and the Spinners, a Detroit group that went nowhere at Motown but took off when paired with Bell in 1972.

56-3 The O’Jays

came into use during the early seventies to identify those solo performers who made personal statements in song. Their songs were typically supported by a subdued, often acoustic, accompaniment that put the vocal line in the forefront.

Within these general parameters, there has been astonishing variety: autobiographical confessions, cinéma vérité portraits or acerbic social commentary, cryptic accounts that leave the identity of the narrator in question. Most are songs in a restricted sense of the term, in that they have coherent melodies that help tell the story and make musical sense through an inner logic. They are seldom formulaic; formal and melodic imagination finds its greatest outlet in these songs.

Among the first wave of singer-songwriters were established acts who went solo: Neil Young left Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young, and Paul Simon dissolved his long-time partnership with Art Garfunkel. They were joined by a new generation of folk-inspired performers, most notably Joni Mitchell and James Taylor. Randy Newman, by contrast, came from a family heavily involved in traditional pop and film music; Carole King had been writing hit songs for over a decade.

The music of the singer-songwriters of the late sixties and early seventies represents the continuing evolution of the folk/country/pop fusions of the mid-sixties. The dominant influences were Bob Dylan and The Beatles, but other influences were also evident—folk and country especially, but also jazz, blues, pop, gospel, and Latin music.

57-2 Elevating the Feminine

The folk revival provided women with the most accessible point of entry into rock. With its intimate environment, emphasis on words and melody, and understated acoustic accompaniment, the urban folk music of the postwar era was far less macho than rock and roll, jazz, or blues. Indeed, young women folksingers were fixtures in coffeehouses throughout the sixties; Joan Baez was the most notable.

During the sixties, the repertoire of many female folksingers mutated from reworked folksongs to contemporary songs in a similar style. Judy Collins’s work in the sixties embodies this transition; Janis Ian’s “Society’s Child” (1965–1967), her first hit, helped mark this new direction.

Among the new voices of the early 1970s were Carole King and Joni Mitchell. Both enjoyed success as songwriters before breaking through as performers. After a decade of working behind the scenes writing songs for others, Carole King began a solo career after her divorce from Gerry Goffin in 1968. She broke through in 1971 with Tapestry, which remained on the charts for almost six years and eventually sold over 22 million units. Similarly, Mitchell’s first foray onto the charts came as a songwriter: Judy Collins’s version of “Both Sides Now” reached No. 8 in 1968.

57-3 Joni Mitchell

. It emerged in the early seventies, mainly in the work of David Bowie and T Rex, a group fronted by Marc Bolan.

As it took shape in the mid-sixties, rock prided itself on being real. It confronted difficult issues, dealt with real feelings, looked life squarely in the eye. This realism provoked a reaction. The Beatles followed A Hard Day’s Night, a documentary-style film of their life on the run from fans, with Help! a psychedelic fantasy, in which they assumed personas, visually and musically.

Rock as artifice—rock behind a mask—found its fullest expression in glam rock, most spectacularly in David Bowie’s first public persona, Ziggy Stardust. In portraying Ziggy Stardust, Bowie stripped identity down to the most basic question of all: gender. Was Ziggy male or female, or something in between? With his lithe build, flamboyant costumes, and heavy makeup, Bowie as Ziggy was a mystery. Particularly because he was not well known prior to Ziggy, there was no “real” Bowie to compare with his Ziggy persona. As Bowie pranced around onstage, he rendered his gender—or at least his sexual preference—ambiguous. Add to that a fantastical story, and—when performed live—a spectacular production: Glam rock, as exemplified by Bowie, was the opposite of real.

57-5 David Bowie/Ziggy Stardust

Bowie (born David Jones, 1947-2016) began his career in the sixties as a British folksinger. Influenced by Iggy Pop, Marc Bolan, and the Velvet Underground, he began to reinvent his public persona. In 1972, he announced that he was gay. (However, he commented in an interview over a decade later that he “was always a closet heterosexual.”) Later that year, he put together an album and a stage show, The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars. It featured Bowie, complete with orange hair, makeup, and futuristic costumes, as Ziggy, a rock star trying to save the world but doomed to fail.

The songs from Ziggy Stardust provide the musical dimension of Bowie’s role-playing. Their effect is not as obvious as his appearance, but without them, his persona would be incomplete. The three components of the songs—the words, Bowie’s singing, and the musical backdrop—all assumed multiple roles, as we hear in “Hang On to Yourself,” one of the tracks from the album. The lyric is laced with vivid images: “funky-thigh collector,” “tigers on Vaseline,” “bitter comes out better on a stolen guitar.” These arrest our ear, without question. But Bowie continually shifted from person to person as he delivered them. He “reported” in the verse—“She’s a tongue-twisting storm”—and entreats in the chorus—“Come on, come on, we’ve really got a good thing going.” His voice changed dramatically from section to section. It’s relatively impersonal in the verse and warm, almost whispered, in the chorus. The music was both obvious and subtle in its role-playing. Bowie embedded instrumental and vocal hooks into the song: the guitar riff and the whispered chorus, a shock after the pile-driving verse. Both made the song immediately accessible and memorable.

David Bowie performing as Ziggy Stardust at the Hammersmith Odeon, 1973.

explorations seemed to wane. It was as if once rock had established its cultural credibility, it was time to move in other directions.

Listening Cue

“Hang On to Yourself” (1972)

David Bowie

Bowie, vocal.

STYLE Glam rock ⋅ FORM Verse/Chorus

Listen For …

INSTRUMENTATION

Lead and backup vocals, lead and rhythm guitar, electric bass, drums, handclaps, synthesizer

PERFORMANCE STYLE

Bowie’s varied vocal timbres; heavy distortion on rhythm guitar, whiney lead guitar sound on riff

RHYTHM

Fast, insistent rock beat periodically reinforced by guitar and drums; rhythmic play = syncopated guitar chords, active irregular bass line, occasional “extra” beats

MELODY

Abundance of riffs in verse and chorus

TEXTURE

Sharp contrasts in texture between verse and chorus, mainly because of shift in dynamics, timekeeping, contrasting riffs, different timbres, and busy bass line in chorus

Remember …

PROTO-PUNK

Loud, repeated power chords played on guitar with some distortion, in a basic rock rhythm and at a fast tempo; these are salient features of punk style. They inform basic feel of song throughout.

HOOKS

Loaded with instrumental (e.g., whiny guitar riff) and vocal hooks, which serve narrative of album/stage show (making the band appealing)

SOPHISTICATED FEATURES

Several sophisticated features not customarily found in straightforward rock (frequent shifts in mood, occasional addition of extra beats, sporadically active bass lines, and Bowie’s ever-shifting vocal timbres) = song about a rock band rocking out, rather than simply a good rock song

Listen to this selection in the unit playlist.

Ch. 58

Steely Dan and the Art of Recording

Chapter Introduction

In 1959, the National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences began presenting a Grammy Award for the “Best Engineered Album, Non-Classical.” The award is given to one or more engineers for their work on a particular record date. The first winner of the award was Ted Keep, for his work on the novelty hit “The Chipmunk Song.” Subsequent winners include the engineers responsible for Sgt. Pepper and Abbey Road. The only act whose recordings have won four awards is Steely Dan: their engineers won the award in 1978, 1979, 1982, and 2001.

58-1 Steely Dan

The pursuit of studio perfection is just one of the qualities that distinguishes Steely Dan. Although it began as a band, Steely Dan became a popular and critically acclaimed act only after its two creative minds, keyboardist Donald Fagen (b. 1948) and bassist Walter Becker (b. 1950), dissolved the group and retained the name to label their studio-driven brainchild.

Steely Dan