UNIT 3
· The Rock Revolution
Rock and Roll as a genre was developing at a rapid rate during the 1960s. The subculture that developed in the 1950s takes hold in the 1960s and the verbal and musical messages that they wished to convey became more radical. The lives of teenagers and college students in the 1960s were quite different from the lives of their parents. Young people began to blatantly reject the more conservative “establishment” values of their families and they began to speak out against widespread discrimination against blacks, women, Chicanos, gays and Native Americans. Young women now had access to oral contraceptives, and this brought about a revival of feminism and sexual freedom form women. Recreational drugs, especially marijuana and LSD spread to a larger segment of the middle class. The military escalation in Vietnam and the subsequent military draft had a powerful influence on American young people.
The result of all of these events happening in such a short amount of time contributed to the rapid development of Rock and Roll. New technologies in music enhanced the production and performance of music. Lyrics were meant to speak directly to audiences. Rock and Roll became more multicultural and influenced by African American styles as well as music from around the world. Rock and Roll itself was more revolutionary genre because it was eclectic; artists attempted to embrace real-world issues and the attitude shift of the 1960s generation made this music more egalitarian than any other previous popular music genre.
Objectives:
· Identify the musical genres and subgenres that arose out of the 1960s.
· Identify the core instrumentation of the rock band.
· Explain the musical role of the rock beat.
· Discuss the variation and diversity found within Bob Dylan’s music.
· Describe some ways that music can be considered both a window and mirror to society and culture in the 1960s.
Activities:
· Read, view, and engage with Readings and Resources.
· Actively participate in the Unit Discussion.
· Complete and submit the Unit 3 Assignment.
· Complete the Quiz in MindTap.
·
Readings and Resources
Textbook or eBook:
Campbell, M. (2019). Popular music in America. 5th ed. Cengage Learning.
This reading will explore the genres and sub-genres of rock and roll music that arose out of the 1960s and the four dominant issues that were prevalent at this time. This unit addresses four issues (Civil and Minority Rights, Sexual Freedom, Drugs, and War) and how music was both a window and a mirror of rock and roll music at this time.
· Chapter 12: The Rock Revolution (pgs. 197-228)
Articles, Websites, and Videos:
The following website contains a great deal of detail concerning the life and works of Bob Dylan. You can explore the different songs he has written throughout his career. This resource will help you with your listening assignment this week.
· . (n.d.). WordPress.
Bob Dylan was the recipient of the 2016 Nobel Prize in Literature for the songs that he wrote during the 1960s. You can listen to his speech from when he received this award here.
· . (n.d.). Nobel Media AB 2019.
The textbook includes some verbal descriptions of the role of rock and roll backbeats. In this video, you will be able to listen to a recorded backbeat and hear a description of the role of backbeats in the Rock and Roll music of the 1960s.
Duration: 1:51 User: n/a – Added: 7/25/07
CH. 47
The Rock Revolution: A Historical Perspective
Chapter Introduction
Among the musicians knighted by the Queen of England are the esteemed conductors Sir Thomas Beecham and Sir Georg Solti, the opera star Dame Kiri Te Kanawa, violinist Sir Yehudi Menuhin … and Sir Paul McCartney. Other key figures in 1960s rock elevated to the peerage include Mick Jagger, Eric Clapton, Roger Daltrey of The Who, and Ray Davies of the Kinks. These venerable and venerated rock stars are the old guard of rock-era music, and their music fills classic rock playlists. It is comfortable music now, not cutting edge, because of decades of familiarity. But when it came out, it disrupted an industry and fueled a cultural and social revolution.
To this day, the rock revolution still seems like the most momentous change in the history of popular music. In the fall of 1963, who could have predicted the extraordinary developments of the next four years, capped by the release of Sgt. Pepper? Nothing since has transformed popular music to such a degree in such a short time, and only the modern-era revolution of the 1920s has had a comparable impact.
The new music of the 1960s—an extraordinary range of rock substyles, Motown, soul—was both the soundtrack and an agent of change for a decade of turmoil. A generation eager to overturn the values of their parents found verbal and musical messages that embodied their radical ideas.
Motown
Volume 90%
©Michael Campbell/Cengage
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47-1Social and Cultural Change in the 1960s
Those who came of age during the latter half of the sixties grew up in a world far different from the world of their parents. A decided majority experienced neither the hardships of the Great Depression nor the traumas of World War II and the Korean War. They were in elementary school during the McCarthy witch hunt; in most cases, it had far less impact on them than it did on their parents. A good number came from families that were comfortable financially, so as teens they had had money to spend and time to spend it.
A sizable and vocal segment of these young people rejected the values of the group they pejoratively called the “establishment.” They saw the establishment as excessively conservative, bigoted, materialistic, resistant to social change, obsessed with communism and locked into a potentially deadly arms race, and clueless about sexuality. Fueled by new technologies and drugs—both old and new—they incited the most far-reaching social revolution since the twenties. For college-age youth of the mid-1960s, there were four dominant issues: minority rights, sexual freedom, drug use, and war.
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47-1aCivil Rights
A generation that had grown up listening to rock and roll, rhythm and blues, and jazz found it difficult to comprehend the widespread discrimination against blacks that they saw as legitimized in too many segments of American society. They joined the drive for civil rights—through demonstrations, sit-ins, marches, and, for some, more direct and potentially violent support, such as voter registration in the South. The successes of the civil rights movement created momentum for other minority rights movements: women, Chicanos, gays, Native Americans.
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47-1bSexual Freedom
Commercial production of an effective oral contraceptive—the Pill—began in the early sixties. For some women, this was the key to sexual freedom; it enabled them to be as sexually active as males, with virtually no risk of pregnancy. It precipitated the most consequential change in sexual relations in the history of western culture. Moreover, it extended the drive for equal rights from the voting booth—in the United States, women were granted the right to vote only in 1920—into the bedroom and sparked a revival of feminism, which sought, among other things, to extend these rights into the workplace.
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47-1cDrugs
47-1dVietnam
In the latter part of the sixties, the Vietnam War replaced civil rights as the hot-button issue for young people. In 1954, Vietnam, formerly French Indo-China, was divided—like Korea—into two regions. The north received support from the USSR and communist China, while the southern region received the support of western nations, especially the United States. A succession of American presidents saw a military presence in South Vietnam as a necessary buffer against communist aggression.
As a result, U.S. military involvement gradually escalated over the next decade. Finally, in 1965 the government began sending regular troops to Vietnam to augment the special forces already there. This provoked a hostile reaction, especially from those eligible to be drafted. Many recoiled at the prospect of fighting in a war that seemed pointless; a few fled to Canada or elsewhere to avoid the draft. Massive antiwar demonstrations became as much a part of the news during the late sixties as the civil rights demonstrations were in the first part of the decade. The lies and deceptions of the government and military, which among other things reassured the American people that the war was winnable and that the U.S. forces were winning, coupled with news reports of horrific events such as the My Lai massacre, in which U.S. soldiers killed close to 500 unarmed civilians in a small village, further eroded support for the war.
The gulf between the older establishment positions and attitudes of young Americans on civil rights, sex, drugs, and war widened as the decade wore on. Still, there was a major shift in values. Civil rights legislation passed, the role of women in society underwent a liberating transformation, recreational drug use became more common and socially acceptable in certain circles (although it was still illegal), and the war eventually ended in failure. As a result of this revolution, ideas and practices that seemed radical at mid-century—such as multiculturalism and equal opportunity in the workplace—are accepted norms in contemporary society, in theory if not always in practice.
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47-1eThe Counterculture
A small but prominent minority of young people chose to reject mainstream society completely. They abandoned the conventional lifestyles of their parents and peers; some chose to live in communes. They followed Timothy Leary’s advice to “turn on, tune in, drop out.” They dressed differently, thought differently, and lived differently. They were the ideological heirs of the Bohemians of nineteenth-century Europe and the Beats of the late 1940s and 1950s. Members of the group were known as hippies; collectively, they formed the heart of the counterculture. Many gravitated to the San Francisco Bay Area.
Throughout the sixties, the Bay Area was a center for radical thought and action. The free speech movement led by Mario Savio got started at the Berkeley campus of the University of California in 1964; it led to confrontations between student protesters and university administrators over student rights and academic freedom. In 1966, in Oakland—next to Berkeley and across the bay from San Francisco—Huey Newton, Bobby Seale, and Richard Aoki formed the Black Panthers, a radical black organization dedicated to revolutionary social reform by any means necessary, including violence. Hippies generally followed a less confrontational path.
For hippies, Mecca was San Francisco; their counterpart to the Sacred Mosque was Haight and Ashbury, an intersection in what had been an ordinary neighborhood in San Francisco, near Golden Gate Park, the largest public park in the city. The area became a destination for those who wanted to “make love, not war” and travel the fast route to higher consciousness by tripping on psychedelic drugs. Migration to San Francisco peaked during the 1967 “summer of love,” when an estimated 75,000 young people flocked to the city.
In San Francisco, Memphis, Detroit, London, and elsewhere, the new music of the 1960s, from acid rock to southern soul, was both a soundtrack for social change and a voice to articulate the new values that transformed life in America and abroad.
A Message Of Peace, written in dust on the side of an old army tank.
. The defining characteristic of a rock beat is the layer that moves twice as fast as the beat. Played forcefully, this faster, more insistent rhythm is far more assertive than shuffle, swing, or two-beat rhythms.
In the rock of the sixties, producing a rock beat became a collective responsibility. With the liberation of the bass line to play a truly creative role, the instruments became both more independent and more interdependent. No instrument, not even the rhythm guitar, was absolutely locked into a specific pattern, like the bass player’s walking pattern, the banjo player’s “chunk” on the backbeat, or the drummer’s ride pattern in pre-rock music. The distinctive groove of rock was the end product of the interaction of all the rhythm instruments. Take one away, and the groove was gone.
47-3bSharing Melody
This sharing of responsibility also applied to melody. Up to this point, the main source of melodic interest in the songs we’ve heard was, appropriately enough, the melody—the vocal line when it was sung and the lead instrumental line when it was played. That changed with rock: melodic interest was spread out to the other instruments. In many of the songs we hear in this unit, the song is immediately identifiable from an instrumental riff, generally the first of several melodic hooks. The hook identifies the song well before the singer enters. Typically, other instruments also had parts with some melodic interest. One result was a greater variety of texture, from delicate tapestries with a few well-spaced parts to densely packed free-for-alls.
All of these changes—in instrumentation, rhythmic and melodic approach, and texture—applied to both white rock and the black music called “soul,” through the mid-seventies. The difference from one style to the next was usually a matter of emphasis or interpretation; indeed, new ideas flowed freely in both directions.
47-4Rock Attitudes and the Musical Message
These innovations give us a musical perspective on the wholesale shift in attitude that was at the core of the revolution. Three qualities of this new attitude stand out: Sixties rock was egalitarian, it was eclectic, and it was real. Until 1960, most groups had a leader, who fronted the band, or a featured performer. In the thirties it was Benny Goodman with his orchestra. After the war, it was Muddy Waters, or Louis Jordan and His Tympany Five. Even Buddy Holly fronted the Crickets. Vocal groups—from the Mills Brothers, a popular black vocal group from the 1930s through the 1950s, to the girl groups—were the almost singular exception.
By contrast, most sixties rock bands took group names: the Beatles, the Beach Boys, the Who, Jefferson Airplane. In so doing, they projected a collective identity. There was nothing in their name that said one member was more important than the others. The interplay among voices and instruments was another key. In hooking the listener with a catchy riff or in laying down the beat, no one person was consistently in the spotlight.
The sources of the new rock style, and the way in which they made their way into rock and soul, also evidenced this new attitude. Rock took a pragmatic approach to musical borrowing—musicians took what they needed, no matter what its source, and transformed it into something new.
was underway. The first wave, in 1964, included the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, the Kinks, the Animals, the Dave Clark Five, and several others.
The sudden popularity of British bands in America abruptly reversed the flow of popular music between the United States and the rest of the world. Up until the early sixties, popular music had been largely an American export. Before the sixties, few European musicians performing popular music enjoyed much of a following in the United States. All that changed with the British invasion.
consists of chords built from modal scales, rather than the major and minor scales used in nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century pop. Like major and minor scales, modal scales also have seven notes per octave, but in a different arrangement. Modal scales are common in British folk music; “Greensleeves” is a familiar example.) The mix of conventional, modal, and blues chords brought a fresh sound to rock harmony.
Like the film itself, the mix of old and new shows the Beatles beginning their move away from convention. Teen-themed songs would soon disappear, as both the band and their audience quickly grew up.
49-4Dylan-Inspired Seriousness (and Humor) in “Eleanor Rigby”
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49-5The Sound World of the Beatles in “A Day in the Life”
Increasingly, during the course of their career, the Beatles’ “style” was not so much a particular set of musical choices, as was the case with Motown recordings heard next, but an approach to musical choices: write tuneful melodies and embed them in evocative sound worlds. Settings—instruments, textures, rhythms, even form—were purposeful; their function was to amplify and elucidate the message of the lyrics.
In Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, released in June 1967, there are not only strong contrasts from song to song, but also occasionally within a song, as in “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds” and the even more remarkable “A Day in the Life.”
In “A Day in the Life,” the Beatles create two opposing sound worlds that highlight the contrast between the mundane, everyday world and the elevated consciousness of an acid trip. The distinction is projected by the most fundamental opposition in music itself, other than sound and silence: music with words versus music without words. The texted parts of the song are everyday life, while the strictly instrumental sections reflect the influence of tripping—they follow “I’d love to turn you on” or a reference to a dream.
Listening Cue
“A Day in the Life” (1967)
John Lennon and
Paul McCartney
The Beatles.
STYLE Art rock ⋅ FORM Imaginative hybrid form: elements of AABA form (the pattern of the mundane sections) and verse/chorus (mundane = verse, string blob = chorus)
Listen For …
INSTRUMENTATION
Simple rock band instrumentation: acoustic guitar, electric bass, drums, maracas, alternating with orchestral strings performing slow glissandos (gradual changes in pitch); orchestral winds and brass in “dream section”
RHYTHM
Strong contrasts in tempo: slow rock tempo; double-time; pulse gradually disappears in instrumental sections
MELODY
Tuneful melody with short phrases in narrative sections, which expand, then dissolve into trill, which dissolves into indeterminate pitch
HARMONY
Simple harmony with occasional modal chords in vocal sections; dissonant blob of sound in instrumental section; simple tonic chord at the end
TEXTURE
Open texture in vocal sections: voice, light guitar, and maracas in mid-range, bass and drums in a lower range; thick texture in instrumental sections
Remember …
CONTRASTING LEVELS OF CONSCIOUSNESS
Underlying message of song is contrast between everyday “reality” and altered consciousness. Expressed most fundamentally by opposition of words/no words. Shift from pop to orchestral instruments and tuneful to avant-garde music underscores shift in consciousness.
NOVEL FEATURES
Song begins simply: strummed chords. It ends on an “OM” chord that lasts for over 30 seconds. In between are slowly elevating globs of string sounds, shifts in tempo, trills that dissolve into completely new music, and more. All are novel effects for rock (and the pop that preceded it) ca. 1967.
STYLISTIC DIVERSITY
Stylistic diversity of the song, so essential to its meaning, stretches boundaries of rock. The “altered consciousness” music has virtually no connection to rock, and even the ordinary music is some distance from conventional rock.
Listen to this selection in the unit playlist.
. Among its most consistent and outstanding features were these four:
· Melodic saturation. Songs are full of melodic fragments. The lead vocal line is the most prominent, but there are many others: backup vocals, guitar and keyboard riffs, horn fills, string lines. The presence of so much melody, all of it easily grasped, helped ensure easy entry into the song; it also was a good reason to listen over and over again.
· A good, but unobtrusive beat. Motown songs typically feature a strong backbeat and an understatement of other regular timekeeping. In particular, timekeeping in the mid-range register is subdued to give greater prominence to the voices.
·
really refers to the emotionally charged black music of the sixties that draws deeply on gospel and blues. It is best exemplified by the music that came from two southern cities—Memphis, Tennessee, and Muscle Shoals, Alabama—and two performers—Aretha Franklin and James Brown. This was music of real commitment: Percy Sledge bares his soul when he sings “When a Man Loves a Woman,” and James Brown was, among other things, the “hardest-working man in show business.” The music expressed deep feelings, with little or no pop sugarcoating; when Aretha asks for respect, she spells it out.
The soul music of the mid- and late sixties came in two speeds: fast and slow. In either case, the music was raw. There was nothing particularly pretty about the voices of Otis Redding, Sam and Dave (Sam Moore and Dave Prater), Percy Sledge, or James Brown, but there was no mistaking the energy or the emotion. The instrumental sounds were painted in primary colors: strong bass at all times, powerful horns, vibrant sax solos, drums, guitar, and keyboard. Power won out over finesse.
The soul band of the sixties was an updated version of the jump bands of the late forties and the early fifties and Ray Charles’s bands of the late fifties. Fast songs, propelled by agile bass lines, had a relentless rhythmic drive, the product of rhythmic play: a decisive backbeat, steady timekeeping, and lots of syncopated riffs. The balance within the band is different from rock: Most of the syncopation comes in the bass line and the horn parts; compared with rock, the guitar part (usually there’s only one guitarist) is typically less prominent. By contrast, slow songs provided a more subdued accompaniment; they surrounded the singer with a rich halo of sound.
Vocalists like Redding rose to the challenge of singing over this powerful and relentless backing. They sang, shouted, growled, moaned, and groaned. Their singing—laced with explosive consonants and short vowels—is almost percussive.
The songs continue to mine a familiar vein in rhythm and blues. In his sexual potency and his willingness to brag about it, Sam and Dave’s “Soul Man” is a direct descendant of Roy Brown’s “mighty, mighty, man” and so many other rhythm-and-blues heroes.
52-3James Brown
James Brown (1933–2006) at once epitomized the “soul man” and stood apart from the other male soul singers. Not shy about positioning himself in the popular-music pantheon, Brown billed himself as “Soul Brother Number 1” and the “Godfather of Soul.” As with the Rolling Stones’ claim to be the world’s greatest rock-and-roll band, Brown’s claim was based on fact: He was the most important male soul artist of the sixties.
The innovations that transformed Brown’s music (and catapulted him to stardom) happened almost overnight. He had been working actively since the mid-fifties—his first R&B hit came in 1956—but he did little to set himself apart from other R&B artists until his breakthrough 1965 hit, “Papa’s Got a Brand New Bag.” (In sixties slang, a bag is an area of expertise.) Brown’s new bag was a breakthrough in rhythm.
Brown created his unique rhythmic approach by addition and subtraction. He had a good-sized band—drums, bass, guitar, and keyboards (when Brown chose to play on recordings)—plus a full horn section: trumpets, saxophones (including a baritone sax), and trombone. This is the addition: his backup band is larger than most rock bands. Except for the bass, however, all the instruments have a reduced role. Guitar and drums are in the background, and often only the drummer supplies any kind of steady rhythm. The bass line is typically the most active and varied. The horns play riffs; the baritone sax part is usually just a note or two every eight beats. Brown sings only now and then; we imagine his footwork in the silences. This is the subtraction: less vocal and less involvement from most of the instruments.
All of this—more instruments doing less—creates an irresistible rhythm and an airy, open texture. There is no melody to speak of; Brown’s voice becomes a percussion instrument—especially in the nonverbal sounds. (Try to emulate his singing and you’ll find that your voice will explode and die away quickly, like many percussion sounds do.)
. The musical products were seemingly as varied as the acid trips themselves. The connection could be in the music, in the words, or both.
Whereas Grace Slick took her listeners into a fantasy world in songs like “White Rabbit,” Janis Joplin got real by drenching herself in blues and soul.
