The Sound of the Sixties

ROCK 'N' ROLL

(See Cover)

You take some music, hot beats,

drumbeats,

Finger poppin' and stompin' feet . . . It's got this whole wide land.

Rock 'n' roll forever will stand, Singin' deep in the heart of man.

--It Will Stand by the Showmen

The Trashmen. The Kinks. Goldie and the Gingerbreads. The Ripchords. Bent Fabric. Reparata and the Delrons. Barry and the Remains. The Pretty Things. The Emotions. The Detergents. Sam the Sham and the Pharaohs. The Guess Who's. Cannibal and the Headhunters. Them. The Orlons. The Liver-birds. Wump and the Werbles. Like something out of Malice in Wonderland, the hordes of shaggy rock 'n' roll singers thump across the land, whanging their electric guitars. Bizarre as they may be, they are the anointed purveyors of the big beat and, as never before, people are listening--all kinds of people.

For the past ten years, social commentators, with more hope than insight, have been predicting that rock would roll over and die the day after tomorrow. Yet it is still very much here, front, center, and belting out from extra speakers on the unguarded flank. Many cannot take rock 'n' roll, but no one can leave it. The big beat is everywhere. It resounds over TV and radio, in saloons and soda shops, fraternity houses and dance halls. It has become, in fact, the international anthem of a new and restless generation, the pulse beat for new modes of dress, dance, language, art and morality. The sledgehammer refrains of Wayne Fontana and the Mind Benders' Um, Um, Um, Um, Um, Um can be heard parting the walls of a Yokohama teahouse, a recreation room in Topeka, or a Communist youth club in Warsaw. For better or worse, like it or loathe it, rock 'n' roll is the sound of the Sixties.

Nothing Sacred. The big boost for big-beat music has come, amazingly enough, from the adult world. Where knock-the-rock was once the conditioned reflex of the older generation ("Would you want your daughter to marry a Rolling Stone?"), a surprisingly large segment of 20-to-40-year-olds are now facing up to the music and, what is more, liking it. Mostly, the appeal is its relentless beat. It is perhaps the most kinetic sound since the tom-tom or the jungle drum. It may seem monotonous to the musicologist, too loud to the sensitive, but it is utterly compelling to the feet.

The result is that rock 'n' roll has set the whole world dancing. Its shrine is the discotheque, a place of sustained noise, smoky ambiance, and the generally disheveled informality that rock 'n' roll inspires. In a discotheque, it's all records and loudspeakers--since the beat is the thing, who cares about the subtleties of a trumpet solo, even by Miles Davis?

In the past year, some 5,000 discotheques have cropped up in the U.S., and their patrons are not all Coke drinkers in chinos and stretch pants. Starting from Paris' famed Whisky a Go-Go, discotheques by more or less the same name have opened in Milwaukee, Chicago, Washington, San Francisco, Atlanta and Los Angeles. In addition, there is the A-Go-Go in Aspen, Colo., the Bucket A-Go-Go in Park City, Utah, the Frisky A-Go-Go in San Antonio, the Champagne A-Go-Go in Madison, Wis., and the Bin-Note A-Go-Go in Whitesboro, N.Y. And everywhere the couples go-going on the dance floor are like, well, old. Moans one teenager: "Nothing is sacred any more. I mean, we no sooner develop a new dance or something and our parents are doing it."

Manhattan now boasts 21 discotheques, where such luminaries as Rudolf Nureyev, Dame Margot Fonteyn, Truman Capote, Baby Jane Holzer, Sammy Davis Jr., ex-King Peter of Yugoslavia, Carol Channing, Peter Lawford, Tennessee Williams and Oleg Cassini mix it up with the hip twitchers. Both New York Senators--Jacob Javits and his wife Marion ("My husband and I just love to frug"), and Bobby Kennedy and Ethel ("I can't believe all that action on such a small floor")--make the discotheque scene. Jackie Kennedy, on her occasional visits to Il Mio, does a sedate version of the frug. Adlai Stevenson, the Maharani of Baroda, and the Duke and Duchess of Windsor have not progressed much beyond the twist, but Walter Cronkite's variations on the frug are a wonder to behold.

Wiggiest Kick. No debutante cotillion or country-club dance is complete these days without a heavy dose of rock 'n' roll. At a charity ball on the roof of the St. Regis Hotel, some of Manhattan's highest society wiggled around the dance floor doing the mule, flapping their hands like mules' ears to the thudding beat of Lester Lanin's orchestra. "It's good for your health," says Lanin, who beefs up his society band with a rock 'n' roll trio called the Rocking Chairs.

On campus, where it once was squaresville to flip for the rock scene, it now is the wiggiest of kicks. Brenda Lee, 20, a tot-sized (4 ft. 11 in., plus five inches of hair) rockette who developed her belting delivery as a high-school cheerleader, outranks Folk Singer Joan Baez and jazz's Ella Fitzgerald on the college popularity polls. "Rock really turns everybody on," says one Princeton senior.

Swinging World. Scholarly articles probe the relationship between the Beatles and the nouvelle vague films of Jean-Luc Godard, discuss "the brio and elegance" of Dionne Warwick's singing style as a "pleasurable but complex" event to be "experienced without condescension." In chic circles, anyone damning rock 'n' roll is labeled not only square but uncultured. For inspirational purposes, such hip artists as Robert Rauschenberg, Larry Rivers and Andy Warhol occasionally paint while listening to rock 'n' roll music. Explains Warhol: "It makes me mindless, and I paint better." After gallery openings in Manhattan, the black-tie gatherings often adjourn to a discotheque.

Even evangelists have adapted to the new beat. A group of Episcopal students from the University of Maryland, armed with electric guitars and bongo drums, have been celebrating with great success a big-beat "rejoice" Mass at several churches in the Washington-Maryland area, including a service that President Johnson and Lady Bird attended. In London, the Salvation Army has formed a rock 'n' roll street-corner group called the Joy Strings, whose repertory includes such numbers as We're Going to Set the World A-Swinging. "Our square approach," explains Drummer Captain Joy Webb, "wasn't getting us anywhere."

Rocked Curtain. The rock 'n' roll beat has proved to be more than the Iron Curtain can resist. All over Bulgaria, Beatle-like mushroom haircuts are sprouting faster than the crops--so much so that the government has plastered the countryside with posters ridiculing the hairy youth for their capitalistic degeneracy. They know better in Poland. When a correspondent for the daily Zycie Warszawy wrote contemptuously of Beatlemania two years ago, so many indignant letters poured in that the paper finally had to publicly disassociate itself from the reporter's views. Now Poland is overrun with rock 'n' roll bands, and hundreds more are playing in Hungary and Czechoslovakia, among them, Bratislava's Beatmen and Prague's Hell Devils. Though the "disgusting dynamism" of big-beat music is officially deprecated in the U.S.S.R., a rock 'n' roll group from Jaroslaw is accompanied by an army of finger-snapping fans whenever it goes on tour.

The sudden public acceptance of rock 'n' roll by so many people who supposedly should know better came as no surprise to the record and radio industries. Their surveys have long shown the existence of a vast underground of adult rock 'n' roll fans, including those who were raised on Elvis Presley and, though too embarrassed to admit it, never outgrew their hound-dog tastes. Today more than 40% of the "teen beat" records sold in the U.S. are bought by persons over 20. When a Manhattan rock 'n' roll disk jockey solicited votes for a "rate the record" feature one recent school-day morning, the station was deluged with 18,000 phone calls, all but a few from housewives. The same feature, aired during prime teen-age listening times, never drew more than 12,000 calls. With a seismographic eye on their markets, many of the sponsors for rock 'n' roll radio and TV shows are such Mom-oriented products as detergents, baby lotions and dishwashers.

Out of Misery. The origins of rock 'n' roll go deep--Deep South, U.S.A. There, in the 1930s, in the fields and shanties of the delta country, evolved an earthy, hard-driving style of music called "rhythm and blues"--played by Negroes for Negroes. Cured in misery, it was a lonesome, soul-sad music, full of cries and gospel wails, punctuated by a heavy, regular beat. With the migration to the industrial North after World War II, the beat was intensified with electric guitars, bass and drums, and the great blues merchants, like Muddy Waters, Bo Diddley, John Lee Hooker and Chuck Berry, made their first recordings.

One of the first white disk jockeys to play these "race records," as they were known in the industry, was Cleveland's Alan Freed, a flamboyant, rapid-fire pitchman who sang along with the records, slamming his hand down on a telephone book to accentuate each beat. Borrowing a phrase used in several rhythm-and-blues songs, Freed christened the music "rock 'n' roll." Gradually, the big beat began to take hold.

Then, in the fall of 1956, came Elvis Presley with his flapping hair, three-inch sideburns, and gyrating hips. "Ah wa-ha-hunt yew-hoo, Ah nee-hee-heed yew-hoo," he sang, and millions of teenagers flipped.

"C'mon, Baby." There was obviously something visceral about Elvis and his music. Because soon there were riots in Hartford, Atlanta, and San Jose, Calif. Theaters were demolished in London and Sao Paulo, Brazil. Sociologists began to view the phenomenon with alarm. Studies showing that Elvis fans had a below-C average were circulated. A Senate subcommittee started to investigate the link between rock 'n' roll and juvenile delinquency. Pablo Casals condemned rock 'n' roll as "poison put to sound," Frank Sinatra called it a "rancid-smelling aphrodisiac," and Samuel Cardinal Stritch labeled it "tribal rhythms."

Then, in 1959, the payola scandal struck. Freed was indicted for accepting $30,000 in bribes from six record companies for pushing their releases. Rock 'n' roll faltered; record sales fell off 30%. Crooned Bing Crosby: "My kind of music is coming back."

But it didn't. Instead, rock 'n' roll did. Rejuvenation came in 1960 on the wings of a king-sized twister named Chubby Checker. A onetime Philadelphia chicken plucker, Chubby threw his tubby hips into high gear, and issued an invitation: "C'mon, baby, let's do the twist!"

From Noise to Style. The twist did not seem like much of an invention at the time. The participant merely planted his feet opposite his partner, started churning his arms as if shadowboxing, while rotating his hips like a girl trying to wriggle out of a tight girdle. But it transformed rock 'n' roll from a noise on the transistor radio into a teen-age style. For the first time since the decline of the jitterbug, teen-agers had a new dance, and soon, at Manhattan's Peppermint Lounge, the famous and near famous discovered its uninhibited joys. Fashion reacted dexterously. To provide freedom of motion, dress designers shortened skirts and loosened waists to turn out what soon came to be known as the discotheque dress. Nobody, but nobody, went to a mere nightclub any more.

Even then, rock 'n' roll was still dismissable among the sophisticates as a curiously persistent fad. But then came the British. U.S. parents had weathered Pat Boone's white-bucks period, the histrionics of Johnnie Ray, and the off-key mewings of Fabian, but this was something else again--four outrageous Beatles in high-heeled boots, undersized suits and enough hair between them to stuff a sofa. When they appeared on the Ed Sullivan Show in February 1964, 68 million people, one of the largest TV audiences in history, tuned in to see what all the ruckus was about.

What they saw was four young chaps having a jolly good bash. In the avalanche of publicity that followed, the Beatles emerged as refreshingly relaxed, if not downright lovable, personalities. Their disarming humor (Reporter: "Why do you wear so many rings on your fingers?" Ringo: "Because I can't get them all through my nose") melted adult resistance.

Back to Fun. There are dozens of rock 'n' roll groups in the U.S., most of them Negro, who can sing better and play better than the Beatles. But somewhere between the "ya da da da da da da" of Sh-Boom and the whine of Hound Dog, U.S. rock 'n' roll groups became mired in lamenting lost love and other ailments of the heart. By refusing to take themselves seriously, the Beatles made rock 'n' roll fun again.

The Beatles also made it all right to be white. As French Critic Frank Tenot notes: "Since the downfall of the Viennese waltz, nothing in popular music, and particularly dance, has known any success unless associated with one or another of the rhythmic discoveries of the Negro." Beatle music (known as "the Mersey sound") and even Beatle accents are actually Anglicized imitations of Negro rhythm and blues once removed. Says Beatle John Lennon: "We can sing more colored than the Africans."

The Brown Sound. Among the many white rock 'n' roll singers attempting a pure "brown sound" today, the most successful are the Righteous Brothers and the Rolling Stones. The Righteous Brothers, a Mutt-and-Jeff pair of 24-year-old Californians, are referred to by Negro disk jockeys as "our blue-eyed soul brothers" for the spiraling gospel wail and hoarse growl they inject into songs like their bestselling Just Once in My Life. Their name, in fact, is derived from the Sunday-go-to-meetin' phrase: "Man, that was really righteous, brothers."

To distinguish themselves from the Beatles, Britain's Rolling Stones have attempted to assume the image of Angry Young Men. "The Stones," their manager proudly explains, "are the group that parents love to hate." They sing Mersey-Mississippi rhythm and blues, backed by a quavering guitar and a chugging harmonica that smacks of cotton-pickin' time down South. With a kind of goggle-eyed conviction. Lead

Singer Mick Jagger intones such earthy lyrics as:

Well, I'm a king bee, buzzing 'round your hive . . .

Yeah, I can make honey, baby, let me come inside.

Yeah, I can buzz better, baby, when

your man is gone.

At concerts, the Stones' fans greet their heroes by suggestively wiggling two fingers in the air. Their appeal, one 16-year-old girl frankly admits, "is sex--but don't print that; my mother would hit me."

Now Motown. The best brown sound is, of course, that sung by Negroes. Last year 42 of the bestselling rock 'n' roll songs were produced by one man: Berry Gordy Jr., 35, who as head of Detroit's Motown Records, employs some 175 Negro artists. A former auto assembly-line worker, Gordy operates out of three adjoining shingle houses which bear the proud banner HITSVILLE, U.S.A. Beginning with a $700 loan six years ago, Gordy has built Motown into the nation's largest independent producer of 45-rpm records (1964 sales: 12 million records). Next to the Mersey sound, the "Motown sound" currently dominates the rock 'n' roll market. It is a swingy city blues sound, propelled by a driving beat, tambourines, violins (from the Detroit Symphony), hand clapping and an ever-present "Oh yeah, oh yeah" refrain from the chorus.

The prize fillies in Gordy's stable are the Supremes, three girls who grew up together in Detroit's squalid Brewster Housing Project. With four consecutive No. 1 records, they are the reigning female rock 'n' roll group, followed by Motown's Martha and the Vandellas. Diana Ross, 21, the Supremes' lead singer, is greatly envied for the torchy, come-hither purr in her voice. Her secret: "I sing through my nose."

Splash in Surf. Distinct from the brown-sound school are the Beach Boys from California: "We're not colored; we're white. And we sing white." They made their big splash with the "surf sound"--clean, breezy orchestration, a jerky, staccato beat and a high, falsetto quaver reminiscent of the Four Freshmen. The Beach Boys' tenor harmony goes so high that it sounds almost feminine, a fact that has all but locked out girl singers from the scores of surf groups performing on the West Coast. Beach Boys' songs, says Jack Good, producer of the rock 'n' roll TV show Shindig, "almost sound as if they were sung by eunuchs in the Sistine Chapel."

With hits like Surfin' and Hang Ten (toes over the edge of the surf board), the Beach Boys--three brothers, a cousin and a neighbor--have sold more than 2 million records, grossed as much as $25,000 for one concert in Sacramento. They write their own songs, following one rule of thumb: "We picture the U.S. as one great big California."

Part of the subculture of the surf sound is the hot-rodders' hit parade. Poaching off their own sandy preserve, the Beach Boys started with Shut Down, a classic of pit-stop poetry:

To get the traction, I'm a-ridin' the

clutch . . .

Pedal's to the floor, hear his

dual-quads drink . . .

He's hot with ram induction, but it's

understood,

I got a fuel-injected engine sitting

under my hood.

Extrapolating the style, Jan and Dean (the "Father of Falsetto"), deliberately mix the sounds of surf and drag races into their records until the ear strains to grasp the lyrics. Explains Jan: "If the kids can hear the words, they'll turn their radio down. We want them to turn it up. It sort of relieves a kid's anxieties if he can drown out his parents."

Jan and Dean have endured, at least until next week, which is unique in a market where one-hit-and-forever-miss performances are the rule rather than the exception. Eva Boyd is typical. A few years ago, Eva was a 17-year-old maid working for a husband-and-wife songwriting team. On a dare, she recorded one of their songs, The Loco-Motion. It sold more than 1,000,000 copies, and Little Eva, as she was billed, picked up $30,000 and has not been heard from since.

Also Dropouts. Last week the man of the moment was Herman, 16, of Herman's Hermits. An engaging high school dropout who looks like a toy sheep dog, Herman (real name: Peter Noone) smiles a lot, claps his hands over his head, and sticks his finger in his mouth when he sings. His Mrs. Brown, You've Got a Lovely Daughter, rendered in a heavy English Midlands accent, was the No. 1 bestseller last week. Right behind it was Count Me In by Gary Lewis and the Playboys. Gary is Comedian Jerry Lewis' son. Unfortunately, he favors an overdose of echo-chamber effect, which makes him sound as if he had his head inside a fishbowl.

Rock 'n' roll lyrics have lately taken on urban socioeconomic themes. In the Crystals' Uptown, downtown is a place where a man "don't get no breaks" and "everyone's his boss, and he's lost in an angry land." But to hear Petula Clark on the subject, Downtown is an island of promise:

Just listen to the music of the traffic in the city . . .

How can you lose? The lights are much brighter there.

You can forget all your troubles, forget all your cares.

So go Downtown.

For his part, Chuck Berry is going neither uptown nor downtown, just slightly commercial, and doing well at it. One of the great lowdown blues singers, Berry, 38, now is talking "teen feel," as in his No Particular Place to Go:

The night was young and the moon gold. . .

Can you imagine the way I felt?

I couldn't unfasten her safety belt.

After serving time for armed robbery and escorting a 14-year-old Apache girl across a state line for "immoral purposes," Berry was recently granted a reprieve by his parole board in St. Louis and is now one of the most popular singers on the rock 'n' roll circuit. Chubby Checker is back pushing a new dance called the Freddie, a kind of side-straddle-hop routine.

Glazed Reverie. The Freddie is the latest of scores of new dances that have spun off the twist. The pelvis is crucial. If it swings from side to side, that's the twist, and the twist is now as dead as the big apple. If it bumps and wiggles, that's the frug (pronounced froog). The rest are all charades. The dog, for example, is a slow-motion jerk (known in less erudite circles as the bump and grind), which is a slow-motion frug. Add a backstroke arm motion to the frug and you have the swim; add a tree-climbing motion and you have the monkey. Stick your thumbs in your ears and it's the mouse or the mule; up in the air, and it's the hitchhiker--and so on for the woodpecker, Cleopatra, Popeye, Harry James, Frankenstein, etc.

But the names, the gestures, are meaningless pressagentry. All you really have to do is shake your hips a little and then, as Sybil Burton puts it, "dance to suit yourself." Dancing to rock 'n' roll has become such a private reverie, in fact, that a partner, except in deference to custom, is not necessary. And that is its great attraction. Since couples neither touch nor even look at each other, all the shyness some men and women have about dancing--clammy hands, missing a beat, stepping on feet, etc.--is removed and, as one club owner says, "Everybody goes off into their own narcissistic bag."

The result is some of the most wildly creative dancing ever seen by modern or primitive man. In a discotheque, where the sound is so loud that conversation is impossible, the hypnotic beat works a strange magic. Many dancers become literally transported. They drift away from their partners; inhibitions flake away, eyes glaze over, until suddenly they are seemingly swimming alone in a sea of sound. Says Sheila Wilson, 18, a student at Vassar: "I give everything that is in me. And when I get going, I'm gone. It's the only time I feel whole."

The highly sensual implications of big-beat dancing have some psychiatrists worried. Says one: "It's sick sex turned into a spectator sport." The voyeur aspects are considerable. Hollywood A-Go-Go, one of the six nationally aired rock 'n' roll TV shows (including ABC's Shindig and NBC's Hullabaloo) that have debuted in the past year, features a line of young nubile blondes whose dancing would bring a blush to the cheeks of a burlesque stripper.

Healthy Outlet. Most sociologists, who take this sort of thing seriously, agree that the sensuality of rock 'n' roll is "safe sex." One cynical college observer has concluded that girls "who don't" dance more vigorously than girls "who do." "These dances," says Harvard Psychiatrist Philip Solomon, "are outlets for restlessness, for unexpressed and sublimated sex desires. This is quite healthy."

Many teen-agers consider all the orgiastic screaming as "uncool." The idols themselves have noted that the frantic fans who storm the stages are predominantly homely girls. Says Jeanne Katzenberg, a pretty 16-year-old: "Nobody in my group has crushes on the singers or anything. We all have real boy friends."

Reluctant Seal. Rock 'n' roll still does not exactly have the Good Housekeeping seal of approval. But even the most recalcitrant of parents now say: "Well, some of it's okay . . ." Some of it, in fact, is very good, far better than the adenoidal lamentations of a few years ago. Some of it is still awful, as might be expected in an industry that grinds out more than 300 new records each week. But for the first time rock 'n' roll can boast a host of singers who can actually sing. The music, once limited to four chords, is now more sophisticated, replete with counterrhythms, advanced harmonics, and multivoiced choirs. Rock recordings, says Jazz Critic Ralph Gleason, "are a lot more interesting than the average jazz release." Conductor Leonard Bernstein likes the Beatles and does not hesitate to admit it: "They are very intelligent, and they have made songs which are really worthwhile. Love Me Do is really stirring and very reminiscent in some ways of Hindu music."

Above all, rock 'n' roll today is lively, youthful, aggressive, often funny, seldom heartsick. The lyrics, showing the influence of folk music, are fresher and more intelligible. Coming the other way, the folk types are beginning to feel the beat. Drums and electric guitars, long scorned by folkniks as decadent commercialism, are now featured on the latest album by Bob Dylan, folkdom's crown prince.

Meanwhile, as expressed in the folk-rock song Walk Right In, the invitation to join in the big beat is there for the accepting--with a slight qualifier:

Walk right in, sit right down.

Baby, let your hair hang down.

Everybody's talkin' 'bout a new way of walkin'.

Do you want to lose your mind?

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