Tapping the Roots

O.K., all you teenaroons, it's nostalgia time, as we move into the groove with the supersound of yesteryear! Let me sock it to ya -- the Beatles, a pow-pow-pounding boogie beat, four blattzing saxes and a nitty-gritty ditty called Lady Madonna! Yeah!

But wait. The Beatles' Lady Madonna is no golden oldie, as the disk jocks say--gone from the charts but not from our hearts. It's their latest single, recorded before they went off to meditate in India last month, and released on both sides of the Atlantic last week. It bears the hallmarks of all their most recent work: a deft arrangement, superb engineering, and a lyric (sung by Paul McCartney in what is known as his "Elvis voice") that combines blithe humor with sharp social portraiture of a hard-pressed mother:

Tuesday afternoon is neverending;

Wednesday morning papers didn't come.

Thursday night your stockings needed mending:

See how they run.

But musically, instead of pushing farther out into the realms that the Beatles charted in such songs as Strawberry Fields Forever and A Day in the Life, the record glances backward to the simple, hard-driving style they left behind in Liverpool. There are no electronic rumbles, no shifting keys or tempos--just a bluesy melodic line plunging exuberantly over an instrumental backing that is straight out of an old-fashioned record-hop.

That happens to be the direction in which much of the British pop scene is looking nowadays. With their characteristic knack for crystallizing what is in the air, the Beatles have captured the current upsurge of interest in "oldfashioned" rock 'n' roll in Britain. Elvis Presley is back on the charts there with Guitar Man, and his earlier hits like Blue Suede Shoes are going for as much as $4 on the second-hand record market. When Bill Haley and his Comets arrive in England next month for a tour, they will find that their epoch-making 1950s' recordings of Rock Around the Clock and Shake, Rattle and Roll have been reissued to meet a rising demand. New British groups are being formed with names like Tommy Bishop and the Rock 'n' Roll Revival Show, and trade journals are eagerly asking: Is the old rock coming back?

Instant Oldies. The answer, of course, is that it had never really gone, neither in Britain nor in the U.S. It may have been overshadowed in the past few years by a wave of such experimental groups as the Jefferson Airplane, The Doors and The Cream, not to mention the Beatles. But, as Chicago Disk Jockey Jim Stagg says, "basic rock, straight rock, has always been around and part of the top ten."

As far as record companies are concerned, smash hits never die, they just get re-released in albums as part of an "oldies" series. Radio stations, courting the lucrative advertising market of 18-to 34-year-olds who grew up on rock 'n' roll, carefully balance their play list of new releases with selected classics of the genre (examples: the Platters' The Great Pretender, Chuck Berry's Roll Over Beethoven, the Everly Brothers' Bye Bye Love). New York's WOR-FM ("The Sound of Solid Gold") is one of six RKO General radio stations across the country on which the proportion of oldies is as high as 50%.

"For the young married adult," explains one radio executive, "the so-called middle-of-the-road music is no longer Tony Bennett but Elvis Presley, no longer the Andrews Sisters but the Supremes." Even some of the new U.S. rock records are sounding like instant oldies, notably the Monkees' latest hot seller, Valleri.

All of which may not amount to an outright resurgence of the old rock 'n' roll--but it is a start. And considering the potent influence of the Beatles, the release of Lady Madonna means that there can only be more.

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