HOW THE BEATLES DESTROYED ROCK ‘N’ ROLL :An Alternative History of American Popular Music
By Elijah Wald New York, Oxford University Press: 2009 81.64 WAL
Vibe, and Spin are gone: Rolling Stone is in trouble. Say goodbye with no tears. The popular music press, broadly defined, is a story told by men, for other men.
“It is often said that history is written by the victors, but in the case of pop music that is rarely true. The victors tend to be out dancing, while the historians sit at their desks, assiduously chronicling music they cannot hear on mainstream radio. And it is not just historians. The people who choose to write about popular music, even while it is happening, tend to be far from average consumers and party goers and often despise the taste and behavior of their more cheerful and numerous peers.” (Wald)
Some men who make their livings playing music understand this. Bandleader Vincent Lopez, in 1924: “The success of the public ballroom depends on whether it is favor with the women patrons.” And Little Milton in the 1990s: "Basically, for every woman that comes, you can figure that she’s going to have at least three men to follow that one woman." Elijah Wald, man though he is, is also an iconoclastic chronicler of the music scene. His choice of title grabs the reader, but though it is the end point of his tale it is not deceptive. Wald builds an alternativ e narrative of 20th century popular music that is fascinating and persuasive.
The craze for ragtime (a two beat music) arrived shortly after commercial recording, capturing and disseminating a new era in sound. The switch to a four-beat based music and the new respectability of public dancing let a thousand dance bands flower. The Original Dixieland Jazz Band (all white) played to the popular prejudice that the new style was the product of untutored inspiration, as did James Reese Europe and “His Superior Colored Musicians.” Eubie Blake: “Europe’s orchestra was filled with readin’ sharks. The popular 1910s dance tea, of Vernon and Irene Castle brought Europe’s band to the concert hall with them.
It was John Philip Sousa who coined the term “canned music”, so great was his frustration at the lack of a system for collecting royalties from the sale of the early cylindrical recordings of his marching band. In general, these early recordings were made by journeymen musicians, not stars and this was accepted as a good thing at a time when sheet music sales were an important source of musical income. If a tune became too closely associated with one performer, others would not need the sheet music to play it and the audience wanted live music (and dancing) as a primary form of entertainment.
Wald is always careful to take account of what audiences were listening )and dancing) to, and what cross-influencing went on among musicians. His book is an antidote to Kierkegaard’s maxim that we live life forward but understand it backwards. This leads him to a reappraisal of the Paul Whiteman Band of the 1920s, that commissioned and premiered Rhapsody In Blue. Wald tells his story forward, not slant.
The rise and fall of the big bands can be understood in terms of economics. During the Great Depression when all work was scarce, musicians banded together and toured widely, working for meager wages and performing constantly. After World War II ended, plentiful jobs and higher wages made big bands less profitable and less attractive.
Mitch Miller, a prolific record producer in the 1950s, made Columbia Records into the top seller of popular hits through an eclectic selection of musical sources, from folk, blues, hillbilly, and Latin and African music, which he then assigned to a very carefully and narrow selection of artists and studio musicians. One amusing bit of information is that “Come On-A My House”, Rosemary Clooney’s 1951 novelty hit was written by Ross Bagdasaran who would go on the create the group Alvin & The Chipmunks
The title is only a small part and the penultimate one at that, but Wald’s larger points, reiterated throughout the decades of changing musical styles are that working bands have always been required to play a range of music to please live crowds than recording artists and that while the Beatles borrowed from black musicians, as Paul Whiteman had four decades earlier, the result was not the same. Where Whiteman’s arrangements led to a greater appreciation of black music in the 1920s, in the 1960s white music became ‘progressive’ and black music was relegated to a narrow corner, known successively as soul, disco, and hip hop. And just before the Beatles took America by storm, girl groups and female songwriters had been achieving unprecedented success. a sign that times were changing.
Notice that How The Beatles Destroyed Rock And Roll is published by Oxford University, also publisher of Dusty: Queen Of The Mods, another recent unconventional and rewarding book on popular music. If these two books represent a trend, it is a welcome one.
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