This course, part 1 of a 2-course sequence, examines the history of rock, primarily as it unfolded in the United States, from the days before rock (pre-1955) to the end of the 1960s. This course covers the music of Elvis Presley, Chuck Berry, Phil Spector, Bob Dylan, the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, Jimi Hendrix, Cream, and many more artists, with an emphasis both on cultural context and on the music itself. We will also explore how developments in the music business and in technology helped shape the ways in which styles developed. Rock emerged in the mid 1950s as a blending of mainstream pop, rhythm and blues, and country and western--styles that previously had remained relatively separate. This new style became the music of the emerging youth culture and was often associated with teen rebellion. We will follow the story of how this rowdy first wave of rock and roll (1955-59) was tamed in the early 60s but came roaring back with the Beatles and the Rolling Stones and then went psychedelic by the end of the decade.
Beatles From Craftsmen to Artists
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From the course by University of Rochester
History of Rock, Part One
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From the lesson
The Beatles and the British Invasion (1964-66)
The Beatles transform the UK music scene and then invade America. Other Beatles-type British bands. The London blues scene and the Rolling Stones. Other Stones-type bands. The Who and the Kinks.
Meet the Instructors
John CovachProfessor of Music and Director
Institute for Popular Music
We turn now to the idea of the movement from craftsmen to artists, in the music
of the Beatles and not just the Beatles but we'll, we can see this and other
artists, but we'll use the Beatles as a good example because they were a leading
example from all this. The idea of craftsman is that, once you
learn to do something, and you learn to do it well, you repeat that.
So think about somebody who makes tables for a living, for example, they find a
very a great way to do a dovetail-joint on a table and it works perfectly and
produces the results. They, what do they do?
They repeat that element of craft in every table they make after that, they
found a good way of doing that, they do it that way again and again and again.
That's considered an aspect of craft. They don't say, well, I've built one
table that way, I couldn't possibly build another one that way, I would just be
repeating myself. Well, that sounds comical right?
But, if you think of what an artist does, the worst thing you can say about an
artist, is, oh, "he's, he's just rewriting the same symphony over and over
again" or, "She's just, recording the same song over and over again".
When you say that, you're basically saying, by repeating something they've
already done, they have no originality, they're not doing anything new, it's a
weakness. So, this the idea of craftsmen where
things are found, where you find a good way of doing something and you repeat it
over and over again and the idea of the artist, where you're constantly
struggling for new things and you don't want to be accused of repeating yourself
to much these things are sort of opposed to each other and what we find in the
music of The Beatles and many other artists in the mid 60's is a movement
from craftsmen to artist or crafts person, if you prefer.
for the Beatles, craftsman means, being songwriters in the tradition of American
popular song, so if you want to check out some of their early, Beatles music that
really kind of does the brill building kind of thing, great examples are Please
Please Me from 1963 and I Want to Hold Your Hand from 1964.
These are really a very typically constructive kinds of pieces, they have
Beatles charm, they have Beatles emphasis and that kind of thing but most of what
they are, are, are brill building type pop songs.
Already though by A Hard Day's night,which was the summer of 1964, the
release, which recorded a few months earlier, you can start to see the small
signs that they're starting to push at those boundries, they're looking for ways
to do things that are more creative, starting to the first inklings of the
move toward the artist approach. By 1965, in, in large part through the
influence of Bob Dylan you begin to see them in songs like Help, You've got to
hide your love away, both John songs from 65 and Yesterday from Paul, you begin to
see that the lyrics start to get more serious, they actually met Dylan in the
fall of 1964 and why, the reason why I, I, I point out the date is because, as
we'll find out in next week's class, Bob Dylan didn't really become a big star in
his own right as a singer and a performer until the summer of 1965.
But the albums that appear earlier than that were known within the folk community
but you really sort of had to be in the know to know about them and the Beatles
were, they admired Dylan, he, he spoke with John and Paul, they got together and
he urged them to do more with their lyrics than just talk about I love you,
she loves me, I hold your hand, she loves your kissy kissy, and start to get into
things that were more serious matters. So the first, the first signs we see of
that, really, are starting to happen on Help, the album Help from 1965.
As I say help, You've got to hide your love away yesterday.
There's a certain type of form that popular song writers use called the AABA
form. That form type goes way back in American
popular music. It's not the only one that's used, but
it's an important one that's used by a lot of American songwriters and we're
talking about people like Cole Porter, George and Ira Gershwin, Irving Berlin, I
mean, all kinds of the traditional Tin Pan Alley composers.
If you look at the first four Beatles records, and the singles that go with it,
there is, there are a lot of AABA forms. In fact, it's kind of the default form,
you kind of count on the fingers of both hands the number of songs that don't do
AABA form. I, I don't, the percentage is something
like 75 or 80%. They didn't just stumble onto the AABA
form and keep doing it over and over again, they knew what it was because
they'd studied this music and they were replicating it and I think proud too.
But what you start to see as the 60's unfold is fewer and fewer of those AABA
forms. As they start to get ambitious with the
lyrics, as different kind of instrumentation starts to come into their
music, the form also starts to change as they get away from the brill building
mentality and go towards something that is more sort of artistically inspired and
so if you get to 1965 and 1966, in 65, you get a song like Norwegian Wood, which
is formally like nothing they've ever done before.
Tonely, it's like nothing they've ever done before, tells an interesting kind of
story from beginning to end, the first use of the sitar you see instrumentation
coming in. 19 66 we get Eleanor Rigby which is sort
of Paul's song about existential angst and, and alienation and this kind of
thing. For No One, a song about a broken
marriage that uses that uses a French horn, kind of in anticipation of the
piccolo trumpet he'll use in Penny Lane, later in 1966, early in 1967.
Eleanor Rigby, by the way, uses the strings, it's kind of the the, the
continuation of what he was doing with Yesterday but now, the song and the
string arrangement is a little bit edgier and of course, Tomorrow Never Knows at
the end of the Revolver album, 1966 is filled with John Lennon reciting lyrics
drawn from Timothy Learie's, The Psychadelic Experience, which are in
turn, drawn from the Tibetan Book of the Dead, and we've got tape loops going on,
and it's just like nothing they've ever done before.
It's a, it's a very, there's a very big stylistic difference, between I want to
Hold Your Hand, and Tomorrow Never Knows, but they're really only separated by
about two years, maybe a little over two years time.
And the distance from, I want to Hold Your Hand, to Tomorrow Never Knows, is
the distance from craftsmen to artists, and that's what happens in the Beatles'
music. They're not the only ones, though.
in the 60s, what the Beatles are doing, a lot of other artists are doing, the Beach
Boys are doing with surf music, we'll talk about that next week.
Brian Wilson, Dylan is doing his music, and a lot of the groups who are imitating
the Beatles are doing it as well. But they, they serve as an example to
show us how this, how this trajectory happens, as this starts to happen and as
artists start to think of their, rock musicians start to think of themselves
more as artists than as crafts persons. a new kind of aesthetic begins to develop
in rock and roll and it's what we might call authenticity in rock.
What this means is this, you write your own songs which really are about who you
are and what you feel or think, you play your own instruments on the records, you
don't depend on studio musicians to play things, it's really you on the records.
You're really writing songs about what you really think, and you're really
playing them, that's considered authentic.
So, when get to to, already when we're getting into 1966 and 1967, and it, the
truth comes out that the Monkees records, for example, they're not even playing on
them, it's studio musicians. All of a sudden That's considered you
know, scandalous. It shows how inauthentic Monkey's music
is you know, how sort of cynically music business crafts-person like it is.
But, you know, just a couple years earlier, The Byrds, who are kind of one
of the icons of musical authenticity released a tune called Mr Tambourine Man,
the only guy playing on the record that's, that's in the band is Roger
McGuinn playing on a 12 string. The rest of the guys are studio guys.
All that Beatles, all that Beach Boy stuff from Pet Sounds, those are all
studio musicians playing that. But, you can see that one, it gets to a
point where it gains critical mass, and then, it's always the musicians
themselves playing on the record, if it's not, it's inauthentic.
It also means, authenticity means that you at least appear to be in control of
your image, you really are who you seem to be.
You're not playing a role, you're not putting on a mask, you're being
authentic, you're being real, and, it's, it's very important that, that you
project that. And the, the last element of it as we've
been talking about with regard to the Beatles, is you strive to progress, as an
artist, there's no repeating, always moving forward, that's, that's where you
go. You're always trying to do something new,
something different, always trying to expand.
Although, with the one exception that it is possible to go back to your roots,
right, it's always possible to simplify and go back to your roots because that's
seen as a sign of authenticity. But what you can't do, is just repeat the
same thing that was successful for you before again, and again and again.
By the time we get to the late 60's, and certainly into the 1970's almost
everybody is operating as, at least in FM rock, almost everybody is operating
according to this aesthetic of authenticity that I just outlined.
But you know what, in the first half of the 60's, coming out of the 50's, up
until about 1965 nobody was, it was still the old brill building idea of this grass
roots movement from craftsmen to artists habits and The Beatles music but it
happens over all in the history of rock music.
In fact when we get to 1967, 1968 and 1969, we will start talking about that in
a couple of weeks. We'll talk about how FM rock continues
this authenticity attitude but AM rock, which is where, this is about the time AM
and FM split off, AM continues to be very singles oriented very kind of brill
building approach, that kind of thing, and FM rock is album oriented artists,
the aesthetic of authenticity, these kinds of things.
Well having talked about that, let's now turn to the rise of blues in the UK or
the, the revival of blues in the UK, and how that will lead to groups like the
Rolling Stones and the Yardbirds.
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