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.
Los Angeles and Elsewhere
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History of Rock, Part One
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From the lesson
Psychedelia (1966-69)
How can music be psychedelic? Underground psychedelic scenes in San Francisco and London. Psychedelia in LA. The Summer of Love and the rise of hippie culture. The birth of FM rock and rock magazines. Woodstock and Altamont.
Meet the Instructors
John CovachProfessor of Music and Director
Institute for Popular Music
Well, we've spent a lot of time talking about Psychedelia in San Francisco, and
London. And to listen to me talk up to this
point, you'd think these are the only two places where psychedelia really occurred.
It is true that since we're talking about subcultures, those are the two places
where the subcultures really were the most adult and really the most important.
But during this time, that is, as the 60s progressed from the early 60s, mid 60s,
and the late 60s the music business was increasing moving toward Los Angeles.
There were all kinds of very good reasons why the music business should sort of
migrate from New York to Los Angeles. one of them being that Los Angeles and
Hollywood had such developed facilities that had come from from the movie
industry. Television was increasingly moving to Los
Angeles and so there were a lot of opportunities for record companies to tie
in with television and movie. the movie industry if they were right
there on the scene, or at least has a branch office that was out there.
So a lot of musicians are moving from the East Coast to the West Coast.
Labels are starting to move in that direction, so something is starting to
happen in LA in 1965, 1966 into 1967. We talked about, a little bit about that
a couple of weeks ago, when we talked about the American response.
The first important group that we should talk about, may be the primary group when
we talk about Los Angeles and psychedelia is The Doors.
What was different about The Doors from some of the other psychedelic groups is
where, Generally psychedelia embraces a kind of utopian flower power, very sort
of positive kind of attitude. So the idea of the most idealistic
argument in favor of LSD is that it leads to higher consciousness and that's a
happy thing, right? It's, it's something that one would
aspire toward. Again, I'm not endorsing LSD use, I'm
just saying this would be the argument But it's like Jim Morrison came along and
said, you know, if you have, if you break on through to this other side there could
be heavens there and there could be hells.
So I'll let the other people talk about the heavens, I'm going to think about the
hell. So in many ways, Jim Morrison's vision of
psychedelia was much darker. It dealt with some of the kind of things
that exist in the psyche that we don't talk about so much.
his lyrics were also extremely literate. Jim Morrison could, as a singer, could
not play an instrument, he could not play a chord on a guitar or anything like
that. He would, he would hear songs in his head
and he would, he would sing the melodies. But it would be up to the other guys in
the group to figure out what he was doing, what the notes were, what the
chords were that should go with it, to figure out what the rhythm should be and
that kind of thing. so in many ways it was the, the, The
Doors were a very democratic group, because they decided that they would
share songwriting royalties equally among all four of them, most of the time that's
the way it went. Their first album, The Doors, was
released in January of 1967, so that is before Sgt Pepper.
That is actually before Penny Lane and Strawberry Fields.
And so when we think about what they were doing, the kind of conceptual approach to
what they were doing. It was really fairly advanced and
relatively independent of what was happening with groups like The Beatles
and, and The Beach Boys and some of the others.
The Doors were a little bit older than some of the groups that followed them.
The Doors were almost the same age as The Beatles and The Stones themselves.
their roots were really more in late 50s rock and roll and early 60s, maybe jazz.
then than some of the other groups they were, maybe a little bit less affected by
The Beatles on the British Invasion. Their vision was you've got Morrison,
this poet guy who's, you know, gotta college degree and seems to have read an
awful lot of literature. And the other musicians, Ray Manzarek,
who was a bit older than the others and had a lot of club experience, and Robert
Krieger, who was a pretty talented songwriter, John Densmore, a very jazz
oriented drummer. And they put this group together calling
it The Doors, taking it from the Aldous Huxley book about mescaline use called
The Doors of Perception. Aldous Huxley had taken that idea from a
William Blake poem, which mentions the Doors of perception.
So we see the connection all the way back to 19th Century literature and
spiritualism. so The Doors first album on the first
side of The Doors is called "Break On Through (To The Other Side)".
How much more explicit can this idea of the doors of perception breaking through
to the other site, but what's on the other side is maybe not such a happy
thing. Now, the first the first single released
out of that album was "Break On Through", it didn't do so well.
So they went for Robby Krieger song called "Light My Fire", which was
initially seven minutes long or so. They cut the whole solos out of the
center, re-released it as an AM single, and that went to number one.
And it really The Doors into an important act, having a number one single like
that. And the, the label that they were with,
Electra Records, was the biggest hit they'd ever had.
So in many ways, they really sort of started to make make Electra Records as
well. but the dark thing, you can really hear
at the end of the album, a track called The End.
Which is where Jim Morrison goes into this almost, sort of, tribal narration
thing. almost about is, it's almost about a,
kind of, a, well, it's very threatening. And he's walking through the house at
late at night and he comes to the father and he says to the father, "I'd like to
kill you" and to the mother he says: "I'd like to, well, engage you in a romantic
liaison,". That's the most, the most polite way to
put it, but it's not very polite in a way that he says it.
It's a very edible kind of complex about about marrying the mother kind of thing
and it's a very dark scary kind of thing. When they would do a buy, he would shock
people. Jim Morrison was about shocking people
out of their complacency, by confronting them with this darkness.
So a very dark psychedelic vision. The group puts out six studio albums.
The last of which is L.A woman. which goes to number nine in 1971.
Ironically, it was thought of as The Doors comeback album.
I say ironic because Jim Morrison died of heart failure in Paris in July of 1971,
becoming the third such uh,death in rock behind Jimmy Hendricks and Janis Joplin.
So but The Doors sort of stand as the LA version of psychedelia, but they were not
the only group in LA. We've mentioned a couple times, Arthur
Lee and the group Love. In fact, Love was a group that was
signing with Elektra Records before The Doors.
They should of had the success that The Doors had, but Arthur Lee would not get
on an airplane, which meant the guys could not tour.
And without being able to tour that music, you really can't get it out of the
LA area. I mean, in LA, they were big, big, big.
The Doors were very small compared to them.
They were lucky to get a gig opening for Love, but Arthur Lee thought they were
pretty good. Recommended them to Jack Holzman, he ends
up signing Elektra. It's The Doors that break out and Love
not so much. They had a hit a moderate hit number 52
in 1966 with My Little Red Book which we talked about before with regard to the
Pink Floyd. their third album from 1967, Forever
Changes is always listed in rock critics sort of like great, overlooked,
psychedelic album. So you might want to try it Love's
"Forever Changes" from 1967, see if you think it's in fact a neglected classic.
Other groups coming of the West Coast: Iron Butterfly, Talk about heavy, heavy,
duty, duty, these guys coming out of San Diego.
The big album for them was probably their second one which called In-A
Gadda-Da-Vida from summer of 1968 of course the song had originally been
called In the Garden of Eden. They got the idea to call it In-A
Gadda-Da-Vida and if you know the Simpsons episode it once again becomes in
the Garden of Eden, Google, Simpsons, In-A Gadda Da-Vida, it's a fantastic
little vignette there. Anyway, the title track of that In-A
Gadda Da-Vida, 17 minute long track in which everybody gets a solo.
It's a heavy tune, all kinds of soloing this is very much sort of in the
virtuosic, sort of psychedelic a thing that we've been talking about.
Another group we should mention The Vanilla Fudge, coming off coming out of
the the East Coast and, and something that we might call "the
psychedelic-symphonic cover version". They sort of specialized in this idea of
taking a short little song and turning into kind of a psychedelic trip.
And so the most famous of those, is a track called "You Keep Me Hangin' On"
from 1967, which the year earlier had been a two minute hit, a two minute song
for The Supremes written by Holland Dozier Hollar, Holl, Holland.
it originally had been two minutes but by the time The Vanilla Fudge got done with
it. It was now a five minute tune complete
with like sort of references to Indian sitars and all, the first couple minutes
of the tune, I usually challenge my students to say can you tell what this
song is going to be. And mostly they can't.
This idea of taking a small song and turning into this big psychedelic,
symphonic kind of composition is something that The Vanilla Fudge really
specialized in. They had an album from 1968 called The
Beat Goes On. And, it was produced by their, the
producer for that was a guy by the name of Shadow Martin who had, had roots that
go all the way back to the brill building and the girl groups.
The band was not so happy with this album, but the way the album turned out
is they used the Sonny and Cher song "The beat goes on" as a kind of motive that
returns again and again throughout the album.
And the songs that they do, basically sort of go through the History of music,
start with the eighteenth century, the nineteenth century, the twentieth
century, they cover some Beatles' tune. It's an extremely ambitious kind of
concept album. The Vanilla Fudge, I think should be
given a lot more credit in terms of what would later become the progressive rock
movement, which was essentially taking short songs and turning them into big,
long songs. Well, as we talk about this period, we
probably should say something about upstate New York and Bob Dylan.
After his motorcycle crash in 1966, Dylan retreated to Woodstock, New York, which
if you don't know where it is, is just a couple of hours North of of New York
City. But really it's sort of considered
upstate, very sort of rural and rustic up there recorded with a group called, it
came to be called The Band. They started out as the Hawks, backing
Canadian singer, Ronnie Hawks. Most of the guys in the group except
Levon Helm are Canadian. They toured with Dylan through '65 and
through '66 when he did his world tour, so they'd already worked together.
So Dylan retreats out there, and does tune after tune after tune recording with
these guys, that was later released as the Basement Tapes in 1975, so you can
hear what they were working on. during that time, two big albums come
out, one from Dylan and one from the band that really sort of helped define not
only the kind of Americana movement, but also are important to the emergence later
of country rock. And that would be in 1960, both of these
in 1968, Dylan's. John Wesley Harding, which was a number
two album, and The Band's Music From Big Pink, which was a number 30 album, but
has since come to be thought of as an extremely influential record.
Well, that sort of concludes our discussion of what was happening in Los
Angeles and elsewhere. And the last lecture of of, of this week,
let's turn to festivals and the idea of what it means to have a hippy nation,
after music, after psychedelia breaks on the national scene in the summer of 1967.
That's what we'll talk about in the last video for this week.
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