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.
The Beginnings of the Hippie Aesthetic
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From the course by University of Rochester
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
In the last video, we talked about the rise of LSD and the most important thing
for us to keep in mind about this rise of LSD is that not only that there was a lot
of sort of use of psychedelic drugs going on.
first of all, in a sort of subculture and then in more in the mainstream culture
into 1967, 68, 69, but that LSD was used. As a way of creating a kind of a trip,
and a lot of musicians either created music that would go along with the drug
trip. Music that was meant to sort of enhance
that. Or got the, having had the experience of
the drug trip, tried to get music to do a similar kind of thing.
So if you listen to the, an album, could you kind of go on a kind of musical trip.
Without the LSD. Would that be possible?
And so we're going to talk about. How music gets serious as it begins to
how rock music gets serious is it begins to sort of address this challenge of
creating music that could be substantial enough to, to become a kind of a trip in
that way. This is the beginnings of something that
I call in the book and we'll talk about in part two of The History of Rock,
something called the Hippie Aesthetic. What makes up this Hippie Aesthetic of
music? you can begin to trace this musical
ambition all the way back at least to The Drifters, There Goes My Baby from 1959.
A track produced by Leiber and Stoller. There, you begin to see them using the
orchestra in ways that are not just sweetening with strings.
They're using, sort of motivic things that really draw attention to the kind of
classical character of strings and this kind of thing.
we can talk about the ambition of Phil Spector and The Wall of Sound in creating
the biggest possible sound there is, sort of teenage symphonies that kind of idea.
We can talk about Brian Wilson's studio experimentation after he stops touring
with the Beach Boys and stays in the studio constantly looking for new kinds
of sounds using the studio as his kind of compositional sketch pad, finding new
sounds, the music gets increasingly ambitious.
We can certainly talk about The Beatles increasing seriousness.
In fact when we talked about The British invasion.
We kind of track The Beatles movement from crafts persons to artists.
That kind of thing. We can talk about Dylan and the
seriousness of lyrics and how that emerges in the mid 1960's.
So by the time we get to 1966, 1967, musicians are starting to think how can
we make the music serious. We've already had a kind of a.
Serious engagement, to a certain extent, with a lot of the kinds of factors that
are going to that, that are going to make the music serious.
So, here are what some of these kinds of things are.
let's first talk about serious lyrics. One of the things about the hippie
aesthetic and a lot of psychedelic music is that the lyrics should deal with
serious themes, not just teen life and romance.
I want to hold your hand, she loves you, yeah, yeah, yeah.
But something that really sort of deals with serious things like spirituality or
society or the role you know, the, the terribleness of the, the terror of war
and all these kinds of, serious kinds of topics that are.
That are not just frivolous kind of romance kinds of ideas.
Of course, Dylan had sort of paved the way for this kind of seriousness of
purpose with his lyrics. Also, for artful crafting of the lyrics
themselves. this is part and parcel with the idea of
the development of the concept album, an album that would sort of be bigger than
would be bigger than the sum of its parts.
The album itself that would sort of deal with the kind of concept and follow it
all the way through. And the album packaging would often times
participate in this too. So you've got an album with serious
lyrics that all kind of deal around this, deal with a sort of central kind of
topic, and then you've got album art that participates in that.
It gets much more ambitious in that way. Serious music, that's another way in
which the music can get serious. you, you appeal to musical styles that
already have a kind of cache for having seriousness of purpose.
And the two, the two that are used most are classical music.
In jazz, in terms of classical music there are probably two kinds of classical
music that appeal to. One is kind of 19th century traditional
classical music, the kind you might find on the program of most classical music
radio stations today. the more orchestral music, string
quartets, that kind of thing, Brahms, Beethoven to a certain extent.
Haydn, Mozart elaborate piano things, Chopin maybe even into 20th century
Rachmaninoff. But very tonal classical music and then
on the other hand, avant-garde music. Tape music, synthesizers, all kinds of
sort of crazy, creative stuff that in the 60's would've been probably personified
by somebody like Karlheinz Stockhausen. in jazz it really had to do probably more
with modal improvisation and some of the kinds of things that Miles Davis started
with Kind of Blue at the end of the 50's and some of the other players, John
Coltrane, and some of the others that had gotten involved in that.
But both of those styles. Classical music of both stripes.
And jazz, we thought of any communities within the community at large as being as
being serious style. So if you brought them into rock, you
were making your music a lot more serious.
People also start to focus on virtuosity, and we'll talk a little bit later about
the, the development of virtuosity in rock, Jimmy Hendrix, Eric Clapton, the
development of the guitar hero. It now meant something that you are
actually good at playing your instrument. You weren't just somebody standing up
there in a matching suit kind of. Playing along while somebody sang, but
you actually had skills on the guitar, or the keyboard, or the drum, or base.
this kind of thing and so virtuosity starts to become important thing.
Again, drawn from those two styles are classical virtuosity or jazz virtuosity
so it's either, Itzhak Perlman or John Coltrain or Charlie Parker, for example,
who are Miles Davis? Who are some of your kind of, your idols
with regard to virtuosity? The use of technology is another thing,
which helps make the music more serious. and this could be, this could be devoted
following the most recent developments in recording technology, being able to put
more and more tracks on these recordings, being able to manipulate the sounds in
various kinds of ways in the recording studio.
As, as we talked about with Brian Wilson, the studio kind of becomes a sketchpad
now, it's a place for your sort of sketch out ideas.
and this becomes increasingly the, the norm at the end of the 60's.
It really becomes important in the 70's, and we'll talk about that in part two of
the course. And we find the first use of
synthesizers. Mostly the Moog synthesizer, and this
starts to happen sort of late 68, 69 but the Moog synthesizer initially not being
the kind of thing you could take on stage with you but being the kind of
synthesizer that would have to stay in one room.
So complicated and so big, difficult to operate that you had to hire a separate
guy to come in just to work the synthesizer.
And then the first sampling synthizer which we've already encountered in The
Beatles Strawberry Fields Forever. for example, which is the Mellotron,
which had each key had a separate recording of a, of a maybe an orchestra
or a choir or flutes playing that particular note.
So when you played all the keys together you got a recording of the orchestra
playing a C an E and a G, and it sounded like an orchestra playing.
The earliest sampler, an analog sampler, these things start to work their way into
everybody's music because they're new sounds.
They're sounds nobody's heard before. And as you get ambitious as a musician
you start to try to create something new, something that's never happened before,
something that's experimental, something that's trippy maybe.
most important thing that comes out of this is the solidification of the idea.
That the rock musician now becomes an artist.
Not simply an entertainer, not simply a pretty face that shows up on the Ed
Sullivan show but now somebody who has a kind of artistic integrity which they
need to develop and which they need to protect in order to have credibility in
the community. and so this idea is that they're always
exploring new possibilities, always pushing musical boundaries.
So take all of those kinds of things together, lyrics, music, virtuosity,
technology, this general sort of sense of responsibility for their music as, as, as
artistic. And we can trace it as I say back to the
late 1950's and forward. And by the time we start to get this.
66, 67, 68, 69, it starts to become the dominate model.
And that's mostly because these instrum, these musicians are looking for a way to
make their music more serious of purpose. Have more seriousness of purpose because
they want the music to take on a little bit more weight as listening music.
And that's partly because they're, they're, they're following the idea of
the trip. And this is maybe in some ways, how music
can become psychadelic. So as we start to look at the music
itself, we'll turn first. To the innovations of the Beatles and the
Beach Boys as they pushed the envelope and help us further understand how music
can be psychedelic.
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