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 Early 1960s in the US & UK
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Do curso por University of Rochester
A História do Rock, Parte 1
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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.
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John CovachProfessor of Music and Director
Institute for Popular Music
Let's take some time now to have a look at what was happening in
the UK during this period leading up to the British invasion here in this country,
that is the United States, in 1964.
Remember that, at the beginning of the course, I emphasized that the history that
we'e telling, or the history of rock in this class, is really one that is markedly
and almost exclusively really from the American perspective.
But this isn't going to be one of those moments where we try to look at what
the history of rock looked like, not from America, but from the UK.
And it turns out that in many ways,
the history of rock looks quite different from a UK perspective.
Some of those of you who are taking the course from the UK can comment on that.
And so we shouldn't assume that simply because we're talking about a lot of
the same artists, that the situation is the same.
And maybe sometimes it's similarity that blinds us to some important and
significant differences.
So here's what was happening In the UK in the period of the late 50s and
the early 1960s.
When you look at the UK charts up to 1963,
it's pretty clear that US pop dominates the UK charts.
That is, if you look at, for the year 1961, 1962,
what the top singles are for that year in the US and
then you look at the charts in the UK, you'll find a lot of those same records.
More records by American artists,
artists out of the US, than by artists from the UK.
And even those artists from the UK, in many ways,
mostly imitated American artists.
And the attitude, I think, of a lot of British musicians was that their music was
maybe not as good as American music but at least it was homegrown.
Certainly the attitude in America, and we'll talk about this pretty soon,
is the idea that, it certainly was the attitude in America that UK music
wasn't as good as American music.
And The Beatles, of course, and The Stones, they would change all that.
But for right now, I want to focus on the fact that even among the Brits,
they thought that their own music was probably not as good as American music.
Going back to the second World War when there was a lot of American presence in
the UK, we brought our pop music with us,
the British people sort of became fans of American popular music.
And so popular music for them was,
the best popular music was the music from the US.
Those that imitated American artists, there were a lot of them,
mostly imitating in many ways, Elvis Presley.
Probably the most important in the UK is Cliff Richard.
Cliff Richard, in the period between 1958 and
1963, had 27 hit singles in the UK.
Cliff Richard had a very difficult time getting any kind of real chart action in
this country, but in the UK he was like an Elvis.
I mean, one hit after another.
He was a very, very big star.
There was also a UK Version of the teen idols.
There was a fellow, we talked in last week about Bob Marcucci in
Philadelphia being a guy who groomed a lot of young teen idols.
Well in the UK, the guy who did this was a fellow named Larry Parnes and
he managed a bunch of teen idols.
He had a kind of whole stable of these guys, including Tommy Steele,
Marty Wilde and Billy Fury.
You can tell from all these stage names that there's something aggressive and
exciting about these acts.
And these guys had single, hit single after hit single.
These were all records that, essentially,
invisible to Americans because they never saw any of this.
It was part of the UK scene.
And so looking at this period from the UK side,
you have to factor in all this kind of thing.
This is the situation that The Beatles and The Stones and the rest of these groups,
when they were making it in their own country, came upon.
Of records that crossed over the Atlantic and
became hits in the early 1960s, the only 2 that were really,
really successful was a record called, Telstar.
An instrumental record called Telstar by The Tornados went to number
1 both in the US and the UK in 1962.
The Tornados, it turns out, were the backing band for Billy Fury.
It turns out that Cliff Richard also had a backing band,
they were called The Shadows.
And the Shadows had a whole series of hits in the UK.
Well this backing band, The Tornados,
had this international or US American hit, Telstar.
Interestingly, produced and written by the legendary British producer Joe Meek,
who in many ways is kind of the parallel to Phil Spector for British music there.
Although, I think Phil Spector probably had a greater success rate in this
country than Joe Meek had in the UK.
Still, he's an important early independent producer.
In the UK also,
there was a very different structure of how record labels and radios worked.
And this really created a very different picture in a lot of kinds of ways.
In this country, we talked about the growth of regional radio and
how there were music on the radio,
a bunch of different stations all the time in this country.
And that left room for stations to be able to specialize in rhythm and
blues or country and western or mainstream pop or whatever.
And, of course, we had lots and lots of record labels, so
it was really important that we had independent labels.
We talked last time about, and the time before that, about how important
independent labels were in being able to sort of bring rock and roll to people.
But it turns out that in the UK, it wasn’t so much like that.
They had the BBC because in many ways the UK had decided that when
they decided to license radio they were going
to keep it within the offices of the government itself.
And so there were no stations in addition to the BBC that you could tune into.
You had as many as three different flavors of BBC but that was about it.
There was a station called Radio Luxembourg
that was broadcasting from the continent.
There was pirate radio, ships out in the sea who were broadcasting back.
And the problem, of course, with something like Radio Luxembourg was that
the programming was paid for by the record labels.
In terms of record labels, there were very few independent labels in the UK.
It was a very, very difficult road, a much smaller market,
very much dominated by the major labels.
And when you haven't got a lot of radio to get your music to people and when you have
a limited number of record stores, I mean, the population being smaller, a lot of
record owners weren't really interested in getting records from independent labels.
They already had plenty of product from the major labels.
It made it very difficult to keep an independent label afloat.
So that meant that a lot more of what the Brits heard in terms of rock and
roll were the things that came to them through these sort of sanctioned sources,
the BBC, the major labels, and so that really constrained what was available.
I would say there's probably less variety available there than there was in this
country.
However, the variety there was different from the one we had here
because they had all the British artists that we were talking about as well.
An important early movement in British pop, or a movement that's important to us
in terms of talking about the 60s, is a movement called skiffle.
It was led by a fellow, Lonnie Donegan, who was a member of a big band.
We'll talk about Trad Jazz in just a minute, but
was basically adapted American folk music with a bit of a kind of big
band kind of beat or sort of a heavier beat with the use of the drums.
Although sometimes he would use a washboard in a traditional kind of way.
But anyway, his Rock Island Line, which is a traditional song,
was number 8 in the UK and even made number 8 over here in the US in 1956.
And that kind of launched in the UK what's often called a skiffle craze.
And that meant kids all across the UK were getting inexpensive acoustic guitars and
learning the first position chords, the Gs, the Cs, the Ds, the A minors,
the E minors, and learning to play these skiffle tunes,
which were essentially versions of American, traditional folk music.
All of this happens before the folk revival that happened in America
which we can trace back to 58 or 59, they were doing skiffle already in 56 and 57.
But this idea of strumming cords, easy tunes that anyone can do, was extremely
influential on the members of The Beatles, the Rolling Stones, Jimmy Page.
In fact, there's a television clip that you can find where Jimmy Page,
as just a young teenage kid,
appears on a variety show as a skiffle musician doing skiffle music.
And so the skiffle thing, very, very, important.
We'll see traces of it in The Beatles music when we look at their music in 63,
64, and 65.
Other kinds of things that were happening in the UK at that time,
there was a real interest in what they called Trad Jazz.
In the UK, Trad Jazz is more like, less like big band jazz in a sense,
less like bebop for sure, more like Dixieland kind of jazz.
Really old New Orleans kind of jazz is really what Trad Jazz tended to
sound like a lot of the time.
Some of the important artists there in the UK doing Trad Jazz were Ken Colyer,
Chris Barber, Kenny Ball, and Acker Bilk.
Acker Bilk actually had another,
there were two British hits that went to number 1 in our country before 1964.
One of them I already talked about, Telstar.
The second one was as song called,
Stranger on the Shore by the Acker Bilk orchestra, in 1962 also went to number 1.
So when we say The Beatles broke through and had a whole series of number 1 hits,
it's not like they're the first UK band to have done it.
But certainly, there was a lot more of it happening and
it was a lot more consistent.
Anyway, so that gives you a little sense of the Trad Jazz scene.
And also, there was a movement in the UK, not a lot of records on the chart, but
we'd be sure, of blues revivalists.
And those were people like Cyril Davies, Alexis Korner and John Mayall.
That'll be important to us in a little bit when we talk about the roots of
The Rolling Stones and some of the other Stones type groups,
like The Yardbirds and The Animals and others like that.
The idea there was they had a real fascination for
American blues music and really worked to imitate it.
So when you think about it we're talking about skiffle, Trad Jazz,
blues revivalists.
These were all folks who, perhaps because they were enamored by the Americans
when they came over during the second World War, were really fascinated by what
we might call the more vernacular musics in American culture.
And so you get this fascination, by sometimes very educated and
sophisticated middle class people, in some of the music that's most associated with
the poorest and most under privileged elements of American culture.
It's a fascinating phenomenon.
We don't really have time to pursue it in a kind of sociological sense here.
But it's worth noting because it's the root of what traditional music meant
to a lot of the British musicians that we're going to be talking about.
So having given you kind of a snapshot of what things looked like in the UK
leading up to 1963, let's now turn our attention to the rise of The Beatles.
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