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Music Store "De Draaitafel" located at Lindengracht 152, Amsterdam. owner E. van Moerkerken (1956)
The Cincinnati Enquirer. Sunday, 18 Oct. 1970.
ROCK, ROCK 'n' ROLL - DEVILS MUSIC?
By BOB GREENE
WHEN Elvis Presley, his sneer curling halfway up to his glaring eyes, first slouched over the microphone on the "Ed Sullivan Show," it began. He couldn't even play his guitar, and his music said nothing more, than "awopbopaloobopalopbam-boom!" But while the adults were looking on in disgust or boredom, their children were twitching on the floor as they saw the defiant figure on the screen growl at them, "You ain't never caught a rabbit and you ain't no friend of mine." The rock and roll revolution had begun. The year was 1956.
Some of the children who watched Elvis with such fascination on that Sunday night were 7 years old. Now, in 1970, they are 21. Rock and roll is still with them. From the beginning, old people looked down at the young, listened to their music and said it would never last. Now the cry is up to ban rock festivals, in the wake of violence. But, as an obscure group called Danny and The Juniors sang in the late '50s, "I don't care what people say, rock and roll is here to stay." The summer's troubles in Chicago's Grant Park and elsewhere are great for the headlines and for the lawmakers who like to make easy speeches. But the music, and what it means, will go on. And the funny thing is, the old people called it right in the first place. My own dad included. I was nine years old when Elvis first showed up in our living room, and as my dad watched the TV screen in disbelief, he said, "Look at that. Look what he's doing to the kids. That's awful. They're out of control. He's leading them out of control." I thought my dad was nuts at the time, I thought It was just music.
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Now it turns out that he had quite an insight, and that Jerry Rubin agrees with him. That's right, my dad and Jerry Rubin agree on old Elvis.
"The New Left sprang . . . from Elvis gyrating pelvis," Rubin wrote in his book, "Do It." He went on: "Elvis Presley ripped off Ike Eisenhower by turning our uptight young bodies around. Hard animal rock energy beat surged hot through us, the driving rhythm arousing repressed passions. Music to free the spirit. Music to bring us together. Buddy Holly, The Coasters, Bo Diddley, Chuck Berry, the Everly Brothers, Jerry Lee Lewis, Fats Domino, Little Richard, Ray Charles, Bill Haley and the Comets, Fabian, Bobby Darin, Frankie Avalon; they all gave us the lifebeat and set us free. Elvis told us to let go! Let go! let go! let go! . . .
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AFFLUENT culture,"Rubin wrote, by producing a car and a car radio for every middle-class home, gave Elvis a base for recruiting. Rock, and roll marked the beginning of the revolution." Now that may seem like overstating the case. But it really is precisely the point. Rubin and Abbie Hoffman and other political leaders of the young can gather only relative handfuls of supporters in one place. During the infamous troubles at the 1968 Democratic National Convention, only a few thousand protesters were in the streets. But rock and roll? Well, think about it. Woodstock. Altamont. Atlanta. Huge crowds everywhere. And on weekends in the city and the small towns, there were thousands more, all gathering together to hear the music and live the life. Abble may get 3000 at a rally in front of some courthouse. But when Country Joe McDonald sings, "Well, there is no time to wonder why, whoopee. We're all gonna die!" and 400,000 kids sing along with him, the effect is overpowering. Political leaders of the young may roar in anger at the government, and it means very little. But when the sound of 400,000 voices rings out, rejecting the war, laughing at it, saying we just don't care, don't bother us, the inherent power of the music and its world is right there. If you can't understand that, you should have, seen the Woodstock movie and watched it happen. If it started with Elvis, it has multiplied ever since. Now in cars and bedrooms and dens and at rock festivals across the nation, the young people hear the Jefferson Airplane call for the start of the revolution in "Volunteers," they read Rolling Stone, the rock newspaper, and It is just not possible for anyone to reach down in an attempt to stop the music. The music has become more than simply songs. It is the major communicator of ideas for a massive proportion of the young. It is, by itself and in conjunction with the drugs and good times that go with it, the reason for huge outdoor gatherings where it is played. It is the provider of the modern cultural heroes; where once there were James Dean and Clark Gable, there was Mick Jagger and is Eric Clapton.
SERIOUS publications ─ of which Rolling Stone, a bi-weekly printed on newsprint is the most popular and the best ─ have sprung up out of rock and roll and have spread to cover the whole youth scene. They are the descendants of the early fan mags, now mature and polished Rolling Stone published exhaustive reports after Woodstock and after the murder of a young black man at the Altamont Festival. After Kent State and Cambodia, it devoted an Issue to the topic "On America 1970: A Pitiful, Helpless Giant." Simply put, to the young rock is very important. It is probably the most important cultural and political factor in their lives. Even those young people who do not like the music are now living with the culture it has spawned. Jonathan Eisen sums it up in the introduction to his anthology, 'The Age of Rock, Sounds of the American Cultural Revolution:" "In the 1940s rock didn't exist. There was Ellington, the Big Apple, Glen Miller and the Dorsey Brothers, jitterbugging and Benny Goodman. In the 1950s when people stifled under the dead weight of Joseph McCarthy and went into fits over the benign smile of Ike, they were listening to the stirrings of cool jazz, bebop, crooners in the Crosby tradition, Rosemary Clooney. Rock and roll was still inchoate, a faint stirring on the musical scene struggling to be born.
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"DALLAS (AP) ─ Bloody knife fights and gunfire erupted from a mass of 6000 rock and roll fans outside an auditorium." That was on the night of July 16, 1957.
That push back against authority meant that the first rock and roll concerts were often rowdy affairs. As well as hosting his popular radio programme, Alan Freed also organised the very first rock and roll concerts like this one at the Paramount Theatre in New York in 1957. The shows offered fans the chance to see up to 16 acts on the same bill, creating feverish excitement and the necessity for a sizeable police presence.
Rock and roll gets rowdy, New York, 1957 © PoPsie Randolph / Michael Ochs Archives / Getty Image
Rock and roll on the silver screen.
As a tireless promoter of rock and roll, DJ Alan Freed saw an opportunity to combine the music teenagers craved with their love of cinema. He started making ‘jukebox musicals’ that not only included the biggest hits of the day but often featured the bands playing as well.
Movies like Don't Knock the Rock; Rock Around the Clock; and Rock! Rock! Rock! were successful around the world. Indeed, in places like Australia where it was prohibitively expensive to tour, these movies often provided the only chance for teenagers to see their favorite acts play.
"MILWAUKEE (UPI) ─ Teen-agers necked and drank whisky and beer in the balcony during a rock and roll stage show, police reported Monday. The incident at the Garfield Theater here touched off plans in the city attorney's office to ban all rock and roll shows in Milwaukee." That was July 29, 1957.
"SAN JOSE, Calif. (AP) ─ Some 2500 teen-agers at a rock and roll dance rioted for an hour before 75 policemen got them under control. Fats Domino and his band, favorites of the rock and roll set, fled when the free-or-all started early Sunday in the Palomar Gardens in the downtown district. 'Everybody was at each other,' said Charles Silvia, owner of the Palomar. 'Boys fought boys and even girls. Girls were slugging boys and scratching one another." That one's from July 7, 1956.
"ST. LOUIS (UPI) ─ Four wild shots were fired during a noisy rock and roll show at Kiel Auditorium Monday night. One man was killed and two were wounded." That happened on August 12, 1957.
KANSAS CITY (AP) ─ A rock and roll show here Saturday night turned into a riot to the accompaniment of popping firecrackers and swinging fists. Dozens of fights broke out among 12,300 persons who attended the affair bearing the name of television star Dick Clark." That from October 19, 1959.
"OSLO (AP) ─ Norwegian teen-agers stormed through Oslo streets smashing windows and fighting police. They had just seen the first showing here of the movie 'Rock Around the Clock.' The youngsters shouted 'More rock! More rock!' as they swarmed through the downtown area." From September 20, 1956.
Politiet var klar med hester og batonger, og slo hardt ned på ungdomsopptøyene som fulgte etter visningen av «Rock Around the Clock» på Sentrum kino i den 20. september 1956. I løpet av tre dager ble 79 ungdommer arrestert. Foto: NTB arkiv / NTB (Foto: NTB /NTB)
Politiet forsøkte å spre folkemengden, som spredte seg i flere grupper i Oslo sentrum. (NTB /NTB)
79 ungdommer ble arrestert, de fleste i alderen fjorten til sytten, og slapp ut etter noen timer i arresten Her en unggutt som har klatret opp i søylen som holder kinoplakaten fra filmen. (NTB /NTB)
Then as now, it was always a minority of the crowd that got the trouble started. There was nothing in the music itself that caused the violence; rather it was the very fact that the music belonged to the young, that it was theirs alone, that provided a background for the trouble. Here, in a world controlled by the old, was an island of music inhabited only by the young. There were no adults holding the rock and roll fans down; so when the violence started, there was no one to stop it. The reaction in the '50s was predictable. The playing of rock and roll music was banned in Asbury Park, N. J., "to prevent riots." A radio station in St. Paul announced it would discontinue permanently all programming of rock and roll and rhythm and blues because of "the recent outbreaks of violence in connection with this type of music." In San Antonio, rock and roll records were banned from swimming pool juke boxes because such music "attracted an undesirable element."
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BOSTON banned the performance of rock and roll from all public auditoriums. Alan Freed, the disc jockey who invented the term "rock and roll," was indicted by a grand jury in Massachusetts for "inciting the unlawful destruction of property" during a rock show. The papers were filled with predictions that rock and roll was dying, that it was only a fad that was on the wane.
The NY Times
Freed, Ex-Disk Jockey, Indicted In $37,920 U.S. Tax Evasion; Failure to Report on Payola Income Is Main Charge.
FREED IS INDICTED OVER ROCK 'N' ROLL; Faces Charges in Boston on Fracas After Show - He Quits Radio Post
Alan Freed and Dick Clark both played important parts in the rise of rock ’n’ roll (Freed embodied the incendiary spirit of the music more than Clark, refusing to play white cover versions of black songs, such as Pat Boone’s “Tutti Frutti”). And though they both denied ever accepting payola, it’s almost impossible to imagine two young, popular jocks not succumbing to a little temptation. Guilty or not, it was Freed who ended up taking the fall for DJs everywhere.
Why did the committee single him out? Freed was abrasive. He consorted with black R&B musicians. He jive talked, smoked constantly and looked like an insomniac. Clark was squeaky clean, Brylcreemed, handsome and polite. At least on the surface. Once the grilling started, Freed’s friends and allies in broadcasting quickly deserted him. He refused—“on principle”—to sign an affidavit saying that he’d never accepted payola. WABC fired him, and he was charged with 26 counts of commercial bribery. Freed escaped with fines and a suspended jail sentence. He died five years later, broke and virtually forgotten.
Dick Clark During House Hearing Photos © Bettman/Corbis
Alan Freed Before Testifying for House Investigation Committee
Previous to the trial, Dick Clark had wisely divested himself of all incriminating connections (he had part ownership in seven indie labels, six publishers, three record distributors and two talent agencies). He got a slap on the wrist by Committee chairman Oren Harris, who called him “a fine young man.” As Clark told Rolling Stone in 1989, the lesson he learned from the payola trial was: “Protect your ass at all times.” Surprisingly candid words from the eternal teenager.
After Freed went down in 1960, Congress amended the Federal Communications Act to outlaw “under-the-table payments and require broadcasters to disclose if airplay for a song has been purchased.” Payola became a misdemeanor, with a penalty of up to $10,000 in fines and one year in prison.
The loophole in the legislation was that it didn’t say anything about “undisclosed payments.” And so payola joined the cockroach and the fart joke on the list of things that, despite changing times, always manage to survive.
—By Bill DeMain
Rock and roll will never die,” Sha-Na-Na insisted at Woodstock in 1969. “It won’t fade away.” But it did. Copyright, the golden seam that ran through the rock business, ended with digital file-sharing in the late Nineties. Rock music now survives in two museum formats, the big-ticket bucket-list gig and the anniversary boxset: see them before they die, hear why the offcuts were cut off in the first place.
Rock fans — middle-aged men, invariably — will recite the Sha-Na-Na catechism and remain happily deaf to the obvious. To anyone with ears, it’s clear that rock completed its natural development decades ago and has been fading away ever since. Popular music retained by right the cultural centrality it had assumed in Western societies in the nineteenth century, a right prolonged by the ubiquity and wealth of the twentieth-century entertainment business. But the music, like most of its successful practitioners, was a haggard and stupefied ghost, mechanically repeating its youthful glories.
Even the fans admit that Rock was rotten in the Eighties. Naturally they blame the adults: for not producing enough little rockers as the baby boom ran out, for the deindustrialisation that dissolved the class systems of Detroit and Liverpool, for the geopolitical bungling that pushed up the price of oil and vinyl singles, or even for inventing the compact disc. The material explanation is true, but incomplete. Rock died because it had played out its natural span — not three minutes, but the three-step dance of all Western art forms: classical, romantic, modern.
Lloyd Shearer, Parade Magazine's pundit-in-residence, wrote an article headlined "Good-bye, Rock and Roll," in which he said "Rock and roll music is on the way out." His prediction, in December of 1959, was echoed by many others around the country. Well, since then have come the Beatles, who took rock from a kind of music to a genuine art form, and the other thoroughly professional, highly talented rock artists who followed. And, of course, the festivals. Woodstock was so highly praised that the public is now shocked at the trouble that has come to festivals this year. More and more, it is appearing that Woodstock was the exception to the rule that there will be some problems at all the festivals.
The trouble has been of three types. The first is the one that the young people do not consider a problem: the heavy use of drugs and alcohol and widespread public nudity. This is the thing that is most angering to a large segment of the adult public. The second problem first appeared at the Altamont festival in California last December.
Altamont was a one-day affair. Its main act was the Rolling Stones. The Stones have always had a devilish image, and the festival probably cemented this picture of them forever. The Stones' management hired Hell's Angels as security guards paying them with cases of beer and the Angels went at their job with a vengeance.
Before the afternoon was over scores of rock fans had been beaten because they had gotten, in the opinion of the Angels, too close to the stage. And one young man ─ had been stomped to death.
Since then motorcycle gang members have been appearing at almost all rock festivals, shattering the tranquility that most of the young people are seeking.
Mick Jagger of the Rolling Stones performs at the Altamont Rock Festival in Livermore, CA as Hells Angels cross stage during melee to help fellow motorcyclists.
THE LAST problem is the one seen in Grant Park: violence springing from the crowd. So far this has been an isolated incident, but the widespread publicity it drew will doubtless cause the curtailing of rock festivals everywhere. The civic groups and local officials can say: Look at Chicago, we don't want that here. So, from that reaction, it appears that young rock fans face the prospect of having their festivals shut down. Will this end the rock scene? It does not seem possible. When authorities canceled a rock festival in the East, the fans showed up anyway. They did not get to hear the music they came for. But they took the drugs and relaxed in the grass and did all the other things that the rock festivals have come to stand for. This seems to be the point: No one can prevent young people from coming together If they want to. The communications system of the young is strong; underground newspapers, rock publications and the rock-oriented FM radio stations carry the message to anyone who wants to know about it. The rock culture has outgrown the music. Whether or not the festivals remain, the world that has grown up around rock will stay. Already some young people are saying that they would rather go to a small rock concert than a long outdoor festival. As one 18-year-old said in Rolling Stone: "After a certain point, what the hell's so great about lying around in the mud?" As was shown so well in the first days of rock and roll, predictions don't count for much. But as we enter the third decade in which rock is a force, it seems safe to bet that it's not over yet.
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