In the beginning, rock n’ roll songs were all about “boy meets girl.” The lyrics were all about love —pretend love, almost love, jilted love, long distance love and missed love. Our favorites were about “true love” like Peggy Sue and Sherry Baby promised. All the choruses were filled with “la, la, la, la la’s” and with doo wop lyrics like The Volumes put in the middle of their 1962 one-hit wonder, “I Love You” — “Iiiiii love yooooou, I really do o o o o.”
Then came maturity and rock n’ roll grew up with its originators. It lost some innocence, got soul, reached out for new rhythms and got influenced by success and money. By the time Elvis started singing his big hits, his songwriters were giving him lyrics about being “All Shook Up,” incarcerated in “Jailhouse Rock” or stuck on a “Mystery Train.”
Rock n’ roll today — in whatever traces might still exist — has come a long, long way from Little Richard’s “Tutti Fruiti,” or Prince’s “Purple Rain” to Taylor Swift’s versions of songs about boys and girls and love. Swift’s verses aren’t quite the same sentiments we remember from the days when we would call up the radio DJ and dedicate a song on the airwaves.
The early rock n’ roll years were all about jukeboxes, AM radio, TV dance shows like Dick Clark’s American Bandstand and the weekly Billboard Top Ten. There was Chuck Berry (“Sweet Little 16”), Buddy Holly (“That’ll Be the Day”), The Everly Brothers (“Wake Up Little Susie”), Elvis, of course, and others. (Don’t forget Bill Haley’s “Rock Around the Clock.”)
Changing the words
But when did rock n’ roll become just “Rock?” Originally, rock n’ roll was like a big bowl of gumbo with gospel, rockabilly, blues, country-western and a little blues and jazz. What changed? How did rock n’ roll lose its ‘roll’ and get a capital ‘R’?
Maybe it was the so-called British Invasion of the early 1960s when The Beatles crashed onto America’s shores. Whatever happened has continued as a moving target, racing through the present and into tomorrow faster than a runaway Corvette convertible or a Flash Gordon rocket ship or one of David Bowie’s Ziggy Stardust androgynous intergalactic adventures.
After The Beatles and The Rolling Stones, the rest of the 1960s really stirred up the rock n’ roll gumbo. Old southern bluesmen like Robert Johnson, Lightin’ Hopkins, Skip James and others got “discovered.” Appalachian and other folk music became popular on college campuses, sung by The Limelighters, Kingston Trio and Peter, Paul & Mary.
And then Bob Dylan happened. And the Civil Rights demonstrations got violent. And the Vietnam War exploded and Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy were assassinated.
Next, Dylan plugged his folk songs into a loud electric amplifier. The Beatles took LSD. Lots of young girls took birth control pills and all the “boy meets girl” songs turned into anthems about “free love” and “feed your head.” After The Beatles came The Byrds, Jefferson Airplane, the Grateful Dead and lots of other musicians that never sounded like Elvis.
After the 1960s and early 1970s, rock n’ roll and Rock music seemed to splinter in all kinds of directions — all at once. All of a sudden we had Hard Rock and Soft Rock; Pop Rock and Punk Rock; New Wave, Heavy Metal and early Rap.
FM radio replaced the old static AM airwaves. MTV displaced Dick Clark on television. Rolling Stone magazine put photographs of marijuana on its cover where John Lennon and Yoko also took off all their clothes. Woodstock happened and so did the Summer of Love.
Rock musicians started printing their song lyrics on the back of their albums. After a few decades of easy-rhyming love songs and odes to fast cars, surfing and skipping school, lots of musicians thought they had lots of different things to say.
And they did.
“People try to put us down; just because we get around. Things they do look awful c-c-cold; I hope I die before I get old,” sang The Who in “My Generation.” They sang it like they meant it and we believed them.
Angry song lyrics weren’t that new but more people started paying attention to them. Rock n’ roll was no longer just music with a good beat you could dance to.
Remember Barry McGuire’s “Eve of Destruction” from all the way back in 1965? Somehow that song got a lot of radio airplay, even on AM. Then came Buffalo Springfield’s “For What It’s Worth,” the very next year. (“It’s time we stop; Hey, what's that sound? Everybody look, what's going down.) Stephen Stills wrote that song that is still being played a lot on everyone’s Spotify, Apple Music and Pandora song rotations.
Timeless?
Somewhere Rock replaced rock n’ roll’s love and happiness with war and protest. But the beat remained the same. The 4/4 timing, solid drums, emphatic bass and Fender guitars fit fine behind the more urgent messages. But it was all a collision maybe best expressed by British blues guitarist Alvin Lee in 1971: “I’d love to change the world, But I don’t know what to do; So I’ll leave it up to you.” This is after he complained in his song about: “World pollution, there’s no solution; Institution, electrocution; Just black or white, rich or poor; Them and us: Stop the war.”
Not all the newer rock songs with lyrics printed on the album covers were protest songs. These were the days when song masters like Paul Simon, Jackson Browne, Lennon & McCartney and others were sharing classic literary offerings like “Bridge Over Troubled Waters,” “The Pretender,” and “I am the Walrus.”
But, as said above, rock n’ roll was getting pulled in lots of new directions. Even The Beatle’s John Lennon was writing the peace-positive anthem “Imagine” at about the same time he penned a few angry songs like “Power to the People” and “Revolution No. 9.”
We pause to wonder how today’s world might be different or better if all those rock n’ roll musicians had stuck to just “boy and girl” songs. Would our world be any simpler, more innocent — or just naïve?
We don’t know, but even the Godfather of Soul, James Brown, changed his focus from his earlier songs like “I Feel Good” to his later rant (rap) about “I say we won’t quit moving, until we get what we deserve; Say it loud, I’m Black and I’m proud.”
Before rock n’ roll the most popular songs were songs like, “How Much is that Doggie in the Window” and show tunes like “Oh What a Beautiful Morning” or “Pennies from Heaven.” So we appreciate all the songwriters and musicians who labored to make our lyrics more real and consequential.
At the very height of the 1960s Inner City domestic violence, Vietnam War inflammation and unsetting cultural changes, California’s The Youngbloods added a song to their first album. It was an older song recorded by other musicians but had never found a listening audience.
The song was, “Come Together.” It’s sing-a-long chorus is: “Come on people now; Smile on your brother; Everybody get together; Try to love one another right now.”
At the same time, there was a more strident song, also written by a member of Quicksilver Messenger Service that deserved extra airplay: “You poisoned my sweet water; You cut down my green trees; The food you fed my children; Was the cause of their disease; Oh... what you gonna do about me? Oh... what you gonna do about me?
That’s about as far as you can get from Johnny Loves Sally or “Peggy Sue Got Married,” but if we pay attention and listen to all the lyrics we might understand where we’re headed. But, first, we should figure out how we got here. “Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da.”
— Rollie Atkinson
6-19-2024
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Nicely balanced article on the evolution of mid-late 20th century popular music.
Dino Valenti, real name Chet Powers, wrote “Get Together”, and later with Quick Silver “What About Me”. Died in Santa Rosa in 1994 at 57. Alcohol took its toll as did hard living. He was a seriously good song writer who unfortunately took himself even more seriously. It made for a hard life; being really talented and hard to deal with.