A kung fu fighter in a disco

50s rock and roll has some of the best starts to records

Johnny B Goode
At The Bop by revivalists Sha Na Na
That'll Be The Day
Crying In The Rain

ISTR Leader of the Pack had some good motorcycle revving going on.

From:

Rock'n'roll also influenced by country and blues. It's certainly pop - see Chuck Berry, Buddy Holly - and was aimed at the newfangled teenagers, although the actual practitioners were often quite old - I'm looking at you, Mr Haley.

Stray Cats -> "rockabilly", but is also pop, given their top 10 hitz.

Not only boys with guitars - see Fats Domino, Little Richard, Jerry Lee Lewis.

Probably done quickly because a) cheap and b) didn't have the 48-track wonder studios of today, so not so much time to faff on getting the snare drum right. The drums on Peggy Sue were played on a cardbox box, FFS!

It was the young persons dance musicks of the time.

From:

braisedbywolves.livejournal.com

Is it a) the first instance of Thrill Power b) the instance whose thrillpoweredness has been most hushed up when it or its progeny became respectable music? Or does jazz beat it on both counts?

From:

freakytigger.livejournal.com

Yeah it's thrill-powered, but I didn't use that term because Poptimists may be unaware of its technical meaning (I may have forgotten it myself).

From:

braisedbywolves.livejournal.com

I found it the other week (http://freakytrigger.co.uk/ft/wedge/2005/10/thrill-power/), while meaning to ask

ampster about how well the Riot Grrll zines matched the description.

From:

Ask the Mighty Tharg!

From:

There's plenty of thrill power in jump blues and wild R&B and Texas swing and other forerunners of rock 'n' roll - even in the early blues of the '20s, or Louis Armstrong's Hot Fives recordings from the same decade.

From:

...its also BOSH!!

From:

katstevens.livejournal.com

Chuck Berry = all teh awesome. Little Richard = all the bonkers.

Bill Haley can eff off. HE = NOT ONE OF VER KIDS!

From:

Great guitar solo in Rock Around The Clock though.

From:

koganbot

Yes, though the solo is the jazz. (And I think Kat is underrating Mr. Comet; he's half in r'n'r and half not there yet, and that halfness seems as valid a predicament as any other; though for those in the predicament, he isn't half as good as Louis Prima.)

From:

It wasn't a predicament for Prima - it was just a move to try to retain a youthful audience, make everything faster and wilder. I think he was at least as inspired by people like Wynonie Harris, who certainly predates rock 'n' roll, as he was by that genre, in his move away from his Armstrong-jazz roots, which he never left behind. His material remained jazz-pop standards.

From:

cis.livejournal.com

I've always thought of rock'n'roll as pop (if also pop that's been adopted by the rock canon): this probably reflects the fact that the rock'n'roll I like is the most commercial, not the rough-edged originals but the smoothed-out major-label chart stuff. Charlie Gillet's 'the sound of the city' meant a lot to me: it was the first book of rock criticism I read in full, one of very few. I remember well his example of how Bill Haley desexualised 'shake rattle and roll', from "you wear short dresses, the sun comes shining through" to "you wear those dresses, your hair done up so nice". 'nice'! what a wonderful choice of word, so perfectly lukewarm. The sound of the kids, toned down and sold to the kids: fresh-faced, fast, exciting, but still not all that authentic: what's not to love!

I also love the mock'n'roll, how the various rockabilly revivals can never quite sound like the sound of the fifties.

Whenever I listen to Buddy Holly, my mother says 'i always preferred the big bopper'.

From:

freakytigger.livejournal.com

Yr mother is QUITE RIGHT!

From:

Nah, Buddy is the MAN, dude :-)

From:

koganbot

But Cis, most of what Gillett was writing about was on the indies - and as for whether indies vs. major means revved-up vs. toned-down, I'm not sure there's a consistent answer; Pat Boone was on an indie, and most of the smoothed-out Philly teen idols were on indies too. The majors pretty much missed the boat across the board and were playing catch up.

Toned-down for the kids is not particularly accurate as to what was going on anyway, unless you take into account which kids. Boys liked Elvis more than girls did (at least in one poll I read from several Illinois high schools in 1958, where Pat beats Elvis decisively). And Little Richard deliberately made his sound wilder to appeal to a white crowd; and Jerry Lee I think was urged to go wild. The rockabilly sound was definitely more deliberately crazy than its pop and r&b and country sources. In fact, while r&b might have been dirtier, deliberate insanity was more of a white thing. (Counterevidence: Screamin' Jay Hawkins. Little Richard not counterevidence, given that he was aimng for the whites.) I think there were contrary urges in recording for white teens: both make it sweeter/mushier (for those into courtship), make it wilder, harder rockin' (for those into harder rockingness). Also, getting a large white teen audience also made you more likely to be afflicted with censorship attempts than when you're restricted to an audience of black adults.

Look at the charts today (esp. the U.S.): Is there a consistent answer as to whether a tough guy or a smooth guy hits big on Top 40? Think of Lloyd (smoothie); think of Lil Jon (nutsy); think of 50 Cent (smooth club and tough lyrics).

From:

koganbot

think of 50 Cent (smooth club and tough lyrics)

Talk loudly and carry a smooth club.

From:

Little Richard's wildness and madness is certainly in part inherent, and in part learned from Esquerita, who at that time had no white audience at all as far as I know - that's where most of Little Richard's visual, vocal and piano wildness derived from, changing his music from his early smooth blues recordings.

Also, there is tons of craziness (silliness, aggressive wildness, insanity and so on) in R&B of the '40s and early '50s, before it was largely replaced by rock 'n' roll.

But I don't think aiming for the big market meant toning things down, though there was some of that at first. Haley was a very big early star for just that reason - taking out the sexual threat both of the up and coming white stars like Elvis and Jerry Lee, but also just by being white when music was still highly segregated, which meant he could have a widespread hit in a way that Little Richard, Chuck Berry, Ike Turner and so on couldn't. Elvis of course benefitted from that latter point too.

From:

koganbot

I'll defer to Martin's greater knowledge on this, so long as we agree that "white" doesn't necessarily equal "bland."

From:

koganbot

To call it "pop" may be OK, but doing so certainly does away with a bunch of subtleties, and a lot depends on what you mean by "pop" anyway. Rock 'n' roll challenged pop (also challenged country, r&b, and blues), cut down its sales, took the youth away from pop - if by pop one means the music represented by Jo Stafford and Rosemary Clooney and Frank Sinatra and Perry Como. The word "pop" tended to be used to mean the old stuff that rock 'n' roll was threatening and replacing (and assimilating and copying). Or another way of putting this is that rock 'n' roll divided the pop market into a kind of you're with us or against us.

And then ballads are a whole nother story, since there are black and country and pop ballads, but pop tends to stay strong there, even when the performer is a rock 'n' roller; so there's the feeling among '50s guys that Elvis sold out to the girls by recording all those ballads.

From:

blue-russian.livejournal.com

I quite like the Beatles, yet at this point I find it almost impossible to listen to anything they did before Rubber Soul. Whether this is a function of the production or arrangements of the time, I can't say, but what I'm driving at (obviously, hopefully) is that going even FURTHER back in time is really quite impossible for me. That said, pretty much every revival during my lifetime has spit out a few good songs.

I went through a brief period where I was interested enough in Elvis to get acquainted with the canon, but even this question is enough to make me cringe now.

(I agree with CIS, though, that it's definitely pop.)

From:

infov0re.livejournal.com

Not just boys with guitars, but boys with haircuts and guitars. Haircuts are an important part of rock'n'roll.

From:

awesomewells.livejournal.com

It is the original haircut indie!

From:

anthonyeaston.livejournal.com

i think pop is or can be:

1) easily queered
2) open to minority voices
3) all about the awesome power of fucking.

so rock and roll is all about these three.

From:

cis.livejournal.com

re 1), is there any kind of music that can't be easily queered? is there even any kind of culture that can't be?

From:

You'd have a jolly hard time with various African cultures, some interpretations of Islam, Christianity, etc.

From:

anthonyeaston.livejournal.com

well its a spectrum, hip hop, country, dub cant be as easily as tutti fruitti...

From:

But Little Richard was UNqueering his music! His most direct forebear, Esquerita, who I mentioned above, mostly thrived on the black transvestite circuit (see also Bobby Marchan and the Clowns, Huey 'Piano' Smith and others), and Little Richard rather toned down the effeminacy of his look and sound. I say this as an interesting sidebar point rather than to disagree with you, since I don't overall.

From:

no wave => kind of like a rock n' roll revival, but its a sukrat matter, as tunes are harder to find. But both deal in briefness, concentration of a kind of energy/force, both dealt with jazz and blues (no wave with some electronics type stuff), both kind of 'scary' (at least looking at some photos of certain no wavers), etc.

Does it get revived a lot? I get the impression of a revival in the 80s and that's about it.

As for rock n' roll I've only (kind of) discovered it this year, too, in that I started to put about 10 tracks on a loop, there's probably quite a lot of digging to be done to find more in compilations I'm sure, with a lot of golden nuggets out there waiting to be found, or not -- maybe it ws a moment, now we're left with a few artifacts, which might be very pop as well.

From:

carsmilesteve.livejournal.com

Does it get revived a lot?

sound of the underground by girls aloud, obv ;)

From:

oh yeah :-D

And 'Love Machine' is skiffle revival!

From:

blue-russian.livejournal.com

My mind spins at the idea of people knowing no wave but only just discovering rock'n'roll. Things like this start making people feel old.

From:

Well, I knew of r'n'r before no wave, but I didn't get round to an appreciation of it till recently. Partly its bcz it seemed to be packaged in these compilations with plenty of tracks and er...so I ended up not knowing where to start. Whereas no wave ws easier -- get 'No New York' and off you go and despite whatev one may say about the quality of that partic comp it ws a start.

Still only have about 10 tracks/the odd record/comp as far as r'n'r goes.

From:

koganbot

The Contortions' "I Can't Stand Myself" was definitely more rock 'n' roll than James Brown's original version. I once heard them do a cover of "Jailhouse Rock."

From:

koganbot

If you're looking from the perspective of r&b, rock 'n' roll brings a lot of pop into r&b. E.g., before rock 'n' roll there's a chord pattern that as far as I know is only used in white pop: I-vi-IV-V (e.g., Richard Rodgers' "Blue Moon"). Or a common variant: I-vi-ii-V (e.g., Hoagy Carmichael's "Heart and Soul"). When rock 'n' roll hits, it's suddenly all over the place (something like 90% or the doo-wop songs uses one or another of those patterns, but they're hardly restricted to doo-wop). Btw, how do you categorize doo-wop? Is it part of rock 'n' roll? R&b? Its own thing?

Gene Vincent: I hear beatnik, proto-counterculture, proto-punk leanings in the guys. Maybe in a lot of rockabilly.

From:

Doo-wop is a genre of its own, somewhere between R&B (where it started out, certainly), pop and rock 'n' roll. It existed before the last of those, of course.

From:

koganbot

Rock 'n' roll was the disco of its day, in its scavenger willingness to incorporate everything. Mambo rock, flying saucer rock, barking dogs rock, chipmunk rock, lunatic balladeer rock. But rock 'n' roll had an edge of violence and a promise or threat of change that disco didn't really have.

From:

epicharmus.livejournal.com

Pop though was ALSO the disco of its day, given the startling degree with which non-English music sources had thoroughly (if maybe superficially...maybe?) penetrated the mainstream. I mean, jeez, probably the most popular song of 1950 -- America and worldwide -- was a solo zither track performed by an Austrian. (And if not that, it was the folk-blues waltz covered by those pinkos.) Richard Corliss covers this territory here:

http://www.time.com/time/columnist/corliss/article/0,9565,127065,00.html

From:

koganbot

I wonder if Corliss listens to much hip-hop?

I think "pop" is too broad of a term here; I mean, late '70s pop was the disco of its day, too, since the pop charts included a whole bunch of stuff, including disco! But disco had the sense that anything could and would be discofied, whereas I'm not sure what it would mean to say that anything could be poppified, pop (as I said) being too broad a term for what I had in mind. )(But then, rock 'n' roll isn't so unbroad a term, either.)

From:

I've said a few things up above, but overall I am a huge fan of rock 'n' roll. Jerry Lee Lewis's Live At The Star Club is my favourite live album ever, the most exciting record ever made and one of my three or four favourite albums. I adore Little Richard. I love Ike Turner's pre-Tina stuff, especially the instrumentals he recorded around 1960 or so (Ho-Ho is my favourite instrumental ever). Chuck Berry is one of my favourite songwriters ever. There is a ton of great rock 'n' roll, some of it famous and some of it very obscure and everything in between.

It is one of those genres that didn't start as pop, that was very distinct from it, in many ways opposed to it, but of course it got assimilated, and was the biggest influence on what became most central to pop in the next decade, the Beatles; so viewed retrospectively now, it is pop in many senses.

As for how it stacks up now, that in part depends on how old you are. The production quality is often lousy, very tinny, and if you're young that may seem intolerable. I am 47, and I grew up with crappy production standards, so they don't cause me a problem. In other terms, the songwriting of Chuck Berry, the piano or guitar of Jerry Lee or Ike, the singing of Little Richard or Elvis, can surely stand alongside the best of any era.

From:

"Jerry Lee Lewis's Live At The Star Club is my favourite live album ever"

Saw you talk about this one a lot, so I gave it a go and "Mean Woman Blues" off that is something I play loads. Don't know about whether I can agree as the greatest live album but its a great beginning.

From: