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“THE ROCK AND ROLL MUSEUM” IS A REGISTERED TRADE-NAME SINCE 1990. This is the debut module of a regular feature in the Sonic Shocks music magazine. All modules are available for syndication – all rights reserved.
The museum and muse concerns itself with “pure” rock and roll and its allied associated musical and cultural forms. It is an outlaw musical form too energetic and too urgent to repress. To conservative traditional values it is transgressive and dangerous in its power through the expression of pain to generate joy, new life and the possibility of wealth and abundance. Its roots stretch wide and deep fed by folk traditions from the haunted Gaelic ballads of Western Europe, Ireland to the vocal village traditions of West Africa and keening of embittered slaves across plantations in the Carribbean to Virginia from the blues of the cotton fields missisippi delta to the Soul of the industrial urban north and their, The haunting ballads of blue-collar white bards Woodie Guthrie and on the Mose Allison it found its apeothis in the heartlands of 1950s America and resonates across to the performances of Link Wray, Jimmy Hendrix, MC5, G.G.Allin, the Sex Pistols, The Beastie Boys through Indie music of the nineties
R + R is what was born in the wake of the 2nd world war when the powers-that-be took their eyes off the ball for a nano-second and through that careless lapse power and strength and purity of the Blues music created by segregated oppressed black musicians somehow synced in with the energy and wild abandon of white relatively affluent teenagers both groups overlooked considered powerless created a joyful surge of music and culture that shook a necrotic establishment to the core, generated shock waves of deep sentiment that played a significant role in challenging the desperate power bases behind such monstrous horrors as America’s war in Indo China and segregation and oppression of the non-white races.
Rock and Roll has a fairly standard structure yet infinitely variable musical format that 60 years from its inception can still have the power and the freshness to shock, amaze and invigorate. It is moreover a rare portal through which ordinary lives can be radically transformed, dramatically and permanently. It can be an elevator upon which a poor boy or girl from Hicksville in the Boondocks from a place with no future can ride on their guitar or vocal style to the stars. Where an awkward adolescent kid can be transformed from aping their idols mouthing at the back of a hairbrush into the wardrobe mirror one day then be singer or musician in a band touring the globe and with the world at his or her feet some time later.
I recall a story about the Jesus and Mary Chain on tour that bassist Douglas Hart told me of how he, with a few of his skinny Glasgow mates in torn black jeans and leather jackets each clutching in his hand a can of some super-strength beer seated hunched in a bunch all together on hard wooden boards to raise up his eyes and realise they were in an out-rigger canoe riding the surf, flower garlands around their necks as huge Samoans dipped their oars into a transparent cerulean blue sea towards a South Sea Island beach of pure white sand fringed by waving coco-nut palms.
He had joined local band the Jesus and Mary chain in his home town and they were now on the Pacific leg of a world tour.
Such utter magical shifts may happen only to one in ten thousand, or one in a million but all can reach out to touch the hem of the garment, we can all be swept up and away by a band at a local concert or by a song on a jukebox, radio or iPod. In three or four chords of a rock and roll song we can all feel our pulses quicken with the beat, Hell! we can even play them! our spirits can soar with the melody.
When I was 14 my sister held her 19th birthday party in an old barn near our house in Surrey. I sat with her guests all clutching paper cups of cider and party-seven ale as a scrawny kid with long hair and an acoustic guitar ran through the canon of popular folk-rock and protest songs from Woody Guthries “My Land”, Bob Dylan’s “Blowing in The Wind” through Buddy Holly’s “Peggy Sue” to a stirring version of The Beatles’ “You’ve got to hide your love away” I can still recall the thrill and emotion shared around that barn and I still love all of the songs. Five years later that scrawny kid was calling himself Joe Strummer and was lead singer with The Clash
In the mid to late 70s a new generation of music lovers was growing up of which I was one. I lived in a squat (Although we actually paid rent – it was £9.00 per week for an entire house in Hove, Sussex) and didn’t have much interest in the products being churned out by an effete music industry. We would pick up vinyls in charity shops and car-boot fairs) I developed an interest in old juke-boxes and set about discovering original records to fill them up with. You could buy classic tunes for pennies.
The same generation was not interested in propping up the consumer culture by buying ready- made and packaged “Entertainment” It was a lot more fun and satisfying to start your own band or support local groups who had something relevant to say. Thus was born the “New-Wave” and “Punk” culture. Thanks partly to Malcolm McLaren’s genius adoption of the situationist philosophy Punk became the prominent genre but in fact there was a whole swathe of styles and types explored and exploited. The entire back-catalogue of music was rifled and re-invented
In April 1980 I started a shop “C.O.D.” (cash on delivery) at kensington Market, Kensington High St where there was a stronghold of fashion and music sub-cultures – some really great shops – Johnsons, Rock-a-Cha, Cuba. I would trawl Brick Lane Market on a Sunday before dawn looking for 50s and 60s clothes, records and paraphernalia on Saturday mornings I’d be at Swiss cottage Market or Kingsland Road Waste and at Portobello Road on a Friday.
There was a thriving club scene at that time spearheaded by Chris Sullivan, Steve Strange, Rusty Egan and a small tight coterie of “in the know” cool leaders of fashion – everybody knew everybody else at least by sight and the New Romantic crew, rockabillies and other types tussled with each other through design and retail, music and dance and across night- time London in a multitude of mushrooming night-clubs that appeared and disappeared with startling rapidity.
At that time vintage clothes and cars were being tossed out everywhere and the canny few who appreciated good quality design and style had a field day scooping up treasures.
The photographs here are of Brian Setzer’s “Stray Cats’” first British visit where I saw them at Gossips in Soho, Dingwalls and in Brighton. Buzz and the Flyers another New York band played Dingwalls in Camden and the Meteors the original Psycho-Billies from the U.K. played at the Marquee Club, Wardour St, Soho.
The term “Rock and Roll” was apparently first coined on American radio by controversial D.J. and alleged “Payola” perpetrator Alan Freed. Payola was a term describing the practice of bribing officials to exaggerate radio plays or record sales of songs in order to boost preferred recordings higher up the charts and its relevance at that time indicates the popularity and economic virility of popular music in the American marketplace during that era.
Rock and Roll had become a marketing, consumer wild card at the height of America’s consumer boom and economic explosion and was too vita to the countries prospects to be ignored yet it was a depraved disreputable unexpected and uncontrollable phenomenum based as it was on a variety of random factors. The second world war had boosted industrial production and fuelled an economic boom time amongst a hitherto unrecognised and unregulated market sector – the so-called teen-agers – young Americans who were for the first time emerging as an entirely new social force.
RADIO AND MUSIC ENTERED ITS FINEST PHASE. cheap mass media, artists considered beneath contempt the pre-war slump and recession meant that an insatiable thirst yearned to be slaked. An unlikely combination consisting of advances in technology had spawned amplification of music enabling two or three guys and their guitars to replace big bands America’s industrial heartland was built on the blue collar workers releasing steam in beer halls which without music would turn ugly and unprofitable so big bands in serried uniformed ranks directed by band leaders were required in order to provide musical backdrop, to achieve the volume to cover the shouts of massed drinkers there needed to be brass sections, it was a a mass, militaristic style set up that overnight was replaced by a mere handful of guys on better wages, less authority, and a creative free hand.At back of their culture was a wealth of poor mans, underdogs, black mans music the blues. CULTURE BLOSSOMS AND THRIVES IN CONDITIONS OF CROSS FERTILISATION AND WHITE BOYS SINGING BLACK SONGS INTRODUCED AN ESSENTIALLY TRANSGRESSIVE AND SUBVERSIVE VOICE THAT DEFINED THE C0NCERNS OF THAT GENERATION.
The Rock and Roll Museum 