The Beatles Destroyed Rock 'n' Roll???

BooksReviewsElijahWald

How the Beatles Destroyed Rock n Roll: An Alternative History of American Popular Music

Oxford University Press

$24.95

Amazon.com Product Description (ISBN 0195341546, Hardcover)

"There are no definitive histories," writes Elijah Wald, in this provocative reassessment of American popular music, "because the past keeps looking different as the present changes." Earlier musical styles sound different to us today because we hear them through the musical filter of other styles that came after them, all the way through funk and hiphop.

As its blasphemous title suggests, How the Beatles Destroyed Rock 'n' Roll rejects the conventional pieties of mainstream jazz and rock history. Rather than concentrating on those traditionally favored styles, the book traces the evolution of popular music through developing tastes, trends and technologies--including the role of records, radio, jukeboxes and television --to give a fuller, more balanced account of the broad variety of music that captivated listeners over the course of the twentieth century. Wald revisits original sources--recordings, period articles, memoirs, and interviews--to highlight how music was actually heard and experienced over the years. And in a refreshing departure from more typical histories, he focuses on the world of working musicians and ordinary listeners rather than stars and specialists. He looks for example at the evolution of jazz as dance music, and rock 'n' roll through the eyes of the screaming, twisting teenage girls who made up the bulk of its early audience. Duke Ellington, Benny Goodman, Frank Sinatra, Elvis Presley, Chuck Berry, and the Beatles are all here, but Wald also discusses less familiar names like Paul Whiteman, Guy Lombardo, Mitch Miller, Jo Stafford, Frankie Avalon, and the Shirelles, who in some cases were far more popular than those bright stars we all know today, and who more accurately represent the mainstream of their times.

Written with verve and style, How the Beatles Destroyed Rock 'n' Roll shakes up our staid notions of music history and helps us hear American popular music with new ears.

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The Popmatter writes...

Do not be drawn in by the title. Elijah Wald, the author of several books including a fine study of Robert Johnson and the blues, tells us that when he was a child he loved Meet the Beatles, but from Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, on had no interest in their music. Turns out this book is not at all about the Beatles, who are mentioned in the introduction and then barely again for over 200 pages.

Wald's one-line thesis is that the Beatles were great while they were playing songs you could dance to, songs that drew upon and paid tribute to black artists such as Bo Diddley, Muddy Waters, and Chubby Checker, but that they lost him when they turned rock into art and experimentation, and created a new musical aesthetic.

The transformation is worth exploring, but Wald is not up to the task. Doing so would require a thorough investigation of the '60s, a meditation on generational shifts, and, most of all, an investigation into drug culture and the great metamorphosis of rock 'n' roll.

Wald provides none of this. Instead he surveys the history of popular music and its various genres and sub genres: swing, jive, jazz, boogie-woogie, R&B, rock, folk, country, western, pop, rockabilly and on and on and on. If the world is divided into lumpers and splitters, those who see forests and those who see trees, Wald is in love with every branch of the ramifying bush that is popular music.

This is not a bad thing, and readers will certainly learn a great deal about artists and songs popular in their day but of which little trace remains. Exhibit number one for Wald is Paul Whiteman, the "Jazz King" of the '20s whose career stretched into the '50s. In a sense, Wald yearns for Whiteman to be as venerated as Duke Ellington or Benny Goodman if for no other reason than because he was more popular at one time.

"Listening with modern ears," Wald observes, "it is virtually impossible to hear how fresh and exciting the Whiteman band must have sounded in the early 1920s." Wald laments the loss, but he does not analyze how jazz came to be seen predominantly as an African American tradition to modern ears.

Wald does raise important questions about how taste changes. His scatter-shot history discusses such topics as recording technologies, the locations where fans heard live music and danced to it, the role of radio and then television, female audiences, and the relationship between rock and race.

He is especially animated on this last issue. Although he does not discuss such important work as Craig Werner's A Change is Gonna Come: Music, Race & the Soul of America,  Wald moves away from the standard line that sees early rock 'n' roll as the appropriation of black music, the "black roots/white fruits" thesis. With Elvis Presley and Carl Perkins, Wald notes, "it ceased to be possible to describe the scene simply in terms of black originators and white imitators."

And yet he sees rock's turn toward experimentation and art as a repudiation of dance beats and a break from black performers who, according to Wald, "were thinking in different terms from the new rock groups." That assertion may come as news to Isaac Hayes, Arthur Lee, Stevie Wonder, and Jimi Hendrix, among others, who served with many white counterparts as originators. The question of race and rock is essential, but it is an issue that requires much closer analysis than Wald provides.

The lack of depth is related to the excessive detail and repetition that plagues the book, and Wald seems to sense it. "By now some readers are probably rolling their eyes," he asserts at one point. It certainly is challenging when, on a single page, the following names appear: Bill Anderson, Skeeter Davis, Marty Robbins, Jimmy Dean, Lorne Greene, the Beach Boys, Acker Bilk, David Rose, Lawrence Welk, the Trashmen, the Rip Chords, Jan and Dean, the Ventures, Dick Dale, and Duane Eddy.

It's unfortunate that Wald stopped listening to the Beatles once they shifted artistic gears. It's like readers who only bought Herman Melville's south sea romances, or movie-goers who only saw Woody Allen's slapstick comedies. And then there are those fans who abandoned Bob Dylan once he grabbed an electric guitar.

If, as Bruce Springsteen suggested, Elvis freed our bodies and Dylan freed our minds, then the Beatles did both and in the process took aim at our souls. It was Dylan who first introduced the Fab Four to marijuana, and it was the drug culture of the '60s more than any other single factor that forever changed what we heard and how we listened.

In 2004, Brian Burton, also known as Danger Mouse, remixed Jay-Z's The Black Album with the Beatles White Album to create The Grey Album. The Beatles thereby became part of a new groove which in turn allowed us to hear the group in fresh ways. Come to think of it, in their time they sampled and rapped and experimented with rhythms and sounds. This gives me an idea for a book. Think I'll call it How the Beatles Invented Hip Hop. 

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Reflections from the American press...

"I couldn't put it down. It nailed me to the wall, not bad for a grand sweeping in-depth exploration of American Music with not one mention of myself. Wald's book is suave, soulful, ebullient and will blow out your speakers."--Tom Waits

"Wald is a meticulous researcher, a graceful writer and a committed contrarian... an impressive accomplishment."--New York Times Book Review

"A complex, fascinating and long-overdue response to decades of industry-driven revisionism."--Jonny Whiteside, LA Weekly

"It's an ambitious project, but Wald's casual narrative style and eye for a juicy quote give it a lightness that even a novice to pop, rock, or jazz history can appreciate... The title is appropriate: This is a provocative book, in all the right ways."--The Onion AV Club

"Wald is a sharp, fair critic eager to right the record on popular music... deepens the appreciation of American popular music."--Boston Globe

"This is a debatable premise... you don't have to agree with it to admire this book... It is as an alternative, corrective history of American music that Wald's book is invaluable. It forces us to see that only by studying the good with the bad--and by seeing that the good and bad can't be pulled apart--can we truly grasp the greatness of our cultural legacy."-- Malcolm Jones, Newsweek

"A serious treatise on the history of recorded music, sifted through his filter as musician, scholar, and fan... It's a brave and original work that certainly delivers."-Christian Science Monitor

"A smart, inclusive celebration of mainstream stars, such as 1920s bandleader Paul Whiteman and the Fab Four, who introduced jazz, blues, and other roughhewn musical forms to mass audiences."--AARP Magazine

"A powerfully provocative look at popular music and its impact on America."--Dallas Morning News

"As catchy and compelling as a great pop single, this revisionist retelling is provocative, profound and utterly necessary... Clearly the product of years of passionate research, it's so rife with references and surprising anecdotes that it's potentially overwhelming, but Wald makes a superlative tour guide-- frank, funny and generous but judicious with his inclusions-- and his book is a beguiling, blasphemous breeze."--Philadelphia City Paper

"Elijah Wald's provocative, meticulously researched new book, How the Beatles Destroyed Rock 'n' Roll: An Alternative History of American Popular Music, turns the stock rock-and-roll narratives on their head."--Very Short List

"Brilliant and provocative... the most challenging and head-clearing history of American popular music to be published in decades."--The Buffalo News

"Wald explains musical and recording techniques and sociological phenomena in an engaging style accessible to a wide range of readers. Throughout, he makes a compelling case for why the figures most historians have disregarded or footnoted need to be considered in order to understand the totality of American popular music. This is an ideal companion to the plethora of standard histories available. Highly recommended." --Library Journal starred review

"Wald's arguments are as nuanced as his scope is wide, which makes this a fascinating and useful volume--required reading for any fan of pop music."--Memphis Flyer

"Fascinating... It's hard to imagine any American music buff coming away from this book without a fresh perspective and an overwhelming desire to seek out Paul Whiteman CDs. Highly recommended."--San Jose Mercury News

"Wald's book may be the literary equivalent of revisionist Civil War histories which tell the war through the eyes of soldiers rather than the generals, for he highlights how consumers actually heard and experienced music over the years, whether as screaming teeny-boppers watching Dick Clark's Bandstand or swing afficionados dancing to Glenn Miller at the Roseland."--HistoryWire.com

"Walds eminently readable book is a scholarly, provocative and opinionated account of the history of pop music from Sousa to the Stones, from genteel parlor piano recitals to arena rock spectacles."--Kansas City Star

"A bracing, inclusive look at the dramatic transformation in the way music was produced and listened to during the 20th century... One of those rare books that aims to upend received wisdom and actually succeeds."--Kirkus Reviews

"Some of the smartest historiography I've ever read. The examples and turns of phrase sometimes make me laugh out loud, and nearly every page overturns another outmoded assumption. Wald just calls it like he sees it and transforms everything as a result."--Susan McClary, MacArthur Fellow and author of Feminine Endings: Music, Gender, and Sexuality

"This is a ground-breaking book, a muscular revisionist account that will get people thinking quite differently about the history of pop music. I've learned much from it and admire the writing style that is so light on its feet, lucid and elegant."--Bernard Gendron, author of Between Montmartre and the Mudd Club: Popular Music and the Avant Garde

Happy reading!!!

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