On Aug 25, 2009, at 10:55 PM, Alan Rudy wrote:
> So, here's the question: Why are there no Rock and Roll standards
> like
> there are in Jazz, Blues and Folk?
There was a piece in last weekend's Financial Times by Elijah Wald arguing that it was all the doing of Mitch Miller, who ran Columbia's pop division starting in 1950. Well, Miller and technology - the development of the 45 and the LP. An excerpt:
> The most influential of these record auteurs was Mitch Miller, an
> oboe virtuoso who in 1950 became head of Columbia’s pop division.
> Miller produced hits the way Hollywood made films. Rather than
> simply recording a working band or performer, he would find a song
> he liked, select – or “discover” – a star to sing it, and hire
> unique combinations of instrumentalists to give it a distinctive,
> ear-catching flavour. Those combinations could be bizarrely
> imaginative. For example, in 1951 Miller took a song based on a
> passage from Christopher Marlowe’s Dido, Queen of Carthage and an
> Armenian wedding melody, backed it with a harpsichord playing boogie-
> woogie, and handed it to a jazz singer named Rosemary Clooney. “Come
> On-a My House” stayed at the top of the pop charts for eight weeks.
>
> Miller’s artists could not replicate the sound of their records at
> live shows but that was becoming less important. And as records were
> freed from the limitations of live performances, unexpected sounds
> and styles began to infiltrate the hit parade. Miller reached the
> upper echelons of the US pop charts with songs from Britain, Italy,
> France, Portugal, Denmark, South Africa and Rhodesia. His
> instrumental palette included everything from symphonic string
> sections to flamenco and electric steel guitars, French horn
> quartets, and bagpipes. As other producers followed his lead,
> studios became creative centres rather than simply places to record.
>
> Rock ’n’ roll at first seemed to buck this trend. Bill Haley, Chuck
> Berry, Little Richard and the early Elvis Presley recorded with
> their touring bands, and their records captured the same energetic
> sounds they presented on stage. Some old-line music marketers
> sneered at the young rockers’ amateurism but many hailed the style
> for rejuvenating the live music business and getting a new
> generation out dancing.
>
> For a few years, that optimism seemed justified. The rock ’n’ roll
> revolution was driven as much by dancing as by music, and by the
> early 1960s the twist had spawned a wave of increasingly free-form
> dances and inspired a last great wave of live dance bands. Many of
> those groups were enthusiastic teenagers working for subsistence
> wages, but from Dick Dale and the Deltones in the beachside
> ballrooms of southern California to the Beatles on Hamburg’s
> Reeperbahn, they churned out loud, rhythmically powerful music, four
> to eight hours a night, seven nights a week.
>
> Even the rock ’n’ roll scene, though, increasingly favoured studio
> productions that could not be replicated by a club combo. In 1959
> Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller backed the Drifters with a full string
> section, opening the door for the lavish orchestrations of Phil
> Spector. And if Motown’s Berry Gordy lacked Spector’s bombastic
> pretension, he also thought primarily in terms of distinctive
> singles rather than consistent live acts.
>
> When the Beatles hit the US, they were still playing in the basic
> dance-band style exemplified by their cover of the Isley Brothers’
> “Twist and Shout”. But their arrival coincided with the first wave
> of discothèques, which proved that it was possible to attract crowds
> of young dancers with nothing more than a sound system and a savvy
> DJ. By the later 1960s, dance clubs were no longer expected to have
> bands. By the 1970s most dancers would have been disappointed to
> hear a live group rather than a club mix.
>
> So when the Beatles quit touring in 1966, it was less a
> revolutionary act than an acknowledgment that the world had changed.
> They complained that their music couldn’t be heard over the crowd
> noise but that was beside the point. The screaming teens had come to
> see the men who made their favourite records and didn’t need to hear
> what was happening on stage because they knew those records by heart.
>
> So in terms of the audience’s expectations, the video game Rock Band
> has it right. By the time the Beatles appeared at Budokan they were
> the roadshow for their records, and if they didn’t match the sound
> of those records, that can reasonably be considered a flaw.