Saying “The Beatles saved rock” may be a bit over the top, but there’s no question they injected it with a vitality, freshness and newness that sent it into what I believe can be objectively argued was the most creative and dynamic few years in the history of the genre.
Still, stating that 1959-1964 (the year The Beatles hit the States; it would be 1963 in Europe) was a vast wasteland, as was common for many years, is inaccurate. Only those who feel music can’t qualify as rock ‘n’ roll unless it’s brutally savage would say such a thing. In fact, rock ‘n’ roll has always been a fairly big tent, able to encompass a variety of worthy styles. Some who produced worthy music in that era have already been mentioned; to them I would add Roy Orbison, Del Shannon and a few others who played it closer to rock’s emotional bone than others.
No question there was a lot of dreck — but genres such as nascent soul, the grittier Brill Building material, girl group, frat rock, surf, etc. brought forth a lot of good and lasting music in the '59-'63 era.
One of the key things The Beatles did was to expand the musical palette greatly in terms of what you could do in a hard-rockin’ song. There were acts prior to them that rocked pretty hard, but they did so almost exclusively in the I-IV-V mode. The Beatles’ chord changes and harmonies were really quite revolutionary, and they freed up those who followed in their wake to work beyond those three basic chords.
More generally, they took the best that various styles of rock and R&B had offered up to that point and combined it in new and exciting ways, presenting it back to an America that may have forgotten many of its original virtues.
I agree that it got young people (and not just screaming girl fans) to get into rock ‘n’ roll at a level that hadn’t happened in some time. It may have been somewhat cool to be in a band pre-Beatles, but the coolness factor shot up several degrees once they hit. This encouraged many to loosen up from the previous three-chord strictures, put in harmonies where before there might have not been many — and crucially, to begin writing their own songs.
My wife teaches the Beatles class at UCLA. So I’m not an expert on the Beatles … I just live with one.
In 1963 rock 'n roll was generally viewed as a teenage fad that was already past its expiration date. Everybody expected “the kids” to move on to something else. They didn’t expect rock to come roaring back with a vengeance and dominate pop music.
The only instruments kids in my town were playing before 1964 was through the school – marching band and orchestra. The only strings were on violins and cellos – no guitars.
I was surprised to read on my town’s FB page that a whole bunch of kids younger than me were in bands in the mid to late 60’s. One of them is in Iowa’s rock & roll hall of fame. But when I was in school, through 1963, all the music played at dances came from record players. AFAIK, no one even thought they could play in a rock band.
Viewed by whom as a teenage fad that was already past its expiration date?
I’m not aware of there being any steep decline in the sales of records to teenagers in 1963 or the years leading up to it.
It’s true that some “kids” as they exited their teen years in the early 60s gravitated to folk music, as they searched for music with greater lyrical substance. But folk didn’t, to my knowledge, make great inroads in the 13 to 18-year-old market — where rock ‘n’ roll, despite being diluted, remained of interest.
I don’t see anything that tells me that, had The Beatles not hit, rock would have shriveled up and died. It’s entirely possible, for example, that younger folk musicians would have tired of acoustic guitars and experimented with electrics even if The Beatles hadn’t come along.
It might not have happened in the same way, but I believe something would have happened.
Thankfully, it happened in just the way it did. And one consequence that perhaps your wife is hinting at is that, post-Beatles, rock remained of vital interest as teens moved into their 20s, 30s…and (ahem!) 60s.
It would be interesting to study what percentage of kids who were, say, in their upper teens in 1955, had jettisoned rock ‘n’ roll from their lives by 1963 or earlier, and what percentage remained interested as they put their teen years behind them.
As a member of the group who were teenagers in the mid-to-late 1950’s I can attest to the fact that the music I was hearing in the college dorm and in other kids’ apartments in those days was only a small percentage of what was known as rock-and-roll in those days. Rock, per se, became the name of a subgenre of that music later in the 60’s. Woodstock and thereabout.
I remember hearing some folk, some blues, some R&B, and a lot of classical and “generic Pop” like Andy Williams, Johnny Mathis, Frank Sinatra, and a budding Barbra Streisand, not to mention show tunes, movie soundtracks and the new fad Stereophonic Sound.
There’s a whole category of Space age pop that I would consider at least as representative of the tastes of my cohort as Rock and its offshoots.
I was working in a shop in the early 60’s that sold stereo equipment and records and I can remember well the day some pimple-faced kid came in and asked if we had any Beatles music and I had to say that not only did we not, but I wasn’t sure what he was even talking about. Needless to say, I became more than a little aware within the next few months. They were like a bombshell!
Everybody. Including The Beatles, who expected to have a group life of five years and then do something else. Not solo careers as the world’s most famous people; something other than music or at least a band.
Music had no afterlife in those days. There weren’t oldies stations or oldies tours. You made a hit, got famous, rode it into the ground, and then became a car salesman. The executives assumed this was the only way it could be, and the artists had to agree because there wasn’t another model to follow.
This is the key point. Rock ‘n’ roll was assumed to be high school music and nothing more. Kids did grow out of it. It was certainly not cool to like rock in college. Maybe some r&b or blues groups, but not RnR. That was for kids. Teens groups had no continuity, which is why artists like Bobby Darin and Ray Charles changed styles to appeal to older audiences as a career survival move.
What changed with The Beatles is that their music evolved and deepened every single year so that they kept their audience as it grew older. The older audience started demanding that other groups evolve and grow as well. The Beach Boys got this perfectly; the Four Seasons and the Ventures didn’t. Dylan led the folk movement into rock; Miles Davis led jazz there. You could grow old with Rock. A separate track of teen music evolved and is obviously still with us. Few of the artists who were famous for a time - Donny Osmond was as big as anybody in the world - made the transition to adult music.
That’s the pathway the music industry might have been stuck on. Not that Rock would have shriveled and died, but that the pre-Beatles pattern would have lingered. Always good music by some, always some great songs and lasting hits, but short and trivial careers dependent on each new generation of teens.
My parents graduated from high school and began college in 1955 which is considered year 1 of “the rock ‘n’ roll era.” A few years later, they left college, got full-time jobs, and got married. Although they liked artists like Elvis, Johnny Cash, and the Everly Brothers, a lot of pop music produced during the following eight years seemed more tuned to the tastes and concerns of teenagers so they never really got into to it that much. They weren’t offended by early rock like many of their elders but did think a lot of it was just kid stuff. They were more into artists like Sinatra, Dean Martin, and Nat King Cole–music for adults with marriages, jobs, houses, and (soon) kids.
The Hamster King: In 1963 rock 'n roll was generally viewed as a teenage fad that was already past its expiration date.
Me: Viewed by whom as a teenage fad that was already past its expiration date?
Two entirely different concepts under discussion here. An individual artist saying he can’t imagine his/her/their career lasting more than a few years is not the same as saying rock ‘n’ roll as a whole was not long for the world, which was how I interpreted THK’s statement.
Whatever one might think of the quality of rock ‘n’ roll in the 1959-1963, there was no indication that as a genre it was on its last legs.
Sure. But new artists (using the term generously!) came along to replace the old, and the genre persisted.
We’re in agreement about this point. I said as much in a previous post. I would add that this change worked in both directions. Not only did appreciation of rock continue into adulthood instead of ending at the teens…I would argue that rock played a pivotal role in extending what is generally thought of as youth.
Used to be when you hit 21 (or maybe even 18), you were a full-fledged adult and were expected to leave any lingering traces of your youth behind you. Post-Beatles, that divide moved forward a number of years.
For some, it more or less disappeared altogether. As Carole King and Gerry Goffin put it in “Goin’ Back,” “thinking young and growing older is no sin.” I always say that for decades now I’ve done a very convincing impression of being a fully functional adult. But it’s a scam. Inside — especially when I strap on my Rickenbacker and make it chime — it still feels the same way it did when I first bought it at age 22.
Skiffle was a big deal in Britain (but not America, although, like rock, it was originally an American form of music) during this period. Many, probably nearly all, of the musicians of what Americans call the British invasion, including The Beatles, began in skiffle bands. (Skiffle was easy to play, and the instruments were very cheap.)
By contrast, British rock and roll before The Beatles (and the Liverpool scene from which they emerged) was almost entirely horrible crap, the only real exceptions I can think of being the very early Cliff Richard & the Drifters/Shadows (when they made “Move It”) and Johnny Kidd & the Pirates (of “Shaking All Over”). Otherwise, rock in Britain meant American records, wannabe twats like Tommy Steele, and balladeers with fake rock ‘n’ roll names, like Adam Faith and Marty Wilde. “Move It,” the first real British rock record, came out in the summer of 1958, and the lyrics were already talking about rock dying. If the skiffle musicians had not grown up to rockers (which may have been the plan all along), it very well may have done.
The man who saved rock: Lonnie Donegan. (I wonder how many people here have even heard of him.)
As I read this thread, I can’t help but wonder if we were able to poll the folks that were teens in the 1920s, we would see some of the same type of reverent responses directed at Louis Armstrong and Jazz. There seems to be a bit of ‘It happened during MY generation - therefore, it’s more important than anything else in history’ going on here in regard to the Beatles. Please, don’t get me wrong. The Beatles were a major ‘direction changer’. But, back up and look with a wider angled lens at the time line.
The Beatles and Rock benefitted from a convergence of the technologies in the music industry, both business and electronic. They were innovative at exactly the right time for it to matter.
There is a cycle where a new form of music breaks out. The record companies are blindsided by it and it takes several years to catch up. Then they co-opt it, take it over, bury it and are in charge again. Then things settle down to boring blandness for a while.
So in the 1950s you had the first wave of rock and roll. The record companies were really caught off guard. But after a while they took control again. Then the “teen idols”, dance songs, etc., dominated the charts again.
Then the 2nd rock and roll wave hit in the early 60s. This was huge. It took a very long time before the record companies got control again. Early 70s.
(Punk came along, but it never took over like rock did.)
Then the MTV stuff happened in the 80s. No name bands from any which where suddenly had hits because they had weird videos. The record companies had to play catch up again. By the mid/late 80s they were in charge again. Blandness ensued.
The 90s. College radio went mainstream. Alternative rock became big. They took that over with generic pseudo-alternative bands. It’s dead.
Behind all this, for 30 years, there’s been rap/hiphop doing its thing. Bursting out here and there but not really dominating like rock did in the 60s. But it has its cycles as well and for the same reason.
Note that there have been just two independent number one hits: Stay by Lisa Loeb (the 90s wave) and Thrift Shop by Macklemore and Ryan Lewis w/Wanz (the current rap wave).
We are way overdue for a rock-genre wave.
So, yes, things were really quiet 1959-1963. The record companies were in charge. For some reason they like it like that.
