I’m not so sure that it was. Rather I’d think it was greeted kind of like eminem ten years ago. A handful of people may have spoken out against it but from the majority of mainstream commentators in this country the response was either an enthusiastic thumbs up or else a shrug and a yawn. The version of rock and roll history displayed in Grease and other suchlike entertainments simply didn’t happen.
My grandparents on my dad’s side spent the 50’s and early 60’s campaigning for Darlington Hoopes and later organizing a group of pro-communist professors at UCSD, so I’d guess they were among the ones who could only wish that rock and roll was a communist plot. (But in reality I never heard them mention it.) My grandparents on the my mother’s side lived in East Germany, where western music was either illegal or impossible to get.
My parents were teenagers when rock n roll hit. My dad was never really into it - he liked Jazz and blues and country. My mom was crazy for Elvis, though, and lots of other rock. My maternal grandmother, born in 1921, thought the rock music her kids was listening to was fun and liked to dance to it, though I’m not sure she ever bought records. She spent her money on country, mostly.
I don’t know about my Grandparents, but both my mom and dad liked country music, even when they were young. I think it was a little too fast-paced for them. Maybe not now though…
My grandma had record albums – 78’s in paper sleeves in actual albums. I remember that she had Bing Crosby, Frankie Laine, Guy Mitchell, and Little Orly – oh, and Little Toot. "Little Toot was just a tug, a happy harbor tug . . . "
She never commented on rock 'n roll. When the radio was on, it was tuned to her “stories” or to the news, so maybe she wasn’t exposed.
Mom wanted to be hip. I don’t know if she really liked rock, but she said she did, although all of her tapes were Charley Pride and Hank Williams.
But me. In grade school, 1955 or thereabouts, I had a crush on my music teacher. He hated rock 'n roll, and I got an A from him on an essay about how “uncivilized” it was. I felt bad about lying though, because I was a huge Elvis fan.
Since I was born in 1944, my grandparents really aren’t involved in this. My parents were OK with it as they bought me a “record player” for my Christmas in 1958. I also got five 45s with it. Chantilly Lace (pretty racy looking back). Elvis-Hound Dog. Purple People Eater. Blueberry Hill Fats Domino. I don’t remember the fifth. Pretty interesting grouping for parents who were Southern Baptist(not the hard shell kind) and rather moral.
Obviously they didn’t consider it the Devil’s Music.
My parents were in their 40’s when rock and roll hit, and my sisters were in their teens. About the only culture clash I can remember was when my father would occasionally yell “Turn down that damn noise.”
Nothing about devil’s music, or the decline of civilization or even jungle music. Just too much noise.
My grandparents were born in the 1890s and 1901. The only comments I recall are from my maternal grandparents. He was born in 1893 and she in 1901. He didn’t really say much about the music but he would stay up late to watch the Tonight Show if Cher was going to be on (this was in the '70s) because he thought “that is a beautiful she-beast”. His wife, my grandmother, thought it a pity that Elvis “has to sing that loud and ugly music when he’s got such a pretty voice when he sings gospel” or other real music.
I don’t recall my paternal grandmother ever making a comment about rock. The only modern day (for the time) thing I remember her expressing opinions on were STAR WARS (which she saw in the theater with me and liked) and various TV shows. (The old folks when I was a kid were all in their 50s and 60s the first time they saw TV and you couldn’t drag them away from it even if they didn’t like what was on it.) Grandmother’s demon of choice for the young was drugs and hippies and she frequently warned us not to “go off and paint yourself blue and smoke in marijuana and live in trees” (actual statement- not sure where the painting yourself blue living in trees part came from).
Neither of my parents, born in the 20s and 30s, were rock fans. I think they looked upon it sort of how I look upon rap, which is to say they found some of it catchy and some of it disturbing and most of it ‘meh’ but in general it just wasn’t their bag.
It’s funny - my dad was born in 31 and my mom in 41, and I mentioned tonight at dinner (synchronicity - this just came up in another thread) that when the Beatles were on the Ed Sullivan Show, 40% of the entire American public watched, and I asked if they’d seen it. My mom said she wasn’t sure because she’d seen it replayed so often that she had no idea if she saw it when it was broadcast or not. My dad?
“Well, I didn’t watch it.”
He refused to elaborate. I suppose the scary long hair?
My Grandad, born in 1906, helped usher in all that Debbil music; he was a musician in Hollywood and LA, playing Sax and clarinet in jazz bands during that great time when music was having an amazing cultural hob nob melting. So, he had a real good experience with all kinds of musicians, and looked at it from a musical perspective.
I never remember him, or my grandmother, also musically adept, as trashing any rock and roll, they were kind of ho-hum about it, just a generational difference, not melodious enough… I do remember that they rolled their eyes and laughed at Lawrence Welk because he was hokey and rather simple musically.
Sigh, I really miss my tremendously astute grandparents. :(.
My mom’s mom loved that Elvis, he was such a nice boy who sang gospel. Clearly very religious. She would comment on that whenever she heard his music, even if it was rock. I think she thought he was a gospel and country singer who occasionally performed rock songs because that’s what the kids liked.
On my dad’s side, they weren’t native English speakers and as far as I could tell, were completely oblivious to the entire concept of rock music, maybe even American music in general. Pretty much everything about their American kids and grandkids perplexed them in a benign way, I don’t think they separated the music from their overall perception of the amusing oddness of life in the US.
See, this is going to be a weird thread. Because when you say “grandparents”, that’s the same generation as my “parents”. Or Ronald C. Semone (he’s the guy here who mentioned seeing the Ink Spots live in '48!) is his own generation…
But my parents (born in '20s) hated Rock and Roll.
And most folk, too. Rock --and “Protest Music”-- was seen as part of the Communist plan to soften the minds of American Youth. Seriously, they would tell of how in their day, college kids sang patriotic songs and had good morals. And fought creeping socialism.
I remember my dad asking “You really call this stuff music?!?” and I was listening to “Horse With No Name”. And, no, he hadn’t noticed the bad rhyming. Now if only he’d said “‘Ain’t no one for to give you no shame’? WhatheHALE? ‘Plants and trees and rocks and stuff’? Whuttintar-NATIONis this folderol?!?”…
