So it’s not possible for an “unplugged” version of a rock song to rock?
Fats Domino, Little Richard, and Jerry Lee Lewis would like to have a word…
“Unplugged” in the MTV sense just means acoustics with contact pickups, not unamplified.
IMO, an unamplified acoustic is not going to rock.
Rock&roll is not the same as the later rock music. It may rock, but it’s not rock that’s rocking, IYKWIM.
All you people, you know the blues got a soul
Well this is a story, a story never been told
Well you know the blues got pregnant
And they named the baby Rock & Roll
“It’s the beat, Dick”
Damn, what a great question! I’ll have to say that rock is something that you’ll know it when you hear it. It’s impossible to find one definition that encompasses all the different variations of the genre. Kinda like ice cream? There’s tons of different flavors, but it’s all ice cream.
Except for Christopher Cross. He’s more like frozen yogurt.
An amplified acoustic guitar is still a different instrument from an electric guitar, though. And “amplified” is a difficult concept to pin down: If a band records a song in a studio (with microphones and recording equipment, of course, but no speakers), and you take that recording and play it on your sound system at a lower volume than the live band would have had with no amplifier, is that still “amplified”?
“Suspicious Minds” and “Margaritaville” are the only ones on that list that I’m familiar with, and I don’t think of either of those as a rock song.
I know we argue all the time about what the first rock, or rock’n’ roll, song was. Which leads to the influences and the predecessors and the almosts or could-bes or the close misses. Who really knows?
Ed Ward. The History of Rock & Roll, Part 1, 1920-1963.
OK, I may be biased because by sheer coincidence I’m reading it right now. And reviewers on Amazon caught him in some errors. Meh. I’ve read tons of histories of rock and this one seems deeper and more comprehensive than the others. Ward wisely never pinpoints a song that starts rock, although he stops for a minute in a chapter titled “Rock & Roll Is Born … Maybe” at May 1955 to say wow. “Rock Around the Clock” topped the charts. Chess found Chuck Berry and recorded “Maybellene.” Fats Domino finally got a hit with “Ain’t It a Shame.” And young Elvis toured down to Florida and met Mae Axton. A hundred pages into the book and finally a white performer. That’s the history of rock & roll.
Also note the dates for volume 1. What happened in 1964 you might ask? Rock was born. That’s my story, too.
As I’ve noted before, the music that is now considered to be more “hard core rock” seems, to me, to track back more to Dick Dale and The Ventures.
The music that is now considered to be more “pop music” tracks back more to the Beatles and Elvis.
Sure. But you’re still going to get some of the distortions and other amplification effects that make something “rockier” than mere acoustic - look at Unplugged Nirvana or Pearl Jam, that isn’t just a straight acoustic sound.
It’s what I point to when I say “This is a rock song” (paraphrasing Damon Knight).
As Samuel R. Delany pointed out (about SF, though it applies widely), that’s the only definition that includes everything you consider a rock song while excluding everything you don’t consider one.
Further complicating matters is that how a song is performed varies and can affect how much it rocks. I’ve always thought of Sweet Caroline as a silly pop song, but I once watched a video of a concert performance wherein that song was made to rock. (I think, but I am not certain, it was from a video exhibit at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.)
To me, “rock” is a separate scope from “rock and roll”, the former being a large generality and the latter being a much more specific sub-genre. All of the songs in the OP are ‘rock’ to me, but none of them are ‘rock and roll’. Even back in the 50s/60s at the heyday of ‘rock and roll’, there was still the need to break things smaller into doowop, surf, soul, etc.
The Stones rocked out pretty good with an acoustic on Street Fighting Man.
The electric guitar is essentially just a successor to the saxophone; a solo instrument whose sound can be distorted by over powering/blowing it. The advantage of the guitar is that it can be played while also singing.
Once microphones or other electronics are involved, it is trivial to distort anything.
The discussion regarding “rock” vs “rock ‘n’ roll” brings to mind the bathouse scene in Quadrophenia where Jimmy the Mod and Kevin the Rocker have a Be Bop A Lula vs You Really Got Me sing-off.
The electric bass guitar is still an electric guitar.
Keef plays an acoustic guitar on Street Fighting Man.