Roots of rock'n'roll

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Andrew Hornung reviews 'The Sound Charlie Gillett (Souvenir Press £6.95).

American MORE than a decade after its first publication and several years after becoming unavailable in British bookshops, Charlie Gillett's treasure store of a book, 'The Sound of the City", has been republished in a revised and updated form.

The present work covers the nearly thirty years between the end of World War Two and the early 1970s, concentrating -because it is the history of rock music — on the period following 1953, when Bill Haley and the Comets socked out their first hit, "Crazy, Man, Crazy"

There is a lot to disagree with in Gillett's book - not least the title! - but not so much as to diminish the dazzle of the historical account. It shimmers with thousands of factual details concerning artists, producers, writers, labels as well as shifts in taste, production techniques, commercial organisation, stylistic devices and subcultural values.

Above all, however, it is a book about the music itself. It is written with sociological imagination. But it is neither a sociology of the music industry nor one of those rock sociologies in which the music itself makes only an occasional guest appearance to illustrate a point - and then in discussion about the shape of the lyric, and not of the musical sound or the sensation it produces.

Gillett sometimes fails to set an adequate social backdrop to what he is describing: what he provides, however - and what most social backdrop artists fail to offer - is a breathtakingly knowledgable survey of the music itself.

In a sense, the weaknesses of the book can be said to be in its political naivete. Not only are IT'S pretty shameful, I suppose - as much an offence against left wing solidarity as it is a capitulation to celluloid machismo.

Perhaps it's a confession of stark cultural poverty. And it's not something I'm proud of. But the truth is that I like John Wayne.

Not the right-wing friend of arch witch-hunter Senator Joe McCarthy and gung-ho American chauvinist - I was arrested picketing his Vietnam war propaganda movie, "The Green Berets' . I suppose it's the character I've watched playing himself in dozens of movies over the last 30 years - in marvellous John Ford Westerns like 'She wore a yellow ribbon' and 'The Searchers'; in Ford's picture postcard Ireland as 'The Quiet Man', and if many others until his last movie in 1976, "The Shootist', shown recently on TV.

Wayne was the subject of the first of Barry Norman's new series on "The Hollywood Greats'. They grow on you, these Hollywood greats, especially if they get to you young.

TV movies keep the attachments alive and fresh, though it is sometimes eerie to skip from movie to movie and decade w decade accompanying the same actor (Bette Davies recently, for example) from youth to middle political events absent from it, •'The Sound of informed by a heroic indies" -dent record labe liberating guerri almost defeated ollywood' Mick Ackersley reviews Barry Norman's 'The Hollywood Greats' (BBC 1, Mondays 9.55pm)

age and beyond.

Wayne's career spanned five decades, beginning ^ with Bwesterns in the '30s. Ford's 'Stagecoach' made him a star in 1939 and he remained 'up there' for four decades, amongst the highest paid and most popular film actors - or, better perhaps, film personalities.

Norman traced the way that the man, a mere actor with no chance to show whether he could be heroic or not, grew indistinguishable from his own screen persona, portraying the great American capitalist virtues of the rugged individual.

He saw himself as the embodiment of 'Americanism' , and a guardian of its values.

I had thought otherwise, but Norman — whom Wayne once called a 'pinko liberal' — says he wasn't himself a witchhunter during the McCarthy period. He did think McCarthy was 'a great American' who had been the victim of a witch-hunt by the pinko liberals!

He starred in a lousy little early '50s movie, 'Big Jim MacClaine', , which glorified the hunt for Commie agents and spies and obliquely paid its homage to almost totally but much of the City" is vision of the - the indepenils - as the lla force that the regular LONDON Big Joe Turner army of musical imperialism. There are elements of truth in this view, but it is vastly oversimplitied The collapse of the smaller record companies during the depression in the 1930s; the near-monopoly ove i song-writ'Big Joe McCartny'.

To be fair, 'Big Jim MacClaine' and 'The Green Berets' were formula movies. The enemy in either case could have just as well been 'Jap spies' 'Jap' solders in the jungle. Wayne's problem in 1968 was that many Americans were refusing to see Vietnam in the pattern of World War 2 propaganda movies.

Since Wayne's death in 1979, they have put up statues to him in many places in America - to the Wayne of the silver screen, in stylised cowboy gear, personifying 'Americanism'. Before he died Congress struck a special medal and presented it to him, inscribed, *John Wayne, American'.

Norman showed film of the Congressional Committee which decided to do it hearing a plea from Wayne's 'friend and costar' , Maureen O'Hara - with the red hair and residual Irish accent - who suggested the inscription, her voice breaking in tears as she said it.

Norman's second 'Hollywood Great' was Henry Fonda, and next Monday it's Steve McQueen.

Steve McQueen? That can't beithe Hollywood Greats' were all figures from my childhood. After that the stars get smaller, and become just boring actors. I'm sure of it. ing and publishing by the ultra-conservative ASCAP (American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers) until 1941; the domination of the US record industry by'six major companies; the control uf musical outlets by whites who preserved the racial divisions of American society in their musical output and distribution patterns: the dependence of star-singers on external sources for their material; the failure of the smaller record companies to create a national distribution network until 1945; the largely regional organisation of record marketing, radio broadcasting and juke-box hiring - all these and many lesser factors created a situation where a huge market, white teenagers, and a huge pool of talent existed largely unattended by the major producers.

In this situation, the indies, who were closer to the new talent and closer to the new market — not only geographically but, sometimes spiritually - were able to become the commercia vehicles for the new musical styles.

By 1952 there were over 100 indies challenging the Big Six -Mercury, MGM, Capitol, Victor, Decca and Columbia - for chart places.

These entertainment giants - they were not exclusively record producers - accounted for four-fifths of the Top Ten records in the US charts in 1954 but their share had fallen by 1959, the end of rock'n'roll's big were, to amere one thom Is view derives from his admiration for the raw musical energy and innovative genius of many of the performers and producers working for the indies: Loyd Price and Little Richard with Art Rupe for Specialty; Elvis Presley. with Sam Phillips for Sun; Chuck Berry, Bo Diddley and scores of blues artists with Leonard Chess LIGHT virtually every urban civusation in the world, adolescents staked out their freedom in the cities, inspired and reassured by the rock and roll beat. Rock and roll was perhaps the first form of popular culture to celebrate without reservation characteristics of city life that had been among the most criticised. In rock and roll, the strident, repetitive sounds of city life were, in effect, reproduced as melody and rhythm.

This sort of naturalistic interpretations seems very weak to me.

Firstly, it does not explain why rock and roll did not develop with the rise of the modern industrial cities. Secondly, it does not explain why the principal originators of this stvle were from the less industrialised areas of America's south.

Thirdly, it does not explain why other styles - like Chicago blues - weren't the absolutery determining point of departure for rock and roll rather than one forceful influence.

Fourthly it implies that industrial societies - societies that have generated ideologies of solidarity and collectivism among workers - cannot produce a musical counterpart to socialist ideas:

These weaknesses of analysis, as I see it, are not unimportant. But as "The Sound of the City" has so much to offer in information and insight, it must remain indispensable reading for any one attempting to understand the development of popular music and popular culture.