How the Beatles Destroyed Rock 'n' Roll

"How the Beatles Destroyed Rock 'n' Roll: An Alternative History of American Popular Music" by Elijah Wald (Oxford Press)

The testy title gets your attention, but this isn’t an attack on The Beatles. It is a rectification of bad history and wrong perceptions about American popular music from 1870 (just before the invention of the phonograph) into the 1970s. By the end of the book (endorsed by Tom Waits), you get a sense that real musical appreciation was nearly lost in the 1960s—the era when The Beatles reigned supreme.

Author-musician Elijah Wald is a “baby boomer” who specializes in musical myth-busting and fringe culture. He clearly loves The Beatles and, like me, can’t imagine life without them. His book is not a diatribe. If anything, it’s an exciting (and exacting) chronology with humorous insights into how the nuances of culture, fashion, gender, race, and technology have driven popular music.

Wald writes from the angle that popular music history has been revised by a cabal of white males who decide what is “politically correct,” burying or castigating important and innovative artists while making Sacred Cows out of others. Wald undoes that with historical sales charts, first-hand media reports, and eye-witness accounts.

To start, the music world was friendlier to women in the late 1800s than it was in the 1960s. Women were more likely to learn an instrument than men (who were usually off conjugating Latin or roping cows), and it was normal to hear Stephen Foster folk songs and Beethoven sonatas in the same home performance. Audiences were not subject to the cultural division between “classical” and “popular” that we have now. New dance steps prompted entire musical movements and were indicators of shifts in mainstream culture. People attended concerts and dances for the shared experience of discovering new music.

While racism was institutional and reprehensible, behind the scenes thrived an interracial “admiration society” of musicians who proactively studied one another and said so. Duke Ellington cited jazz orchestrator Paul Whiteman as a major influence, yet the urban myth is that Whiteman tried to steal jazz from black people [untrue; Whiteman was pro-integration and never asked for the title “King of Jazz”]. Louis Armstrong repeatedly said that [the monstrously successful] Guy Lombardo’s Orchestra was his favorite band, yet rock-jazz historians have dismissed Lombardo as Caucasian fluff. Even though it was easier for whites to cross into the black world than the other way around, Wald diffuses racial stereotypes on all sides.

Wald gives overdue respect to underdogs. Growing up in the Sixties, I was told that Mitch Miller was a “sing-a-long square who hated rock ’n’ roll.” In reality, Miller was the first real record producer in the brave new world of the studio (post World War Two) and was as much a technology pioneer as Les Paul. Miller was an early advocate of mixing classical and ethnic elements with pop, of singers experimenting with stylistic diversity, and of using purely electronic instruments. Miller’s main complaint about rock ’n’ rollers was that they weren’t actually learning the craft of music-making; there was something dispassionate about “singing along with a radio for a week and thinking you’re ready to sign a contract.” In Miller’s world, professionalism was the core value, whether you were Leonard Bernstein, Charlie Parker, or Hank Williams. [Sidebar: Wald cites Williams as an example of an astute musician and showman, not a bumpkin.]

Wald gives the Fifties and the birth of rock ’n’ roll a makeover, saying that cultural and racial objections to rock ’n’ roll existed but have been exaggerated. Resistance to change is not unusual in history, and artists of all colors have been abused. However, in the Fifties, black artists were more annoyed by [paraphrasing LaVern Baker] white artists doing unimaginative note-for-note copies of the black versions instead of doing something fresh. Meanwhile, the white versions paid handsome royalties to black songwriters who did sign fair contracts. Ask Hank Ballard or Otis Blackwell (a black songwriter hired by Elvis Presley).

According to polls and Wald’s research, ageism barely existed in the Fifties. Teens were equally open to Little Richard’s maniacal showmanship as they were to Perry Como’s cool stage manner [Marvin Gaye said he modeled his early looks after Como]. Parents came to like Elvis Presley because he stood for Mama and sang “Love Me Tender.”

“Hip” rock historians dismiss the pre-Beatlemania Sixties as a dead zone, but Wald points out some of the great subgenres of American pop/rock (Folk/Protest, Motown/Soul, Surf Music, Phil Spector’s Wall of Sound) developed in this period. Teen idols such as Paul Anka, Frankie Avalon, and Bobby Vee (now dismissed as pap) were trained musicians and consummate pros.

When Wald gets to The Beatles, he casts them as humble lads with a balanced perspective on their own accomplishments. They merely thought of themselves as part of a slipstream, a continuum of the music that influenced them, from Broadway to classical to folk to rockabilly to rhythm and blues. 

It was also the Last Golden Age of Radio, when radio truly mirrored the range of what the public wanted. Live disc jockeys would play hard rock in the same set as Johnny Cash, Ray Charles, Janis Joplin, and Peggy Lee. The Seventies cheered in free-form FM (where you could hear twelve-minute Pink Floyd cuts no problem), but the Golden Age was over. Because of Beatlemania and successes like it, the male-dominated music industry splintered the audience into markets based on class, culture, race, and age. The so-called Generation Gap (a term unheard of until the Sixties) was exploited by Madison Avenue.

Unwittingly, The Fab Four became models for marketing manipulation and the Cult of Personality. Popular music became more about social identification than music itself. Technology and the music industry grew. Social bonding with music shrank.

I have always been of the belief that the social impact of The Beatles has to be kept separate from the value of their material, which is enormous and needs no amplification by personal obsession, commercial forces, or ethnocentricity. In the end, music should make people come together.

This book is available at the James V. Brown Library.