Popular Music Heritage: Places, Objects, Images and Texts (Pop Music, Culture and Identity) 3031082958, 9783031082955

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POP MUSIC, CULTURE, AND IDENTITY

Popular Music Heritage Places, Objects, Images and Texts

Andy Bennett

Pop Music, Culture and Identity Series Editors

Stephen Clark Graduate School Humanities and Sociology University of Tokyo Bunkyo-ku, Tokyo, Japan Tristanne Connolly Department of English St Jerome’s University Waterloo, ON, Canada Jason Whittaker School of English & Journalism University of Lincoln Lincoln, Lincolnshire, UK

Pop music lasts. A form all too often assumed to be transient, commercial and mass-cultural has proved itself durable, tenacious and continually evolving. As such, it has become a crucial component in defining various forms of identity (individual and collective) as influenced by nation, class, gender and historical period. Pop Music, Culture and Identity investigates how this enhanced status shapes the iconography of celebrity, provides an ever-expanding archive for generational memory and accelerates the impact of new technologies on performing, packaging and global marketing. The series gives particular emphasis to interdisciplinary approaches that go beyond musicology and seeks to validate the informed testimony of the fan alongside academic methodologies.

Andy Bennett

Popular Music Heritage Places, Objects, Images and Texts

Andy Bennett School of Humanities Griffith University Brisbane, QLD, Australia

ISSN 2634-6613     ISSN 2634-6621 (electronic) Pop Music, Culture and Identity ISBN 978-3-031-08295-5    ISBN 978-3-031-08296-2 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-08296-2 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2022 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors, and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Cover illustration: SEAN GLADWELL / Getty Images This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG. The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

Dedicated to the memory of my father, George Herbert Bennett (1934–2020)

Acknowledgements

In the thirty or so years that I have been an academic, I have met many wonderful people all over the world. My life has been all the richer for that. Among those many people, there are a few who I would specifically like to thank for their collegiality and support: Paula Guerra, Ben Green, Devpriya Chakravarty, Mark Percival, Asya Draganova, Richard Frennaux, Alexandra ‘Sasha’ Blok, Ian Rogers, Catherine Strong, Ross Haenfler, David Baker, Jon Stratton, Ian Woodward and finally Richard ‘Pete’ Peterson and Dave Laing (I miss you both). I would also like to acknowledged the generous support of the Griffith Centre for Social and Cultural Research in providing funds for the copy editing of this book. Thanks to Daniel, and to Paul and Lee, for getting me back into playing music again. One day we will get those old songs finished. Thanks also to my family, Monika and Daniel, for their incredible love and support. This book has been written during a period of incredible change in the world. I have been, and continue to be, heartened and inspired by the resilience shown by so many to circumstances that few of us could have envisaged just a few short years ago.

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Praise for Popular Music Heritage “Clear, highly insightful, informative and timely, this book traces the growth of pop and rock into becoming a consecrated and enshrined realm of modern culture. Bennett explores the incarnation of pop and rock heritage in physical locations, collectible objects, media genres, internet websites and performance formats. Essential and comprehensive, the book is bound to become indispensable for anyone interested in the tricky issue of the cultural longevity of pop and rock musicians and albums.” —Motti Regev, Professor of Sociology at The Open University, Israel, and author of Pop-Rock Music: Aesthetic Cosmopolitanism in Late Modernity (2013) “From tourism to tribute performances to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and Museum, Andy Bennett shows how the heritage industry successfully resurrects cultural memories and generational myths from the pop music of the not-toodistant past, while at the same time generating new meaningful experiences for millions of fans, young and old.” —David Grazian, Professor of Sociology and Communication, University of Pennsylvania, USA

Contents

Introduction: Why Popular Music ‘Heritage’—and Why Now?  1 Part I Place and Objects  13 Music, Heritage and the Cultural Consecration of Place 15 Museums, Music Halls of Fame and Fan Conventions 39 Memorabilia, Collectables and Enshrinement 61 Part II Media and Performance  85 Heritage Media and ‘Classic’ Re-presentation 87 Heritage Discourse and the Internet115 Tribute Bands, Self-Tribute and ‘Classic Albums Live’137 References159 Index173 xi

Introduction: Why Popular Music ‘Heritage’—and Why Now?

In contemporary parlance associated with the music industry and broader cultural industries landscape, the term ‘heritage’ is now increasingly being applied in relation to rock and pop performers, their work, artistic and/or cultural impact and broader legacy. Aligning with a history of pop and rock documentation in written and visual media, and the use of prestige descriptors such as ‘classic album’ and ‘classic rock’, the notion of heritage in popular music has significantly broken ranks with previous applications of heritage—to denote artists of ‘worth’ and marking them out from a plethora of other artists whose status and achievements are considered less worthy of note. Such a reclassification of particular artists as deserving of a heritage title, while others languish under the bar of heritage esteem, holds true even as the entire spectrum of rock and pop history has been subject to the same industrial processes and pressures of mass production (Frith 1983). Indeed, it is not beyond reason to suggest that ‘heritage’ in the world of popular music has also become a highly potent branding device—a way of representing artists and music back to audiences only too willing to accept the heritage discourses in their embrace of rock and pop icons whom they effectively grew up with. In this sense, the concept of ‘heritage music’, ‘heritage bands’ and ‘heritage events’ has taken on a highly seductive resonance, drawing in fans, musicians and music industry workers through its provision of a new cultural territory for the claiming of artistry and authenticity, of cultural value and significance.

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 A. Bennett, Popular Music Heritage, Pop Music, Culture and Identity, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-08296-2_1

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And yet, as recently as the 1980s, the concept of popular music heritage was rarely used and, in practical terms, little understood. While some earlier forms of popular music that pre-dated the youth and consumer boom of the early 1950s (see Bocock 1993), such as jazz and bebop, had ostensibly earned themselves a heritage status through a process of canonical consolidation and a resulting critical legacy (see, e.g., Souther 2003; Teal 2018), even these music genres were rarely discussed directly with reference to heritage. Post-war popular music genres, including rock and roll, beat music, hard rock, heavy metal, punk, reggae, rap and metal, were still at that point associated with pop culture ephemera; musics that were, to paraphrase Adorno (1941), mass-produced, mass-consumed and essentially pre-digested. Alternatively, many of these genres, notably rock and roll, heavy, metal, punk and rap, were demonised through a succession of media moral panics (Cohen 1987; Martin and Segrave 1993) that firmly cast them in the public consciousness as promoting anti-social and violent tendencies among youth. Factors such as these conspired with the elitist posturing of cultural critics to position post-war popular music as the antithesis of those art forms and cultural practices deemed worthy of conservation and thus adorned with a heritage classification.

The Dawning of the Rock and Pop Heritage Era During the course of the 1990s, a series of anniversary milestones, reunions and the concomitant growth of what could be termed ‘heritage media’ (see Chapter “Heritage Media and ‘Classic’ Re-­presentation”) began to change the way that popular music of the post-war era was understood and appreciated. Indeed, in the space of a few short years, the concept of popular music heritage rapidly gained momentum and crystallised as an acknowledged discourse for the benchmarking of rock and pop achievements from the 1950s onwards. This trend was consolidated by a series of anniversary milestones. Thus, in 1992, the Beatles’ landmark 1967 album Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band celebrated its twenty-fifth anniversary, while the following year a clutch of other critically acclaimed albums including Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon, Mike Oldfield’s Tubular Bells, Lou Reed’s Transformer, David Bowie’s Aladdin Sane and Elton John’s Goodbye Yellow Brick Road turned twenty years old and began a vogue for anniversary CD reissues that often included expanded liner notes, bonus tracks and, in many cases, additional CDs featuring remixes and outtakes from the original album sessions (Rashidi 2020). The

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mid-­1990s also saw reformations of a number of seminal rock and pop bands from the 1970s including the Eagles and KISS. But perhaps the most surprising reformation of the period occurred in 1995 when surviving Beatles Paul McCartney, George Harrison and Ringo Starr reunited to record two new Beatles tracks, ‘Free as a Bird’ and ‘Real Love’. Each of these songs had begun as piano and vocal ‘demo’ recordings made by fellow Beatle John Lennon during the late 1970s. Using state-of-the-art studio technology, these basic homemade recordings were turned into fully fledged Beatles’ tracks with new instrumental and vocal performances added by McCartney, Harrison and Star. The release of ‘Free as a Bird’ and ‘Real Love’ coincided with the production and broadcasting of a new six-part documentary, the Beatles Anthology, that told the history of the Beatles from their early beginnings in Liverpool as hopeful young amateur musicians through to their fractious and highly publicised break up in April 1970. Two years after the screening of the Beatles Anthology, the first few episodes of Classic Albums, an occasional and ongoing British documentary programme dedicated to landmark popular music recordings, were aired on television (see Bennett and Baker 2010). From its inception, Classic Albums closely adhered to the rock and pop canons formulated through the polls of leading music magazines such as Billboard and Rolling Stone, with close-up accounts of the making of top-selling albums ranging from The Jimi Hendrix Experience’s Electric Ladyland and Cream’s Disraeli Gears to Black Sabbath’s Paranoid, The Who’s Who’s Next and Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon (see also Chapter “Heritage Media and ‘Classic’ Re-­presentation”). Classic Albums was preceded by the appearance of Mojo, a coffee table glossy magazine featuring new interviews with and retrospectives on a wide range of artists whose careers had often begun in the 1960s or early 1970s. Aimed at a more ‘mature’ audience, this publication together with later magazines such as Classic Rock further consolidated a move on the part of the cultural industries to cater to the tastes of an ageing popular music audience (see also Chapter “Tribute Bands, Self-­Tribute and ‘Classic Albums Live’”). If popular music had initially been a ‘youth music’ (Chambers 1985), from the mid-1990s onwards, it was increasingly clear that those invested in rock and pop were no longer just teenaged; rather there was a significant and growing element of middle-aged fandom (Bennett 2013). As Savage observes: ‘This age bracket is employed, often “up-scale”, and has already been trained to consume in the period of teenage’s greatest outreach’ (1990: 167).

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As it became apparent that middle-aged music fans were now populating a cultural space once deemed the exclusive domain of youth, this provoked an initially critical reaction among both academic and non-academic writers whose response was to proffer as a series of accounts suggesting those who ‘held onto’ the musical tastes of their youth were essentially displaying a form of ‘arrested development’ characterised by a refusal to grow up and leave their youth behind (see, e.g., Ross 1994; Calcutt 1998; Weinstein 2000). Others suggested that through continuing to push and promote their own youth generational sounds and styles as a ‘golden age’ of popular culture, such ageing generations were refusing contemporary youth its own voice (see Grossberg 1994). Despite such negative representations, however, the ageing audience’s representation of its generational past, assisted through the rapidly expanding range of commodities that catered to the taste and budget of those in the 45–65 age bracket, continued and, in the fullness of time, assumed its own cultural resonance. This also served to prise open some of the hitherto taken-for-granted assumptions about the ephemerality of rock and pop as it became clear that ageing audiences not only continued to read significance into the music and performers that had framed their experience of youth, but also had their own, very firm ideas about the ongoing importance of such artists and their ‘status’ as aspects of contemporary history and heritage (Bennett 2009).

Rocking the Institutional Bias In terms of the commodification of the emerging heritage buzz around popular music in the 1990s, the inroads made by the music industry were in some ways an easy transition. In essence, this amounted to creative thinking about ways of stretching and transforming practices already ingrained within the music industry—in this case, a ‘selling back’ of popular music history to those ageing generations who had had a large hand in shaping it was a relatively easy undertaking, drawing on principles of branding and commodification already well established. But expanding the heritage currency of popular music in other ways would prove more challenging as it involved confronting an ingrained institutional bias. During the early 1990s, Shuker (1994) opined that popular music continued to suffer a significant element of bias from official art and cultural organisations across the industrialised world. As such, he argued, rock and pop music were rarely considered serious contenders for state or public

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funding. Museums and exhibition halls were not, at that point in time, considered in the main to be appropriate spaces for the celebration of popular music history, while the idea of popular music as in any way ‘viable’ beyond its commercial significance continued to be scoffed at in many quarters. One exception here was the Beatles, whose home city of Liverpool in the north-west of England took an early lead in celebrating the history and heritage of contemporary popular music through their introduction of a range of Beatles tourism experiences from the re-opened Cavern Club (where the Beatle’s performed some of their earliest gigs) to bus tours around the city to visit important Beatles’ landmarks including the childhood homes of John Lennon, Paul McCartney, George Harrison and Ringo Starr (Cohen 1997). It would, however, be a significant period of time before other cities began to celebrate their own popular music heritage in such a way, a process which began in earnest only as dominant opinions about the nature and value of popular music began to change. Continuing the push for popular music heritage to assume recognition and gravitas, albeit with a similarly Anglo-American emphasis as seen with city-based initiatives, was the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. Established in 1995 in Cleveland, Ohio, the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame quickly became a key driver in the efforts to transform the significance of rock and pop from ephemeral youth musics to art forms that had fundamentally shaped the culture and history of the late twentieth century (see Reising 2001). While the establishment of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame marked in many ways an important turning point in the recognition of popular music as a legitimate form of cultural heritage, it simultaneously brought into the sharp relief the unlevel playing field of heritage making in the world of rock and pop. In an instructive article on Rolling Stone Magazine’s role in what he terms the ‘retrospective cultural consecration’ of various rock albums from the 1960s and early 1970s, Schmutz (2005) compellingly illustrates how, through their power to grant prestige and status to selectively chosen aspects of popular music history, publications such as Rolling Stone serve to champion the legacy of popular music artists in a selective way, conferring status and prestige on certain artists while ignoring others. A similar characteristic can be seen at play with the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame whose inducted artists represent a relatively select grouping (largely focused on artists who have had significant commercial success in the US). This same logic of selection has also filtered through into the museum sector. Thus, for example, while the stage costumes of an artist such as David Bowie are now considered worthy of the same kind of cultural

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consecration bestowed on the paintings of Monet or the etchings of Rembrandt, other popular music artists who have been equally in the public eye at various points since the 1950s are left out of consideration in such curatorial decisions.

Whose Heritage Is It Anyway? But the dawning of popular music heritage cannot be purely cast in terms of institutional responses to the cultural value of popular music. Generational memory and the broader structures of feeling (Williams 2020) to which this memory is attached also play a significant part in deeming the worth of cultural images, objects and texts relating to popular music. Although commercially produced, in most cases such artefacts continue to circulate long after their initial production and release into the marketplace. As such, these artefacts become key resources in the framing of collective cultural memory (Bennett and Rogers 2016a), this in turn giving them an organic heritage status. As previously noted, a selection of these artefacts has been elevated to a more formalised representation of heritage. But many more have not. They exist under the radar, sometimes part of personal collections, or among the exhibits in informal collections of artefacts. Indeed, of equal salience in the emergence of popular music heritage as a bona fide discourse is its significance as a practice that is not merely governed by official forms of representation but also takes on more do-it-yourself (DIY) properties as well. To put this another way, popular music fans do not only consume pre-produced artefacts of popular music heritage but are also often busy producing their own representations of rock and pop heritage. This chimes with an observation made by Atkinson who has suggested that the concept of heritage is now both highly contested and increasingly multi-layered. As Atkinson explains, such an interpretation of heritage has perhaps inevitably given rise, in some quarters, to criticisms that ‘anything and everything from the past is now celebrated uncritically and indiscriminately’ (2008: 381). For Atkinson, however, this recasting of heritage could also be seen to represent a ‘more far-reaching re-engagement with collective pasts’ (2008: 381). While this view could obviously be widely applied in an understanding of more everyday vernacular perceptions of heritage, there are particular resonances here with popular music due to the ways that it touches audiences and imbues them with a sense of ownership (Frith 1987). When considering this quality of popular music and its associated performers and icons, academic

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scholarship has tended to focus on musical ownership in terms of its underpinning of the formation of music scenes (Straw 1991) and its relationship to aspects of fashion and style (Hebdige 1979). More recently, however, it has become clear that such musical ownership can also be a critical factor in attempts to preserve and enshrine particular aspects of popular music history in order to prevent them from slipping into obscurity. Such forms of DIY music preservation can take many forms, including the collection and display of fan memorabilia (Bennett and Rogers 2016b) to photo exhibitions (Edwards 2010) and DIY museums and archives running on a shoestring budget and staffed by volunteers (Baker 2015). The fact that such informal opportunities to experience popular music heritage exist is matched by the ‘quiet demand’ for opportunities to step outside the more commodified box of popular music heritage preservation and experience alternative representations of how popular music and the broader institutions and practices of cultural life have impacted each other, often in highly nuanced and localised ways. In this respect, the role played by digital media has been of significant importance. Although many of the artefacts associated with popular music heritage date from the pre-digital era, their capture and broader dissemination via digital mediums has rapidly opened up a vast new sphere of popular music heritage display and exploration. With the arrival of Web 2.0 in the early 2000s, the world of online popular music heritage became increasingly more interactive. The artist and genre-dedicated fan sites and chat rooms that dominated the Web 1.0 era were supplemented by new opportunities for music fans to communicate and share memories online, initially via MySpace and later through Facebook. Similarly, with the arrival of YouTube in 2006, an important user-content-driven digital archive was made available to music fans all over the world. YouTube rapidly became a go-to resource for those interested in exploring popular music’s past, offering a wide variety of rock and pop videos and documentaries as well as vintage live performance footage, much of which had rarely if ever been available for public consumption before. In many respects, the heritage boom in popular music has served in the public imagination to forge the final step of rock and pop’s transition from consumer commodity ephemera to an item of consecrated cultural worth. At the same time, however, it has done this work in particular ways with the effect that particular eras, and within them, particular moments have been repositioned as deserving of cultural worth. On the one hand, it is tempting to think that the popular music heritage boom is tied to a

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particular kind of ‘believer’, whose understanding of popular music heritage is closely tied to their association with 1950s or 1960s generations. If this were to prove the case, then the popular music heritage boom will prove to be a short-lived affair, as mortal as the baby-boomer generation who subscribe to it. However, even though critical accounts of popular music heritage are at a relatively early stage of assessment, evidence is beginning to suggest that the hegemonic steering of popular heritage by generational power may in fact be a moveable feast. Thus, for example, in Tony Palmer’s seventeen-part documentary All You Need Is Love: The Story of Popular Music, released in 1977, the popular music icons of the 1950s and 1960s are rarefied while the likes of KISS are dismissed as what is referred to in the documentary as ‘sour rock’. By comparison, if we fastforward to 2022, KISS’s heritage rock status is widely acknowledged and barely disputed in rock circles. The generational tide has moved on, and it is now the 1970s generation who are calling the shots, hegemonically speaking, when it comes to defining popular music heritage, as seen in the plethora of heritage media dedicated to the likes of the Eagles, Steely Dan, AC/DC, David Bowie, Brian Eno, the Electric Light Orchestra, Queen, 10 cc and so on. And as the 1980s generation becomes middle-aged, the music heritage pendulum is again beginning to swing in the direction of generational icons such as Joy Division, U2, the Police, Prince, Madonna and Michael Jackson. Fundamentally then, it seems that if the transformation of popular music to heritage status began with the retrospective cultural consecration of artists and albums from the 1950s and 1960s, as the process gathers momentum, more and more artists from subsequent decades are entering the frame. The purpose of this book is to provide an account of popular music’s heritage development to date. As the foregoing account serves to illustrate, the field of popular music heritage is broad and complex. It is limited neither to the institutional embrace of particular music artists and their associated cultural artefacts; nor is it a matter of what can be commodified and sold back to (ageing) audiences as music heritage products. Rather, popular music heritage is as much about the informal as it is about the formal, as much about the intangible as it is about the tangible. The following six chapters in this book attempt to capture this broad field of popular music heritage by considering manifold aspects of popular music heritage and how these have taken shape since the mid-1990s when the term ‘heritage’ began to be more readily applied to contemporary popular music and its cultural legacy.

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Chapter “Music, Heritage and the Cultural Consecration of Place” focuses on aspects of popular music heritage and place. Place has, for many years, been integral to the understanding of music’s cultural significance. With the mediatisation of music, new discourses of music and place have been made possible, for example, through the verbal accounts of artists concerning the importance of their local environment on the music they make. Such discourses have been capitalised upon in various heritage making initiatives, in some cases, blossoming into highly lucrative cultural industries, an example of this being the Beatles’ tourism opportunities available in the band’s home city of Liverpool. Chapter “Museums, Music Halls of Fame and Fan Conventions” looks at various examples of exhibition spaces for the staging of popular music heritage. Beginning with a consideration of museum exhibitions, the chapter charts the transition in the perceived status of popular music from mass-produced ephemera to a bona fide aspect of cultural history and heritage. Attention then focuses on the music hall of fame and how this institutional setting for popular music has served to broaden the currency of its heritage status while imposing new indices of heritage value tied in with generational attachment to particular eras and, to some extent, genres of popular music. The final section of the chapter looks at popular music fan conventions. Although these are not typically associated with museums and music halls of fame, it is argued that the forms of conspicuous forms of embodied display that emerge there have a similar resonance in terms of the public celebration of popular music history and heritage. Chapter “Memorabilia, Collectables and Enshrinement” examines how personal collections of material objects associated with popular music history also contribute to the proliferation of heritage preservation practices. Over the years, fans have collected memorabilia, from marketed forms of merchandise to things such as signed photographs, concert programmes and ticket stubs. Many of these objects are now rare and some attract high prices when sold at auction. It is not only memorabilia that attracts attention in this way, however. It is also the case that personal possessions of popular music artists have become prized objects of heritage value. This extends to musical instruments, notably electric guitars which, in addition to having a vintage value of their own, assume added status as objects of heritage if previously owned by a music icon. Chapter “Heritage Media and ‘Classic’ Re-­presentation” introduces the term heritage media as a means of considering how mediums including film, documentaries and television series, together with print media

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such as books and magazines, bring a new level of depth to our understanding of popular music heritage. As the chapter demonstrates, the significant growth in demand for heritage media products since the mid-1990s is illustrative of the growing interest among music fans of all ages in learning more about the history of popular music, from the staging of landmark events such as the Woodstock Music and Arts Festival to the making of ‘classic albums’ such as Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon and Nirvana’s Nevermind. Chapter “Heritage Discourse and the Internet” considers the importance of the internet as a means through which popular music heritage is both constructed and celebrated. Since it first became a more common household resource during the mid-1990s, the internet has made significant contributions to the reframing of popular music as heritage. One critically important aspect of this has been the new level of ease with which popular music fan communities can gather. No longer separated by geography, fans are able to communicate more freely online, building new communities that contribute content in the shaping of what have sometimes been referred to as virtual music scenes. Another significant aspect of the internet is its function as a space for articulations of DIY popular music heritage practice, the latter frequently challenging more formalised representations of popular music heritage such as those seen in museums and music halls of fame. Chapter “Tribute Bands, Self-­Tribute and ‘Classic Albums Live’”, the final chapter of the book, is dedicated to specific forms of live music performance that also contribute to discourses of popular music heritage. Despite a now substantial literature on popular music performance, little attention has been focused on this aspect of popular music helps to define understandings of popular music heritage. The chapter focuses on three main areas, tribute bands, self-tribute (i.e., when an original artist celebrates their own legacy, e.g., through the live performance of one of their classic albums) and classic albums live. The latter differs from both tribute bands and classic album performances by original artists, bringing together a skilled collection (or ensemble) of musicians who focus solely on the accurate reproduction of a chosen classic album or albums.

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References Adorno, Theodore W. (1941) ‘On Popular Music’ [trans. G. Simpson], in S. Frith and A. Goodwin (eds) On Record: Rock Pop and the Written Word. London: Routledge, pp. 256–267. Atkinson, David (2008) ‘The heritage of mundane places’, in Graham, B., Howard, P. (eds) The Ashgate Research Companion to Heritage and Identity. Ashgate: Aldershot, pp. 381–395. Baker, Sarah (2015) ‘Affective Archiving and Collective Collecting in Do-it-­ Yourself Popular Music Archives and Museums’, in S.  Baker (ed) Preserving Popular Music Heritage: Do-it-Yourself, Do-it-Together. London: Routledge, pp. 46–61. Bennett, Andy (2009) ‘“Heritage rock”: Rock music, re-presentation and heritage discourse’, Poetics, 37(5–6): 474–89. Bennett, Andy (2013) Music, Style and Aging: Growing Old Disgracefully? Philadelphia: Temple University Press. Bennett, Andy and Baker, Sarah (2010) ‘Classic Albums: The re-presentation of the rock album on British television’, in I. Inglis (ed.) Popular Music on British Television. Aldershot: Ashgate, pp. 41–53. Bennett, Andy and Rogers, Ian (2016a) Popular Music Scenes and Cultural Memory. Basingstoke: Palgrave. Bennett, Andy and Rogers, Ian (2016b) ‘Popular music and Materiality: Memorabilia, Archives & Memory Traces’, Popular Music & Society, 39(1): 28–42. Bocock, Robert (1993) Consumption. London: Routledge. Calcutt, Andrew (1998) Arrested Development: Pop Culture and the Erosion of Adulthood. London: Continuum. Chambers, Iain (1985) Urban Rhythms: Pop Music and Popular Culture. Basingstoke: Macmillan. Cohen, Stanley (1987) Folk Devils and Moral Panics: The Creation of the Mods and Rockers, 3rd edn. Oxford: Basil Blackwell. Cohen, Sara (1997) ‘More than the Beatles: Popular Music, Tourism and Urban Regeneration’, in S. Abram, J. Waldren and D.V.L. Macleod (eds) Tourism and Tourists: Identifying with People and Places. Oxford: Berg, pp. 71–90. Edwards, Paul (2010) ‘Rock Photography: Cover Art from The Beatles to Post-­ Punk.’ Rock Photography, Paris, France. Ouphopo Éditeur, 2011, Bibliothèque Lunaire, 978-2-9540241-1-0. Frith, Simon (1983) Sound Effects: Youth, Leisure and the Politics of Rock. London: Constable. Frith, Simon (1987) ‘Towards an Aesthetic of Popular Music’ in R. Leppert and S.  McClary (eds) Music and Society: The Politics of Composition, Performance and Reception. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 133–150.

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Grossberg, L. (1994) ‘Is Anybody Listening? Does Anybody Care?: On Talking About “The State of Rock”’, in A. Ross and T. Rose (eds) Microphone Fiends: Youth Music and Youth Culture. London: Routledge, pp. 41–58. Hebdige, Dick (1979) Subculture: The Meaning of Style. London: Routledge. Martin, Linda and Segrave, Kerry (1993) Anti-Rock: The Opposition to Rock ’n’ Roll. New York: Da Capo. Rashidi, Waleed (2020) ‘Young Adults’ Compact Disc Usage Experiences in 2020’, Journal of the Music and Entertainment Industry Educators Association, 20(1): 127–145. Reising, Russell (2001) ‘The Secret Lives of Objects; The Secret Stories of Rock and Roll: Cleveland’s Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and Museum and Seattle’s Experience Music Project’, American Quarterly, 53(3): 489–510. Ross, Andrew (1994) ‘Introduction’, Microphone Fiends: Youth Music and Youth Culture. London: Routledge, pp. 1–16. Savage, Jon (1990) ‘The Enemy Within: Sex, Rock and Identity’, in S. Frith (ed.) (1990) Facing the Music: Essays on Pop, Rock and Culture, 2nd edn. London: Mandarin, pp. 131–172. Shuker, Roy (1994) Understanding Popular Music. London: Routledge. Schmutz, Vaughn (2005) ‘Retrospective Cultural Consecration in Popular Music’, American Behavioral Scientist 48(11): 1510–23. Souther, J. Mark (2003) ‘Making the “Birthplace of Jazz”: Tourism and Musical Heritage Marketing in New Orleans’, Louisiana History: The Journal of the Louisiana Historical Association, 44(1): 39–73. Straw, Will (1991) ‘Systems of Articulation, Logics of Change: Communities and Scenes in Popular Music.’ Cultural Studies, 53: 368–88. Teal, Kimberly Hannon (2018) ‘Fred Hersch at the Village Vanguard: The Sound of Jazz Heritage at New  York’s Oldest Jazz Club’, Journal of the Society for American Music, 12(4): 449–476. Weinstein, Deena (2000) Heavy Metal: The Music and its Culture, 2nd edn. New York: Da Capo Press. Williams, Raymond (2020) Culture and Materialism, 3rd Edn. London: Verso.

PART I

Place and Objects

Music, Heritage and the Cultural Consecration of Place

In claiming the heritage credentials of popular music, the significance of place has often played a major role. In many ways such musical associations with place are linked directly with other forms of heritage naming and ‘branding’. Thus, cities and regions have long drawn on their own historical legacy as a way of distinguishing themselves from other places with the aim of both promoting local heritage landmarks and attracting tourists (Staiff et  al. 2013). This is often achieved through the draw of physical attractions—notably historic buildings such as the Tower of London (London, UK), the Taj Mahal (Agra, India) and the Empire State Building (New York, US). These fall into a category of tangible heritage, things that can be seen and physically experienced—offering visitors a series of tactile associations with place that serve to link the present to the past through the representative power of lasting monuments (which in a context of late modern mediated societies are often discursively linked in a global heritage trail) (Waterton 2013). Music heritage can also be experienced in such ways, for example, through visiting historically important live music venues (Long 2014), recording studios (Gibson 2005) or the houses where famous musicians grew up (Cohen 1997)—and the apartments, houses or more stately dwellings they occupied once their careers had become established (Naiman 2015). In many cases, such physical heritage aspects of popular music become part of a broader tourist route in cities and regions that, like other bricks and mortar aspects of cultural heritage, are increasingly trans-locally linked. At the same time, however, © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 A. Bennett, Popular Music Heritage, Pop Music, Culture and Identity, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-08296-2_2

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it is frequently the case that popular music heritage attracts its own kind of fascination. Enchanted by the mediated images and music of iconic artists, music fans—come tourists share a desire to ground these experiences in physical spaces and place. For such fans, visiting the sites of a musician’s early life, the place where their iconic recordings were made and memorable concert performances took place enhances their appreciation and understanding of the artist as a living, breathing person with a tactile relationship to place. Scholars have long discussed how, even as there is an understanding among audiences that popular music is an industrialised and packaged product, they continue to consider their favourite artists as ‘real’ (see, e.g., Negus 1992). The opportunity to situate such artists in physical space, particulary when the artists themselves have attributed such places as having inspired and influenced them, can personify feelings of realness for fans. Likewise, visiting the site of a famous music scene, such as the Chicago blues scene (Grazian 2004) or a historic music event, such as Woodstock (Spock 2010), offers music tourists a chance to ‘feel’ the connection they have come to believe exists between music and place. This chapter considers in depth the relationship between popular music heritage and place. It begins by examining the long-standing fascination between music and place, employing the concept of spatialisation as a framework for establishing the various facets of this perceived connection. The discussion is then extended by looking at the connections between music, place and memory, highlighting the musicalised components of what can be referred to as ‘memoryscapes’. This is followed by a focus on specific examples of how popular music heritage, drawing on elements of place and memory, plays out in the context of the urban environment. In this section of the chapter, examples drawn upon include Liverpool, Memphis, Chicago and Berlin. Increasingly, however, it has become obvious that the connections between music heritage, space and place are not restricted to urban environments but are also to be seen in regional and rural environments. The final part of the chapter thus considers examples of this evolving trend in the understanding and appreciation of places of popular music heritage, including the site of the original 1969 Woodstock Music and Arts Fair and Bron-Yr-Aur, the cottage in rural North Wales where, during the early 1970s, English rock band Led Zeppelin wrote much of the material for their third album Led Zeppelin III (1970) and subsequent albums. Discussion in this part of the chapter notes how such locations have been elided until quite recently due to a contemporary bias

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in how popular music heritage experiences are fashioned in a way that suits the purposes of an urban-centric emphasis fostered by city-based cultural industry enterprises.

Music, Place and Spatialisation In both folklore and, during more recent times, media discourses and narratives, music and place have long been held to form a distinctive relationship with each other. As historical records indicate, music has been a universally defining aspect of cultural identity for centuries, and within that the connectedness of music to place is a critical feature of its cultural significance (Sancar 2003). At the heart of this is the perceivable fact that prior to the onset of  globalisation music was typically made by specific people at specific times and in specific places. Music continues to be strongly connected to place, but since the early 1950s the factors underpinning this relationship have significantly shifted. Thus, although a range of genres, from rock and roll to beat music, psychedelia and various forms of alternative music are frequently associated with particular regions or cities around the world, the actual connections between these music genres and their respective places of ‘origin’ are more often discursively constructed and cosmetically fashioned than could often, though not exclusively, be said of more ‘traditional’ music in a historical sense.1 Thus, for example, while Merseybeat is a label intended to mark out a sound created by Liverpool bands such as The Searchers and Gerry and the Pacemakers, the actual musical elements of this style owe much to US rock and roll artists such as Elvis Presley and Buddy Holly, who in their turn were influenced by rhythm and blues and country music styles (see Palmer 1977). Similarly, if the early 1990s ‘grunge’ music of artists such as Nirvana and Pearl Jam quickly became referred to as the ‘Seattle Sound’, grunge was in fact highly influenced by punk and post-punk styles of music from the late 1970s through to the early 1980s. Such styles had evolved elsewhere in North America as well as in the UK and other parts of Europe. Indeed, in citing his influences, Kurt Cobain of iconic grunge band Nirvana referred to Kim Salmon of Australian post-punk band the Scientists as having had a salient influence on his own guitar sound and songwriting style (see Stratton 2008). In a palpable sense then, the place associations inscribed in popular styles, and by definition the historical legacy of such styles, are seeped in the liquidity that social theorist Zygmunt Bauman (2000) associated with the late modern condition (a context in

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which the term postmodernity has also often been frequently applied; Smart 1993). In such a context, the properties of society, including representations of culture and its relationship to place, while they may contain residual elements of local cultural practice (Williams 2020), are largely constructed through mediatised process of myth making. In this sense, the defining characteristics of a place, including things such as musical legacy, are often constructed in abstract and then reflected back on a place and its people (see Bennett 2002). It is here, however, that an interesting sleight of hand takes place, for it is frequently the case that in connecting music to place, a discursive, and often romanticised, language is brought into play. This often begins with journalistic commentary, such as that seen during the early 1960s, when British Communist newspaper The Daily Worker described the sound of the Beatles as: ‘“The voice of 80,000 crumbling houses and 30,000 people on the dole”’ (Palmer 1977: 226). A similar rhetoric was applied in the case of grunge whose ‘Seattle Sound’ label was discursively tied by journalists to the city of Seattle and its outlying regions being socio-­ economically depressed (prior to the new technology boom of the 1990s) and a place of high unemployment, particularly among the region’s youth—a number of whom were to become leading exponents of the grunge style. A discourse of bleak working-class life has also frequently been used to link the origins of heavy metal to Birmingham in the English midlands, with many commentators claiming that the city’s heavy industry base of the 1960s and early 1970s directly fed into the sound of heavy metal artists such as Black Sabbath and Judas Priest (see Harrison 2010). In point of fact, the term heavy metal did not begin to acquire broader currency until later in the 1970s, by which time bands from other places across the UK, and in Europe and North America were also writing and performing music that attracted the heavy metal label. As these examples thus serve to illustrate, to speak of a direct connection between music and place in contemporary society, particularly when discussing popular music genres from the 1950s onwards, is highly problematic. Indeed, as Hodgkinson observes, while ‘locality must be recognized as important … a definite relationship between musical style and a given locality certainly cannot be assumed’ (2004: 234). Despite the constructed quality of place, however, at an everyday level, many music artists and their fans continue to believe in a palpable connection between music and place. Indeed, in many ways, this remains a key facet of appeal among artists and audiences—something that frequently serves to give music a sense of ‘realness’ and ‘authenticity’. In this sense,

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the connection of music to place subverts a sense of music and music artists as ‘produced’ and returns to a more folkloric notion of music as rooted in an organic community. Over time, such spatial discourses can harden, taking on a new realm of historically embedded meaning. The music and place connection also has significant currency in the realm of popular music heritage. As people search for connections between music and place, the lure of a more deeply embedded and historical dimension to such a connection proves a new impetus for the claiming or realness and authenticity in an artist and their music. Reciprocally, this becomes highly beneficial for the physical sites of such popular musical history. Thus, the emphasis on place has become an important branding tool, a means through which particular cities, towns and regions around the globe can effectively own the history and cultural legacy of particular music genres and their associated artists and sell this back to eager consumers. An important additional point of reference here is the historical presence of a strong music scene in a given city or region that nurtured artists who then went on to earn trans-local or global notoriety. This can clearly be seen in the endearing connection between Elvis Presley and the southern US city of Memphis, and in the case of the Beatles and Liverpool. Indeed, these examples are particularly interesting when considering the constructed nature of music’s connection to place as, in the case of Elvis and the Beatles, the tactile relationship of each artist to the place in which they are remembered is qualitatively different. Thus, in the case of Elvis, the singer continued to remain a resident of Memphis long after he became an international icon, living in the city until his untimely death in August 1977 (see Williamson 2015). In contrast, the Beatles relocated from Liverpool to London soon after their initial commercial success in 1963 (see Norman 1981). Nevertheless, the connection between each of these artists and their place of origin remains equally as strong in the public imagination and, more critically, in the context of the collective cultural memory surrounding contemporary popular music and its most high-­ profile exponents. Indeed, as will be considered in more detail later in this chapter, both Elvis Presley and the Beatles have played a major part in putting their respective home cities on the global map and continue to contribute significantly in terms of musical legacy to the respective local tourist industries of Memphis and Liverpool. In effect, Elvis and the Beatles have become key mediums in the spatialisation of Memphis and Liverpool as critical nodes in the historical development of contemporary popular music.

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Spatialisation refers to a process whereby social activities and material objects located within a physical place become bound up with how that place is socially constructed and represented (Keith and Pile 1993). As this suggests, space can no longer be cast in purely physical terms. Rather, it is the case that in addition to its physical characteristics, space is also an ideologically and aesthetically shaped terrain. Such malleability also extends to the mediation of place. Indeed, the extent to which a physical space is mediated and culturally represented via images, objects and texts plays a significant part in how that place is understood, not merely by those living there but also by those living in other locations. In the case of those living further afield, representations of a place give rise to a series of expectations, summed up by Urry (1990) through his concept of the ‘tourist gaze’ whereby visitors arrive in a city or region with a preformed idea of what they will experience in that place. Places that become the object of the ‘tourist gaze’ are then able to play off this by creating or enhancing particular points of reference that both tourists and, indeed, locals can draw on in their perception of a place and its significance. This point is returned to later in the chapter when particular examples such as blues tourism in Chicago and Beatles tourism in Liverpool are used to illustrate the significance of the tourist gaze for the ways in which popular music heritage is developed and sustained as a spatial concern.

Music Heritage and Memoryscapes As the foregoing account begins to illustrate, the process of musical spatialisation is temporally complex. Thus, not only is the relationship between music and place frequently a highly constructed relationship, but also depends on a carefully orchestrated portrayal of the past that successfully plays into the cultural memory of the present. As Bal (1999) observes, cultural memory has become a key force in the way that the past is remembered and, over time, exerts a significant influence on what kind of representations of the past will be accepted by audiences and consumers as genuinely representative of particular periods of history. This also has a significant bearing on the popular music heritage industry for whom much depends on rendering for fans an ‘authentic experience’ that both resonates with their own expectations and provides a basis through which they can relate their experience to others. DeNora’s (2000) study of music and everyday life signalled an early acknowledgement of the relationship between music and memory through its illustration of how individuals

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often map out their lives with reference to musicalised memories. According to DeNora, this function of music is so strong that it is able to instantly trigger memories for an individual; for example, when a particular song is played on the radio, the impact on an individual may be so strong as to immediately transport them back in memory to a time and place where the song was initially heard and/or where it acquired a strong personal meaning for them. More recently, Green has applied the concept of peak music experience to explain how meanings associated with musical memories are carried forward by individuals, shaping the ways in which they continue to understand specific music tracks or albums and their personalised meaning over time. Thus, observes Green: As meaning is mediated by feeling, the meanings mediated by the strongest feelings may be the ones that persist. Peak music experiences can therefore provide concrete insight into the question of how encounters with music can affect people in enduring ways. (2016: 340)

For Green, such forms of peak experience often incorporate a spatial quality, for example, a festival site and concert venue, where a particularly memorable performance was experienced. This spatial aspect of music and memory is particularly resonant in the case of contemporary popular music where so much of this music is experienced collectively. Indeed, websites and Facebook pages dedicated to older, and in many cases defunct, music venues will often host discussions by fans of their peak music experiences in those collectively enshrined spaces (see, e.g., Bennett and Strong 2018). However, memory can also inform the reception and understanding of historically important scenes and their music heritage in other ways. It is not merely lived memories, but also received memories that play a role here. Indeed, in terms of realising their ‘heritage’ status, many music scenes now are no longer simply nodes of production, performance and consumption practices (see Peterson and Bennett 2004). Rather, they are also active in the (re)production of memory and the selling of such packaged memories on to tourists and other fans. Thus, many of the most famous music scenes in the world, for example, the Nashville country music scene (Fry 2017) and the Chicago Blues scene (Grazian 2004) trade as strongly on their past as they do on the present. However, it is clearly not the case that only such historically well-established and world-famous music scenes can claim such historical and heritage status. Nor is it the case that all music scenes can boast a history that is documented and known

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about by current scenesters. Indeed, as the popular music heritage industry expands into increasingly localised spaces of music production, performance and consumption, a key focus is often the making visible and accessible to others ‘hidden’ musical pasts; that is to say musical pasts associated with localised, peripheral music scenes whose histories remain in an intangible state, in the personalised memories of those who have invested in these music scenes over time and who share ‘emotional geographies’ (Bennett and Rogers 2016) of such scenes. Such musicalised emotional geographies of space and place can also have a significant bearing on the development of popular music heritage over time. In the Introduction to this book reference was made to the Canterbury Sound, a scene that lay dormant for a period of years until the virtual resurrection of the Canterbury Sound through the Calyx website (see Bennett 2004; Draganova et al. 2021; see also Chapter 4 “Memorabilia, Collectables and Enshrinement” and Chapter 6 “Heritage Discourse and the Internet”). From there, interest in the Canterbury Sound began to grow again, both among original musicians and among fans associated with the scene and a growing trans-local fan base—many of whose primary source of connection with Canterbury and with each other was the internet (see Bennett 2002). Over time, the Canterbury Sound has grown in importance as a bona fide part of the city of Canterbury’s contemporary socio-cultural history and is documented as an important and locally distinctive aspect of English popular music history (see also Chapter 6 “Heritage Discourse and the Internet”). More specifically, this relates to a period in the late 1960s and early 1970s when a number of Canterbury artists contributed to the psychedelic, progressive rock and jazz rock styles that characterised this era. A similar situation persists in Brisbane, Australia, where rapid and successive re-developments of the city centre, particularly during the 1980s, served to eradicate from the urban landscape historically important landmarks such as Cloudland. Demolished in 1982 to make way for a residential tower block, the Cloudland Ballroom (to use the venue’s full name) had been a pivotally important venue hosting a variety of international artists, including Buddy Holly (on his only tour of Australia in 1958), the Cure, Ian Dury and the Blockheads and Midnight Oil. In addition, Cloudland also hosted a number of iconic Australian bands such as Cold Chisel, The Sports, The Saints and Midnight Oil (Stafford 2006). Although Cloudland’s physical existence is a thing of the past, for Brisbane music fans the venue has continued to exist in their collective emotional geography of the Brisbane music scene. Indeed, since

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the 2010s, there has been a growing interest in documenting the history of the Brisbane music scene. A crucial part of this has been a retrospective cultural consecration (Schmutz 2005) of Cloudland as well as other important sites that have faded into Brisbane’s collective memory such as Bruce Window Studios where local punk band The Saints recorded their debut and most remembered song ‘I’m Stranded’ in June 1976 (Willsteed 2019). Other movements to make more visible the hitherto hidden history of Brisbane’s musical past have included the Go Between Bridge (named after the Brisbane-based indie rock band The Go-Betweens) and Bee Gees Way. The latter is a 70-metre walkway in Redcliffe, Moreton Bay, in the Brisbane metropolitan area, opened in 2013 to honour the Bee Gees whose childhood home was in Redcliffe following the Gibb family’s emigration to Australia from the UK in the late 1950s. The impact of collective memory on the significance of particular spaces is therefore critical in the way that such spaces are regarded and often ultimately represented back both to locals and to visitors. Indeed, it is undoubtedly the case that a key ingredient of popular music heritage is how it serves to animate the collective imagination of audiences by effectively playing back their memories to them. As many of the most successful popular music heritage sites in the world today attest, supplying a repertoire of artefacts—images, objects and texts—consistent with the memories of visitors to these sites is critical. In that sense, to become an effective site of popular music heritage is to become a ‘memoryscape’— and one that is sufficiently seductive to be able to draw in an audience and hold their attention. At its most extreme, this can result in a hyper-­ commodification of a city’s physical and commercial infrastructure to the extent that the popular music heritage of a city becomes critically interwoven with the way that it is experienced and remembered.

Cities, ‘Sounds’ and Heritage The city’s claim on popular music heritage is a particularly strong and significant one. From the time of the emergence of the modern city, during the late nineteenth century, something that has defined urban everyday life has been the presence of cultural scenes (Straw 2004). Among such scenes, music has had a salient presence (Peterson and Bennett 2004). The famous jazz scenes of the early twentieth were all by definition urban scenes (Gioia 2011). A similar story applies in the case of blues which, despite its regional and rural origins (Oliver 1997), quickly evolved

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into an urban phenomenon, initially in the US ‘deep south’ and later in northern cities such as Chicago (Grazian 2003). By the 1950s, the association between music and the city was essentially taken for granted as cities themselves often became an important aspect of how particular music styles were branded. The aforementioned ‘Merseybeat’ and ‘Seattle Sound’ are clear examples of this as are similar terms such as the ‘Brisbane Sound’ (Regan 2019) and the Dunedin Sound, the latter referring to the city of Dunedin on New Zealand’s South Island and its vibrant indie music scene of the early 1980s (see Bannister 2006; McLeay 1994). The connection between popular music and the city is also strongly imprinted in the way that popular music is celebrated as cultural heritage. As noted earlier in this book, the city of Liverpool was an important forerunner in this context, drawing heavily on the historical legacy of the Beatles and transforming this into a heritage industry that has been widely emulated by other post-industrial cities as a means of tapping into the cultural and leisure economies that now constitute a significant stream of revenue for many urban centres (Lashua 2018). In Liverpool, the city-­ centre precincts, monuments, shops and bars dedicated to the Beatles, and The Beatles Story, a permanent interactive exhibition located at Albert Dock, serve to create a compelling narrative for those visiting the city of its significance as ‘home of the Beatles’ (see Kruse 2005). These more ‘Disneyfied’ (Matusitz and Palermo 2014) elements of Beatles memorabilia exist alongside bona fide landmarks such as Penny Lane and Strawberry Fields, physical locations that were immortalised through Beatles songs dedicated to them. Such is the seductive atmosphere of all that is on display that many tourists are apt to forget, or never to learn, that the Beatles actually spent more time away from Liverpool once they achieved initial fame. Indeed, taxi drivers in the city occasionally report having been asked by parties of tourists to take them to Abbey Road Studies (where the Beatles recorded most of their music), unaware that this is actually in London, where the Beatles were based from 1963 onwards. At its most literal, the city offers tourists, and often locals too, an embedded experience of popular music heritage. To be in the same space or spaces where a famous popular music artist lived before and/or after they became famous creates a phenomenological link between fan and artist. To walk along the same street, or gaze out of the same window, as their praised music icon, a fan may catch a glimpse of something which helped shaped that popular music artist’s life, and perhaps gain a sense of what might have inspired them to learn a musical instrument or write songs in

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the particular style that would eventually lead them to stardom. Such grounded experiences then become part of the way that the artist is remembered by their fans. Such a tactile experience allows fans to move beyond the typically mediated experience of fan-icon interaction (Frith 1988)—to gain a sense of them as real people with a history and an existence beyond that of the mechanically reproduced voice or image that they have become accustomed to experiencing. Over the years a number of different urban locations have become attractions precisely because of their association with a popular music icon. As noted above, such locations are often formally recognised and effectively branded as heritage spots for tourists to visit. However, this need not always be the case. Indeed, this kind of fan/tourist association can occur even if a particular site or place is not formally recognised as a music heritage destination. A case in point here is Hauptstrasse 155 in the Schöneberg district of Berlin. This house contains the apartment shared by David Bowie and Iggy Pop during the late 1970s when Bowie produced his famous Berlin Trilogy of albums consisting of Low (1977), Heroes (1977) and Lodger (1979) (see Trynka 2011). Although not officially open to the public, many tourists visit the spot to see the house and also visit the neighbouring cafe Neues Ufer (formerly Anderes Ufer, a colloquial German phrase connoting homosexuality, this cafe having been a popular spot for gay men and women) frequented by Bowie and Iggy during their time in Berlin. In addition to providing opportunities to visit famous local landmarks, urban popular music heritage also orientates heavily around music itself, particularly in the case of those cities that are considered key historical nodes in the development or evolution of a genre. Grazian’s (2003) work on blues tourism in Chicago provides a particularly instructive account of how a city can harness its musical legacy to accommodate a varying range of tourist tastes, perceptions and expectations. Thus, according to Grazian, over the years Chicago blues musicians and venue owners have become savvy in reading and understanding tourist interactions with blues music, acknowledging the difference between the relatively undiscerning and often voyeuristic tourist as compared with those who have a more specialist and connoisseur-like appreciation of blues artists and their music. Such tourists expect a more ‘authentic’ experience of the blues and, through their deeper knowledge of the Chicago Blues scene, know where to find this. Moreover, it is often the case that such blues purists not only are highly conversant with the music of the blues itself, but also have a deep knowledge of its history based on a long-term consumption of print and

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visual media products dedicated to this subject (the importance of ‘heritage media’ in the presentation and re-presentation of popular music history is focused on in more detail in Chapter 5  “Heritage Media and ‘classic’ Re-­presentation”). In essence then, when catering for tourists interested in the musical heritage of a city, local musicians, venue owners and promoters remain aware that music tourism is not a homogenous concern and that people embark on it with differing expectations based on their existing relationship to particular artists, music genres and scenes.

Magical History Tours Part of the assumed connection between music and place is the understanding of place as providing a nurturing quality for musicians, including providing the impetus for becoming a musician. Frith (1983) has discussed the importance of local music scenes as spaces where musicians gain initial experience of playing with other musicians, forming bands and playing in front of an audience. Finnegan (1989) develops this perspective by talking in depth about the importance of local infrastructures in supporting live music performance with many non-musicians contributing to this through, for example, the provision of rehearsal space, designing promotional materials such as gig posters and helping out as ‘roadies’. Such aspects of musicians’ formative years frequently surface in interviews many years later when discussions of space and place often feature centrally as part of self-styled biographic accounts. For example, it was previously noted how British rock band Black Sabbath frequently discuss how the experience of growing up in the industrial city of Birmingham impacted their musical style and also provided an impetus for viewing music as a form of escape from the day-to-day drudgery of manual labour in local factories and industrial plants. A more famous and well-rehearsed example of such place analysis in recounting the early history of a band is the Beatles and their connection with their home city of Liverpool. At the point when the Beatles first emerged as a national and subsequently international success, their Liverpudlian roots were an important part of the band’s appeal, with many other  British popular music artists of the time being from London and its environs, and also gave rise to a local scene in the form of Merseybeat (a scene that the Beatles were not directly associated with but considered important to its foundation nevertheless). It has previously been noted how Liverpool, by virtue of its being the home city to the Beatles, made early inroads regarding the harnessing

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music musical tourism as a local cultural industry. However, Beatles tourism is also designed to take the tourist behind the scenes, so to speak, by offering glimpses of how John Lennon, Paul McCartney, George Harrison and Ringo Starr experienced their pre-fame days, including visits to their family homes and to places such as Penny Lane and Strawberry Fields that featured in the individual Beatles earlier memories of Liverpool and later became subjects of their songs. Viewing artefacts, including the early guitars of John Lennon and Paul McCartney, in their original situ brings a new level of intimacy to the spatialisation of the Beatles whose subsequent transition to icons of global popular culture is preceded by a more organic, everyday relationship to Liverpool. A parallel tourist experience exists in Memphis, the home of Elvis Presley from 1948 until his death in 1977. As with Liverpool and the Beatles, the global reputation of Memphis, despite its rich pre-existing musical heritage, rests largely on the iconicity of Elvis. If the Beatles traded heavily on a northern English, working-class background, then likewise Elvis’s blue-collar, Deep South identity became integral to his star narrative and was one grounded in a firm sense of place. Such qualities are squarely articulated in Elvis tours of Memphis that include the singer’s first family home, in a low-income housing project, and Humes High School which Elvis attended between 1948 and 1953 and where he gave his first public appearance. The site of Elvis’s early recordings, Sun Studios, is also on the tourist route in Memphis, this offering an insight as to how the latent talent that studio boss Sam Phillips saw in Elvis became a launch pad for the artist’s future career and a key source of inspiration to those many other aspirant young musicians drawn to Elvis and his music. Notwithstanding the previously discussed elements of Disneyfication and mythification that arise from the staging of such bricks and mortar representations of popular music heritage, such representations seek to provide a grounded experience for fans of specific artists and popular music enthusiasts more broadly. In a context where so much of the experience of popular music is mediated, including the images and voices of artists themselves, the presentation of material artefacts in a close-up and personal fashion can assist with reinserting a sense of a real-life, tactile quality to the featured artists. Thus, as Kruse observes, ‘through visits to places associated with particular artists, visitors may experience a merging of the real and imagined which makes their visits especially meaningful’ (2005: 89). While feeding off a pre-digested notion among tourists about what to expect from a visit to a ‘music city’—an aspect of what Urry (1990) refers to as the tourist gaze, at

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the same time such themed tours are also developing new ways of understanding cities such as Liverpool as sites of contemporary historical celebration where that history is not confined to institutions that respectively archive the past, but as an active, ongoing celebration where tourists are welcome to participate in and co-­produce that celebration. The band or artist local history tour operates in the face of a complex set of relationships between the local and trans-local, wresting back those elements that are perceived to have an authentically ‘local’ quality to them. In that context, the representation of ordinariness is often also crucial to how such tours play out. For example, on the Elvis tours of Memphis, a site of interest is one of Elvis’s favourite restaurants. Again, such devices are intended to break down some of the myths surrounding stardom and iconicity and reframe the object of the tour as a living breathing part of the city that rubbed shoulders with other locals and contributed to the public life of the place that they resided in. While not every city can capitalise on the celebration of an individual artist as a home resident in this way, many cities are able to offer history tours designed to illustrate their importance as nodal points for music resulting in many cases in the creation, or consolidation of new musical genres. This is evident in the musical history tourism of cities such as Chicago and Nashville, recognised internationally as respective hubs for blues and country music. Again, tours undertaken in each of these places endeavour to create connections between the everyday local experience of the city in question and the circumstances that produced musical innovation.

Beyond the Bright Lights It is true to say that popular music heritage remains for the most part an urban phenomenon. Popular music heritage features tend to be based in major cities and, to a lesser extent, secondary cities and larger provincial towns. For many, this observation may be unsurprising given that most, though not all, popular music styles have characteristically urban roots. Moreover, even in the case of genres such as blues and folk, whose historical roots as grounded in styles that emerged in regional and rural places, the later incorporation of these music genres into more city-focused scenes serves to obfuscate such historical origins or, at the very least, resign them to a historical past that is often cloaked in its own romanticism from the perspective of more contemporary audiences (see, e.g., MacKinnon 1993).

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Aside from such issues of genre origin, however, it is patently clear that as the emphasis on popular music as a bona form of cultural heritage grows and the different spatial dimensions of such heritage are  increasingly acknowledged, the regional and rural dimensions of such heritage are coming into play. If much contemporary popular music has originated in city spaces, its performance and consumption (and indeed its production) have not remained confined to urban spaces. Smaller peri-urban and regional music scenes have developed (see, e.g., Bennett et al. 2020) while from the 1960s onwards major rock and pop festivals have taken place in rural settings, drawing urban audiences out into green field spaces that in some celebrated cases have infused the rock community’s anti-hegemonic ideology (see Frith 1981) with a pastoral element. Such non-urban spaces of popular music history are also attracting attention as important makers of contemporary cultural heritage. A pertinent example of this is the celebration and preservation of the site of the iconic Woodstock Music and Arts Fair, which took place between 16 and 18 August 1969. The site Woodstock is not only preserved but also home to a major rock music heritage attraction, The Museum at Bethel Woods. Opened on 4 July 2006 and featuring as its main and permanent exhibition ‘Woodstock and the Sixties’, the museum has attracted 2.3 million visitors since it opened (with 214,405 visitors in 2018 alone). A further factor that has conspired to keep the focus on popular music heritage urban centred is its tiedness to current debates and emphasis on the economic value of the so-called cultural and creative industries. Almost by definition, this work has been focused on how art and culture can become a new source of urban regeneration, a premise most pointedly illustrated in Florida’s (2005) notion of the ‘creative city’. Inspired by the post-industrial turn in the Western world from the 1970s onwards, the logic of the creative city is that this offers a new mode of cultural production based not on manufacturing of goods but on the provision and consumption of arts and culture focused forms of leisure and entertainment. In this respect, the Museum at Bethel Woods also serves as a useful illustration of how the creative industries logic can also be applied productively in a non-urban context. Upon opening, the museum quickly served to revive tourism in the region, and with that the (re)development of an infrastructure to support tourists coming from many different parts of the US and further afield. Sullivan County, where the town of Bethel (the site of the Woodstock Music and Arts Fair) is situated, had struggled with the legacy of Woodstock for a number of years. The museum has revived local

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interest in the legacy and has served as an important source of revenue for the region. Indeed, the museum has become one of the country’s larger economic regeneration projects (Spock 2010). The viability of placing popular music heritage sites in regional locations is also illustrated through other examples, notably the Australian Country Music Hall of Fame, located in the regional town of Tamworth in the state of New South Wales. Positioned approximately 420 kilometres (260  miles) north of Sydney (the state capital), the Australian Country Music Hall of Fame was established in 1973. One of the largest producers of country music in the world after the US, Australia’s country music history dates back to the late 1700s and is grounded in folk songs and ‘bush music’ sung between the 1780s and the 1920s. In the 1930s artists such as Tex Morton, Buddy Williams, Shirley Thomas and Smoky Dawson popularised a style of country music more influenced by American artists but still retaining a distinctively local style (Smith 2010). Given its now almost 50-year history as the acknowledged ‘country music capital’ of Australia, Tamworth qualifies as an early example of a regional location that combined discourses of rurality and creative labour. As Gibson and Davidson note: Since the 1970s, and particularly in the 1990s, country music has come to define Tamworth, gaining it unprecedented media attention and creating an intangible, but invaluable, stock of meanings to be deployed in tourism promotions … Key actors in Tamworth, as well as national and international media and other commercial organisations, have mobilised … discourses of rurality as part of it becoming a centre for country music in Australia. (2004: 387)

Prior to the establishment of the Australian Country Music Hall of Fame, Tamworth began staging its annual country music festival. Over the years this too has developed into a defining feature of the town attracting both national and international country music performers and fans. The festival has also generated international exposure for Indigenous Australian country music artists including Jimmy Little, Troy Cassar-Daley and Kirsty Lee Akers. The association of a famous musician with a particular place also has proven to be the source of regional and rural popular music heritage promotion and tourism. For example, the Canadian  regional town of St. Catharines, located on the Niagara Peninsula in south-west Ontario

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(approximately 122  kilometres (76  miles) from Toronto) has achieved notoriety as the birthplace of Neil Peart, drummer and lyricist of Canadian rock band Rush. Over the years, this fact has been celebrated in various ways, including at one point a tour that took visitors to places associated with Peart’s time as a resident of St. Catharines, among these Lakeside Park, a small park on the shores of Lake Ontario where Peart worked as a teenager during school vacations. Lakeside Park became more well known among Rush fans as the title and subject of a song on the band’s third album Caress of Steel (1975). In 2020 following Peart’s death, residents of St. Catharines voted to name a recently constructed pavilion at Lakeside Park ‘Neil Peart Pavillion. According to the St Catharines Standard: Peart’s name was on a St. Catharines Heritage Advisory Committee list of significant local individuals whose contributions to the city are worthy of formal recognition … City staff will work with the Peart family and the city’s heritage committee on interpretive signage at the pavilion to reflect the memory of Peart’s career. A Neil Peart commemorative task force was also struck by the city in April [2020] to look at other ideas for honouring Peart with a statue or memorial.2

Another interesting example of a regional heritage event focused on a former resident turned music celebrity is BonFest (see Thompson 2020). This event began in 2006 in the regional Scottish town of Kirriemuir and celebrates the musical legacy of Ronald Belford Scott, otherwise known as Bon Scott, former vocalist of Australian rock band AC/DC. Scott lived in Kirriemuir for the first six years of his life years before emigrating with his family to Australia (initially to Melbourne and later to Freemantle in Western Australia where Scott’s legacy is also marked by a bronze statue at the town’s harbour). BonFest was conceived by DD8 Music, a local music collective that promotes various local music initiatives in the region. Seeking to promote Kirriemuir’s connections with AC/CD, the initial plan was to stage a Bon Scott memorial concert with the aim of raising funds to install a heritage plaque. As Thompson notes: By 2006 both goals had been achieved, with a large concert given by an AC/DC tribute band in the local town hall, and the unveiling of a carved stone memorial in the town center, displaying the opening bars of the song “Let There Be Rock”. (2020: 396)

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BonFest became such a successful venture in marking the connection between Kirriemuir and Bon Scott that ten years later DD8 decided upon another project to mark the singer’s legacy in the form of a life-size bronze statue to be erected in the town centre. The statue was unveiled by Mark Evans, former bass player with AC/DC and Scott’s bandmate from 1975 to 1977. According to Thompson: ‘The statue now attracts hundreds of visitors per  annum, with fans making a pilgrimage to have their photograph taken next to Bon Scott almost everyday of the year’ (2020: 397). In addition to marking the birthplace of famous musicians or the scene of a landmark festival, regional and indeed remote rural places can hold other kinds of heritage significance for popular music. For example, both Bob Dylan and the Band (a Canadian-American rock band and one time backing band for Dylan) have each commented on how the rurality of the upper New York State town of Woodstock inspired their songwriting and provided an important retreat from rigours of touring. A similar story has been told by Led Zeppelin members Robert Plant and Jimmy Page, concerning the time they spent at Bron-Yr-Aur (Welsh for ‘hill of gold’), a remote eighteenth-century cottage in Snowdonia North Wales. Following extensive touring in North America, Plant, who had holidayed at the cottage with his parents in the 1950s suggested to Page that they should spend time there to both recuperate and write material for Led Zeppelin’s next album (which became Led Zeppelin III, released in October 1970). The iconicity inscribed in the cottage through its associations with Led Zeppelin came largely through two tracks, the song ‘Bron-Y-Aur Stomp’ (from Led Zeppelin III) and an instrumental acoustic guitar track entitled ‘Bron-Yr-Aur’ recorded during the sessions for Led Zeppelin III but appearing on Led Zeppelin’s later album Physical Graffiti (1975).3 Bron-­ Yr-­Aur is now privately owned and is rented out as a holiday cottage. Not surprisingly a number of people who stay at the cottage are fans of Led Zeppelin and have indicated on fan websites and other online forums that their long-term interest in visiting Bron-Yr-Aur was fired by a curiosity in the cottage and its location as places that inspired songs by one of the most enduring rock bands of the 1970s. Although not presented, nor advertised, as a popular music heritage as such, it is clear that in taking its place within a lineage of rural dwellings and settings that have inspired artists over the centuries, Bron-Yr-Aur demonstrates the continuing legacy of this trend into the era of industrialised music. In doing so, the cottage also subtly subverts the dominant emphasis on popular music heritage as an exclusively urban concern by offering fans an opportunity to

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experience another perspective on the lives and experiences of iconic artists and the inspiration for their music. Bron-Yr-Aur also serves as an effective example of how, even when regional and rural (or indeed other ostensibly heritage-worthy) sites are not packaged as such, through their own knowledge and understanding of artist histories and biographies fans are often able to create their own narratives of popular music heritage.

Conclusion This chapter has considered the significance of space and place in the creation of popular music heritage. The discussion began by considering how through processes of spatialisation, place can be socio-culturally appropriated and inscribed with new forms of meaning. Using Liverpool and Memphis as examples, it was then illustrated how such malleable aspects of space and place have been exploited by the local tourism industry in each of these cities to reposition their respective claims to popular music heritage as highly visible and strongly punctuated marketing campaigns. Such activities are reinforced by salient discourses of artists, critics and fans that link space and place to musical legacy through suggestions that specific genres and their distinctive musical and sonic qualities are directly linked to their place of origin. Such assertions can themselves become palpable motives for fans to visit particular places in order to personally experience the place-centred mood and vibe that provided the inspiration for iconic songs or albums. Later in the chapter, it was demonstrated how, despite the still dominant perception of popular music as an urban and industrial phenomenon, various links between popular music icons and regional spaces are also beginning to engender forms of popular music heritage creation and preservation. These may be officially sanctioned by the local authorities or may exist as more informally understood forms of popular music heritage tourism.

Notes 1. Even here, however, claims of music and musicians to be pursuing authentically ‘traditional’ music practices are often problematic as seen, for example, in MacKinnon’s (1993) study of the ‘re-invention’ of the British folk tradition that was inspired by American folk revivalists such as Ramblin’ Jack Elliot and Bob Dylan (see Mitchell 2007).

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2. See https://www.rushisaband.com/blog/2020/06/03/5444/St.-­ Catharines-­city-­council-­votes-­to-­name-­pavilion-­at-­Lakeside-­Park-­after-­ Neil-­Peart 3. In fact, a number of other songs released on Led Zeppelin III and subsequent Led Zeppelin albums date back to Plant and Page’s time at Bron-Yr-­ Aur. These include ‘Friends’ and ‘That’s the Way’ (Led Zeppelin III), ‘Over the Hills and Far Away’ and ‘The Crunge’ (Houses of the Holy) and ‘The Rover’ and ‘Down by the Seaside’ (Physical Graffiti).

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Frith, Simon (1981) ‘The Magic That Can Set You Free: The Ideology of Folk and the Myth of Rock’, Popular Music, 1: 159–68. Frith, Simon (1983) Sound Effects: Youth, Leisure and the Politics of Rock. London: Constable. Frith, Simon (1988) Music for Pleasure: Essays in the Sociology of Pop. Oxford: Polity Press. Fry, Robert W. (2017) Performing Nashville: Music Tourism and Country Music’s Main Street. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Gibson, Chris (2005) ‘Recording Studios: Relational Spaces of Creativity in the City’, Built Environment, 31(3): 258–73. Gibson, Chris and Davidson, Deborah (2004) ‘Tamworth, Australia’s “Country Music Capital”: Place Marketing, Rurality, and Resident Reactions’, Journal of Rural Studies, 20: 387–404. Gioia, Ted (2011) The History of Jazz, 2nd Edn. New  York, NY: Oxford University Press. Grazian, David (2003) Blue Chicago: The Search for Authenticity in Urban Blues Clubs. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Grazian, David (2004) ‘The Symbolic Economy of Authenticity in the Chicago Blues Scene’, in A. Bennett, and R.A. Peterson (eds) Music Scenes: Local, Trans-­ Local and Virtual. Nashville, TN: Vanderbilt University Press, pp. 31–47. Green, Ben (2016) ‘“I Always Remember That Moment”: Peak Music Experiences as Epiphanies’, Sociology, 50(2): 333–48. Harrison, Leigh Michael (2010) ‘Factory Music: How the Industrial Geography and Working-Class Environment of Post-War Birmingham Fostered the Birth of Heavy Metal’, Journal of Social History, 44(1): 145–158. Hodgkinson, James A. (2004) ‘The Fanzine Discourse Over Post-rock’, in A. Bennett and R.A. Peterson (eds) Music Scenes: Local, Translocal and Virtual. Nashville, TN: Vanderbilt University Press, pp. 221–237. Keith, Michael and Pile, Steve (1993) ‘Introduction Part 1: The Politics of Place’ in M.  Keith and S.  Pile (eds) Place and the Politics of Identity. London: Routledge, pp. 1–21. Kruse, Robert J. (2005) ‘The Beatles as Place Makers: Narrated Landscapes in Liverpool, England’, Journal of Cultural Geography, 22(2): 87–114. Lashua, Brett D. (2018) ‘Popular Music Heritage and Tourism’, in S.  Baker, C. Strong, L. Istvandity and Z. Cantillon (eds) The Routledge Companion to Popular Music History and Heritage. London: Routledge, pp. 153–162. Long, Phillip (2014) ‘Popular Music, Pyschogeography, Place, Identity and Tourism’, Tourist Studies, 41(1): 48–65. MacKinnon, Niall (1993) The British Folk Scene: Musical Performance and Social Identity. Buckingham: Open University Press.

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Matusitz, Jonathan and Palermo, Lauren (2014) ‘The Disneyfication of the World: A Grobalisation Perspective’, Journal of Organisational Transformation & Social Change, 11(2): 91–107. McLeay, Colin (1994) ‘The “Dunedin Sound”: New Zealand Rock and Cultural Geography’, Perfect Beat, 2(1), 38–50. Mitchell, Gillian (2007) The North American Folk Music Revival: Nation and Identity in the United States and Canada, 1945–1980. London: Routledge. Naiman, Tiffany (2015) ‘When Are We Now? Walls and Memory in David Bowie’s Berlins’, in T.  Cinque, C.  Moore and S.  Redmond (eds) Enchanting David Bowie: Space/Time/Body/Memory. New York, NY: Bloomsbury, pp. 305–22. Negus, Keith (1992) Producing Pop: Culture and Conflict in the Popular Music Industry. London: Edward Arnold. Norman, Phillip (1981) Shout! The True Story of the Beatles. London: Penguin. Oliver, Paul (1997) The Story of the Blues. Boston, MA: Northeastern University Press. Palmer, Tony (1977) All You Need is Love: The Story of Popular Music. London: Futura. Peterson, Richard A. and Bennett, Andy (2004) ‘Introducing Music Scenes’, in A. Bennett and R.A. Peterson (eds) Music Scenes: Local, Translocal, and Virtual. Nashville, TN: Vanderbilt University Press, pp. 1–15. Regan, Scott B. (2019) The Brisbane Sound. PhD by Creative Works, Queensland University of Technology, Queensland, Australia. Sancar, Hahriye Hazer (2003) ‘City, Music and Place Attachment: Beloved Instanbul’, Journal of Urban Design, 8(3): 269–291. Schmutz, Vaughn (2005) ‘Retrospective Cultural Consecration in Popular Music’, American Behavioral Scientist 48(11): 1510–23. Smart, Barry (1993) Postmodernity. Routledge: London. Smith, Graeme (2010) ‘The Gendered Voice of Australian Country Music’, Context: Journal of Music Research, 35/36: 27–38. Spock, Daniel (2010) ‘The Museum at Bethel Woods Center for the Arts: The Story of the Sixties and Woodstock. Bethel, N.Y.’, The Journal of American History, 97(1): 127–31. Stafford, Andrew (2006) Pig City: From the Saints to Savage Garden, 2nd edn. Brisbane: University of Queensland Press. Staiff, Russell, Bushell, Robyn, and Watson, Steve (eds) (2013) Heritage and Tourism: Place, Encounter, Engagement. Oxon: Routledge. Stratton, Jon (2008) ‘The Difference of Perth Music: A Scene in Cultural and Historical Context’, Continuum: Journal of Media and Cultural Studies, 22(5): 613–622. Straw, Will (2004) ‘Cultural Scenes’, Loisir et Société / Society and Leisure, 27(2): 411–422.

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Thompson, Emil (2020) ‘Three Rural Scottish Music Scenes—An Ethnographic Study’, Popular Music & Society, 34(4): 389–400. Trynka, Paul (2011) Starman—David Bowie: The Definitive Biography. London: Sphere. Urry, John (1990) The Tourist Gaze: Leisure and Travel in Contemporary Societies. London: Sage. Waterton, Emma (2013) ‘Heritage Tourism and its Representations’, in R. Staiff, R. Bushell and S. Watson, Steve (eds) Heritage and Tourism: Place, Encounter, Engagement. Oxon: Routledge, pp. 64–84. Williams, Raymond (2020) Culture and Materialism, 3rd edn. London: Verso. Williamson, Joel with Donald L.  Shaw (2015) Elvis Presley: A Southern Life. New York, NY: Oxford University Press. Willsteed, John (2019) ‘“Here Today”: The Role of Ephemera in Clarifying Underground Culture’, in A. Bennett and P. Guerra (eds) DIY Cultures and Underground Music Scenes. London: Routledge, pp. 160–170.

Museums, Music Halls of Fame and Fan Conventions

Over the last twenty years, the frequency and range of exhibitions themed around aspects of popular music history in museums, galleries and other exhibition spaces has significantly increased. In the city of London alone, between 2013 and 2017, there was a major, multi-venue exhibition on punk as well as exhibitions on the life and work of the late David Bowie and on the career of the much-celebrated progressive rock band Pink Floyd. Across the Nordic countries, a vibrant network of popular music museums has been developed with an inaugural conference held in June 2019.1 The vogue for displays of popular music heritage in museums obviously relates in large part to the heritage boom in rock and pop that has already been noted and discussed in the Introduction chapter and Chapter of this book. What began as a mass-produced popular culture with an anticipated short shelf life is now being increasingly subjected to retrospective consecration (Schmutz 2005), with the objects, images and texts of popular music from different eras being reinscribed as cultural artefacts that offer critical insights as to key cultural trends emerging in the mid-to-­ late twentieth century. Bearing in mind the now close to the seven-decade history of popular music in its contemporary, industrially produced sense, this quality of popular music artefacts is writ large in the appeal of numerous artists and the genres with which they are associated. A further dimension of this museumification of popular music is its place within the positioning  of culture as a new form of capitalist venture in the post-­ industrial era. Within this context, the growth and development of © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 A. Bennett, Popular Music Heritage, Pop Music, Culture and Identity, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-08296-2_3

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cultural resources have largely been managed under the banner of the cultural industries (Miller 2009; see also Introduction to this book). The museum, as an institution dedicated to the preservation and display of artefacts pertaining to history and heritage, has become a significant node in the network of spaces and places where culture is consumed as part of what is now referred to as the leisure economy (Nazareth 2007). This chapter considers the significance of the museum and similar spaces of cultural consumption in the production and reproduction of practices and discourses of popular music heritage making. The chapter begins by examining the relationship between popular music and the museum and, within this, the museum’s role in repositioning popular music from its former status as profane culture (Willis 1978) to its more recently acquired status as cultural heritage. Consideration is then made of music ‘halls of fame’ as in some ways analogous to museums in the way that popular music history is displayed and celebrated. Although the museums in the main  feature exhibitions pertaining to aspects of popular music on a temporary basis, music halls of fame serve as more permanent markers of popular music history and heritage—with displayed objects, images and texts being supplemented by regular guest talks and performances from celebrated artists. Finally, the chapter considers fan conventions as a further aspect of popular music history and heritage on display. Although fan conventions are not typically associated with museums and halls of fame, the participatory nature of the convention allows for a specific kind of exhibition as many fans emulate the visual image of their rock and pop icons in what could be seen as a corporal display of popular music heritage on the surface of the body. Similarly, the artefacts on display and/or for purchase at conventions tell their own story concerning the retrospective consecration of popular music as heritage.

Popular Music and the Museum: An Uneasy Alliance Until around the mid-1990s it was relatively unusual to see aspects of contemporary popular music history and heritage being displayed in museums, galleries and other exhibition spaces. Indeed, it would be fair to suggest that there was a significant element of institutional bias within organisations focused on the preservation of art and culture that served to conspire against the consecration of popular music artefacts. Thus, despite the huge popularity of many rock and pop icons, their cultural significance was not considered compatible with the artefacts of culture, history and

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heritage that were typically displayed in museums. The fact that rock and pop, at least from the 1950s to the 1980s, were considered ‘youth’ musics impacted significantly, and to a large extent negatively, the way that elite cultural tastemakers and high-brow cultural institutions, not least of all museums and galleries, tended to view post-war rock and pop genres. In essence, the mere fact of the ‘youth’ consumer for rock and pop served as a viable lever in the cultural legitimacy argument; those favouring more elite art and culture together with artefacts considered to be invested with traditional markers of national cultural identity continued to promote an essentially conservative discourse of cultural heritage. The musical genres consumed by youth were argued to be plastic and ephemeral; products of mass culture that corrupted youth and dumbed down their capacity for understanding and appreciating more challenging and intellectual forms of culture. This is exemplified in Paul Johnson’s (1964) New Statesmen article, ‘The Menace of Beatlism’, which was published in the wake of the Beatles’ unprecedented commercial success and appeal to a global youth audience: If the Beatles and their like were in fact what the youth of Britain wanted, one might well despair. I refuse to believe it—and so will any other intelligent person who casts his or her mind back far enough. What were we doing at 16? I remember reading the whole of Shakespeare and Marlowe, writing poems and plays and stories. At 16, I and my friends heard our first performance of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony; I can remember the excitement even today. We would not have wasted 30 seconds of our precious time on the Beatles and their ilk. (Johnson 1964: 327)

Johnson’s scathing attack on the Beatles and also the broader sphere of post-war popular music and youth culture during the early 1960s was, even at the time of its publication, an extreme form of commentary that attracted significant criticism from readers of the article. Nevertheless, Johnson’s statements flagged an underlying sentiment on the part of elite cultural institutions that popular music culture was a worthless commodity form and thus undeserving of recognition as culture in the more formally acknowledged sense of the word. Such a view remained prevalent for the next thirty years, even as many of the artists who the cultural elite had considered to be meaningless and ephemeral retained popularity and in many cases assumed iconic status. From the point of view of the cultural elite, popular music was regarded as popular culture rather than culture of

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value in the sense that it contributed to anything other than the fads and fashions of youth leisure and entertainment. This viewpoint only began to loosen when post-war generations started to reach middle age and, in some cases, attained influence as tastemakers and agents of cultural consecration in their own right. As such, during the mid-1990s perspectives on the cultural value of post-war popular music began to change, this being signalled by the emergence of terms such as classic rock and classic pop, terms that would have been unthinkable during the post-war years. No longer was popular music considered a throwaway, ephemeral object of mass youth entertainment. Rather it came increasingly to be regarded as meaningful in a cultural sense—as something that had played a significant part in shaping the trajectory of late twentieth-century history and culture. One immediately obvious consequence of this shift was a rapid transformation in the way that rock and pop artefacts were repositioned in terms of their cultural representation. A wide array of rock and pop artefacts from the 1950s onwards, including stage costumes, musical instruments, photographs, concert tickets, posters, albums and a variety of other objects, became prized items of worth and also began to be more frequently displayed in museums and other exhibition spaces. This also extended to other popular music-related artefacts including handwritten lyrics, ‘set lists’ (of the paper variety taped down to the floor of the stage during a concert as a guide to the artist of the song sequence during a performance), fan mail and personal letters from and to notable rock and pop icons. Such has been the rapidity and extent of this transformation in the perceived cultural worth and heritage value now attached to artefacts from contemporary popular music’s past that it has become almost commonplace to see museum exhibitions celebrating the life and work of particular artists such as David Bowie, Pink Floyd and AC/DC (the latter being the subject of an international touring exhibition in 2011–2012). Similarly, entire genres and their cultural legacy have also become a focus for museum exhibitions, as seen, for example, with the Punk London exhibition of 2016 (Robinson 2018) and the ‘Home of Metal’ exhibition that has utilised a range of venues across the city of Birmingham and the English west midlands (Collins and Long 2014). Nevertheless, despite this changed perception of popular music, from throwaway ephemera to bona fide aspect of cultural heritage, the relationship between popular music and the museum remains in many ways an uneasy alliance. Thus, even as more popular music artists, genres and eras

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are becoming the focus of museum exhibitions, scepticism remains concerning the place of popular music in the museum space. There are various factors to consider in this respect, including the hierarchical nature of the museumification of popular music and impact of this on who and what is selected to feature in museum exhibitions and what is excluded. Thus, although the institutional intolerance for popular music in the museum setting has eased over the last thirty years, decisions as to how to represent popular music in museums and which artists, genres and eras to include continue to be subject to vetting processes. Various interests come into play here, including a desire to broaden the appeal of museums as widely as possible. Thus, as Leonard notes, due to their reliance on public funding, museums are expected to demonstrate inclusivity, with popular music being ‘used within museums in a number of practical ways in order to encourage participation by groups generally seen as hard to reach’ (2010: 173). Ostensibly, such pressure on museums to appeal to diverse interests would suggest an openness to working with a range of artists from a diverse range of genres. In reality, however, existing cannons of musical value also play critically into curatorial decisions with the perhaps predictable outcome that the content of museum exhibitions with popular music themes tend to closely mirror established mainstream representations of what count as key artists and critical milestones in the careers of such artists. Clearly, an economic rationale also underpins such an alignment, with museums, as a significant aspect of the cultural industries, often being required to turn over profit generated through ticket sales. With such an economic imperative to consider, it tends to be those artists who are already recognised within existing cannons of popular music that are chosen as topic matter for museum exhibitions as these artists are predicted to draw the largest audiences. Indeed, it is significant to note that the institutional bias which many music fans perceive in the curatorial decisions of museums has also contributed to a vibrant and expanding range of DIY popular music heritage preservation practices (Bennett 2009; see also Chapter  “Memorabilia, Collectables and Enshrinement” and Chapter “Heritage Discourse and the Internet”). The emergence of the DIY sphere of popular music heritage preservation, as a means of ‘filling in the gaps’ left by official forms of popular music heritage preservation, points to another critical point of friction in the museumification of popular music; specifically, the fact that in the main what is on display (or not, as the case may be) forms part of living memory for many of those who visit museum exhibitions. In choosing to

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visit an exhibition, be this focused on a specific music artist or a particular genre of music, visitors are often also expecting to be able to relive or at least reflect on an aspect of their own past. The same cannot be said of exhibitions that focus on earlier periods of history where such a personal investment in the artefacts on display will be markedly less evident. Similarly, in the case of exhibitions dealing with earlier periods of history, visitors, except for those with an advanced knowledge of the theme of the exhibition, will view such displays with a relatively uncritical stance in terms of artefacts featured and the narratives of presentation applied. In the case of popular music, however, to a greater or lesser extent opinions, as to what is displayed and how it is displayed in a museum exhibition will be based on how this aligns with personal memories of an artist(s), genre, scene or era. Indeed, such personal experience and investment may also prompt questions of legitimacy. This was evident in the case of the 2016 Punk London exhibition when the decision to stage the event met with mixed feelings among many punk fans, some of whom suggested that making punk and its associated cultural artefacts the topic of a museum exhibition of any kind was antithetical to the oppositional ethos of punk. Thus, as contemporary historian Lucy Robinson observed in an extended review of the event: Punk London explores what happens when popular cultures are used to tell bigger stories, and when something that was never meant to last ends up in a museum. When our youthful experiences and our own local music scenes are incorporated into our national heritage, we should all feel included it seems. Except that every attempt to collate a scene draws boundaries, names codes, and forms narratives around a cultural expression that excludes as much as invites self-recognition. (2018: 313–14)

Robinson’s comments highlight the problems that occur when aspects of living history are incorporated into the museum context, particularly when they focus on aspects of cultural practice that are considered by those who were present at the time to have been ‘of the moment’ and part of a spontaneous reaction to a series of temporal, locally specific events. Much of what unfolded in the realm of popular music and its associated cultural styles and scenes was inscribed with such qualities of spontaneity, the legacy of such events being as much down to personal reflection as the significance of tangible artefacts on display. Such a sentiment is also frequently shared by the musicians at the centre of the music ‘heritage making’

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industry. Indeed, for many of these artists, the notion that their careers would span more than a few years is still a difficult thing for them to contemplate. In other cases, popular music artists who are now highly celebrated for their musical innovation and revered as ‘heritage acts’ have languished in obscurity for much of their lives and in some cases died well before their talents were critically acknowledged. A case in point is singersongwriter Nick Drake who released three albums during the early 1970s before dying at the age of twenty-six due to an overdose of prescribed antidepressant medication. Commenting on the reissue of Drake’s debut album Bryter Layter (1971) in 2013, Hepworth makes the following observations: With its curious combination of antique trade fakery and digital sheen the 2013 Bryter Layter project was the most elaborate example yet of the heritage rock industry’s attempt to conjure up the allegedly magical moment in early 1971 when that record was released. In truth, there was no such moment, magical or otherwise, no feeling that something precious was happening, or even that an opportunity had been missed. The concept of rock posterity hadn’t yet been invented. Drake died unknown in 1974. (2017: 71—72)

This in turn points to another element of friction that exists between popular music as a cultural form and its acquired status as an object of reverence in context of the museum, that is, is the frequently intangible nature of popular music’s everyday appeal and deeper cultural significance, including how this evolves over time. Indeed, while decontextualised artefacts displayed in a museum may tell a partial story of a music artist’s creative and cultural contributions, popular music is also a sensory experience linked to the sound of the music and the visual spectacle of the artist as a performer (see, e.g., Green 2016). Nick Mason, drummer with iconic progressive rock band Pink Floyd, commented on this very issue when discussing the motivation for establishing Nick Mason’s Saucerful of Secrets, a band comprising of Mason and other musicians including Gary Kemp (of Spandau Ballet) who perform Pink Floyd material from 1967 to 1972, the latter being the year prior to the release of Pink Floyd’s most celebrated album Dark Side of the Moon. Mason thus commented that through his involvement in the Victoria and Albert museum’s Pink Floyd exhibition in 2017, he had come to realise that his critical point of connection with Pink Floyd’s legacy—and something inevitably missing from the

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V&A exhibition—was his experience of actually performing the band’s music live on stage.2 Such visceral qualities of popular music and its memories are largely lost in the relatively sterile setting of the museum space; even in those instances where multi-media features are used to in an attempt to reinstall music artefacts in their original contexts, such efforts are incapable of fully capturing the aura of the musical experience. Thus, as Leonard observes: Although the nature of [the] objects [on display] is manifold, from ticket stubs and set lists to instruments and stage clothes, the challenge is to construct, reflect and evoke particular histories through tangible artefacts … While the material culture of popular music offers a vista on cultures of production, mediation, consumption, creativity and sociality, it is also something of a silent witness. (2007: 148)

The patronage from ageing fans of the bands and individual artists featured in museum exhibitions is important to the critical and commercial success of such exhibitions. Equally, it is a given that in making choices concerning which artists to feature in exhibitions, museum directors and curators will ultimately need to make these choices based on the likely numbers of visitors that they will attract. As such, while popular music exhibitions are invested in the transformation of rock and pop artists and their work into objects of heritage and historical worth, they are at the same time driven by economic imperatives and a commercial logic not dissimilar from that underpinning the music industry—and the same commercial logic that once conspired against the reification of rock and pop as having deeper cultural value. Indeed, while museums work to overturn previous perceptions of popular music as ephemeral and to present it as bona fide culture, an ephemerality of a different order will presently need to be engaged with—specifically that of generational memory. Those who frequent pop and rock exhibitions in museums are in one critical sense doing so in order to re-engage with and relive their generational memories of particular icons they have followed during their youth. As such, it may well be the case that in their retrospective celebration of popular music’s past, museums, rather than developing a new curatorial cannon of popular music history and heritage representations, will become in effect tied to the dictates of successive generational tastes. Thus, as the rock and pop icons of the 1960s and 1970s cease to be aspects of living memory, the way in

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which they are represented by museums and their significance for future generations is a significant question, particularly as the texts and images associated with such icons are already part of readily accessible digital media archives which are likely to become increasingly more central to how people will remember the past in an overall sense. At present, the museum can be seen as a place that serves popular music fans for whom the analogue world of the past is still relevant as part of their shared generational history. Within this, the tactile objects of popular music consumption that pervade the memories of those generations born before the digital age are a critical linchpin for museum displays and their representation of popular music’s past. Even taking this factor into account, however, it is clear that museum exhibitions of popular music-­ related artefacts by no means meet the approval of all music fans who came of age between the 1950s and the early 1980s. As noted above, when the Punk London exhibitions were staged in 2016, they were met with resistance by some ageing punks who questioned the relevance of museums as places for the celebration of punk’s legacy. Although the anti-hegemonic and anti-materialistic nature of punk (Hebdige 1979) makes it perhaps an obvious candidate for such a critical reaction on the part of fans, this reaction is perhaps indicative of the way followers of other genres also feel about the museumification of rock and pop. Thus, for many, it is arguable that the presence of popular music in the museum connotes a sense of past glory, as something that has had its cultural heyday several decades previously. In contrast, many fans, including ageing fans, would rather celebrate the ongoing legacy of musical genres by engaging with this legacy as it manifests in the music of new artists for established genres such as punk, metal, hard rock and so on. Notwithstanding such present and foreseeable limits to the viability of museums as mediators of popular music heritage, the number and range of opportunities for experiencing museum exhibitions of popular music artists, genres and eras is a currently expanding aspect of the popular music heritage landscape. In countries throughout the world, new museums and exhibitions appear each year. These take the form of both official activities and initiatives, both state and privately funded, as well as a wide range of do-it-yourself (DIY) activities that are often run by volunteer staff and on a shoestring budget (Baker and Huber 2014). A related, if perhaps less well-documented, aspect of popular music’s reframing as heritage is seen in the incorporation of pop and rock photography in the museum and  gallery setting. In many ways, photographic

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artefacts from popular music history are equally as important in framing discourses of heritage as the other images, objects and texts discussed in this book. Indeed, many photographs of music performers have become iconic in their own right, notable examples being Joel Brodsky’s ‘Young Lion’ photograph of Doors’ singer Jim Morrison taken in 1967 and included on the band’s first album and Mick Rock’s photograph of rock band Queen for their Queen II (1974) album, an image inspired by a much earlier photograph of singer and actress Marlene Dietrich. Such examples are part of a vast photographic history of rock and pop from the 1950s onwards, much of this capturing in the moment happenings of life at home, in the studio, on the road and on the stage. The status of popular music photography became increasingly significant from the 1960s when, as Hernádendez de Toledo notes, touring artists frequently ‘invited photographers to go with them as if they were part of the band. Photographers went on tour with the musicians and took photos of their daily lives, the concerts and portraits in different places’ (2018: 27). Initially the aim of taking such photographs was for the purposes of using them to accompany magazine articles or interviews with the artists, or on some occasions for use as album artwork (Edwards 2010). However, as rock and pop began to assume heritage status, photographs of music artists started to take on a different resonance, as documents of artists’ lives and creative legacies. It has also been frequently noted that popular music photography has the effect of immortalising particular artists, capturing and preserving them at their youthful ‘best’—or in the case of artists such as Jimi Hendrix, Jim Morrison, Janis Joplin, Brian Jones, Kurt Cobain and Amy Winehouse, who all died at the age of 27, preserving their memory overall as youth icons. The potency of photographic collections to evoke such a legacy can be seen in examples such as Gered Mankowitz’s (2020) collection of photographs taken of The Rolling Stones in 1966. Published as a book in 2020, the collection captures the Rolling Stones following their initial rise to fame on the back of hit singles including ‘(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction’ and ‘The Last Time’. The collection of photographs—of the band’s then-­ current line-up, Mick Jagger, Brian Jones, Keith Richards, Charlie Watts and Bill Wyman—is taken at the individual homes of the band members. Over the years, many photographers have acquired significant fame and notoriety in their own right through the iconic images they have produced of rock and pop performers during their prime: these include Henry Diltz (cover photo of The Doors’ (1970) Morrison Hotel), the aforementioned Mick Rock (cover photo of Queen II (1974) plus a vast portfolio of images

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of iconic artists such as David Bowie, Lou Reed and Iggy Pop and the Stooges), Jenny Lens (among the few photographers to document punk’s early years in the UK and the US) and Pennie Smith (staff photographer for British music newspaper the New Musical Express during which she documented a number of bands, among them the Clash including the iconic photo of bassist Paul Simonson used as the cover of the band’s 1979 album London Calling). The appeal of rock and pop photography and its ready use in a range of mediums to promote and illustrate the work of artists over the years has led to its ready translation as an artefact of popular music heritage. In galleries around the world, photographic collections are now a regular feature. These range from photographs spanning decades and covering a number of artists, for example, ‘What a Life! Rock Photography by Tony Mott’ (Wollongong Art Gallery, Australia), to London’s Victoria and Albert Museum exhibition of previously unseen photographs of David Bowie taken between 1973 and 1976 as the artist transitioned from his Ziggy Stardust image to the ‘Thin White Duke’ era of his career.

Halls of Fame Another prominent space for the celebration of popular music history is the music hall of fame. A generic term with localised, sometimes genre-­ specific variations, the ‘hall of fame’ shares many similar features with the museum, the obvious distinction being that in the case of the hall of fame the focus is exclusively on the celebration of (popular) music history rather than placing music as one among a range of historically and culturally significant artefacts. In many cases, the music hall of fame is also demonstrably more engaged with the significance of music as a live performance medium. Thus, in addition to containing still life artefacts and audio-visual material for public consumption, many music halls of fame also feature live music performances on a regular basis, often in purpose-built auditoriums. Similarly, as places that occupy a space that is distinct from ‘high art’ institutions, such as museums and galleries, halls of fame present as both more embracing of popular music as a form of contemporary culture and are inclusive in a general sense to those who wish to participate in the celebration of rock and pop’s creative and cultural legacy. Such inclusion may also extend to education, specifically through the objective of promoting popular music history as a part of the curriculum in schools and higher education institutions (Santelli 1997). This positioning of halls of fame as

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non-elitist is also frequently managed through the sites chosen for their installation. Such sites are often not conventionally recognised as spaces of art and culture. A pertinent example of this is the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in the US. Following a series of proposals, the post-industrial city of Cleveland, Ohio, was chosen as the site for the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame due to the city’s association with the origin of the term rock and roll during the mid-1950s by local radio DJ Alan Freed (see Gillett 1983). As Santelli observes: For the first time, rock and roll had been officially institutionalized. Instruments, lyrics, stage costumes, diaries, albums, stage sets, concert programs, rare photographs, and old film footage, among thousands of other items, had been assembled under one roof for public scrutiny and long-term safekeeping. But from the beginning, the goal of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and Museum was not only to preserve this growing collection of artifacts, but to use them to tell the story of how and why popular music had such an effect on American culture in the past half century. (1997: 97)

Although not the first of its kind, the location, scale and flurry of publicity that accompanied the launch of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame was such that it quickly became established as a key arbiter for the conferral of heritage status and prestige on a cultural form that up until that point had failed to gain traction as anything other than mass-produced ephemera. Despite its important contribution in re-addressing the cultural bias that had hitherto excluded popular music from consideration as a heritage-­worthy form of creative undertaking, since its inception the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame has also attracted a significant level of scrutiny. Much of this has been directed towards the question of how representative the Hall is in terms of its annual roster of nominations with some observers arguing that a significant amount of bias exists in the process of nomination and the selection of inductees. Bledsoe, for example, notes that despite the Hall’s induction in more recent times of artists from the fields of hip hop and pop there still tends to be a rock bias underpinning the inductee selection process. Although this does not preclude other artists from being selected, those with a ‘historical positioning in the field of rock music’ are likely to experience a shorter waiting time before being formally inducted (2021: 77). Indeed, it is telling when looking at the annual lists of inductees into the Hall that white male rock artists are particularly well represented, whereas artists from genres such as punk and new wave are far less well represented

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(something that has added pertinence given the more noticeable acceptance of women within these genres). It is also noticeable that the list of inductees is drawn almost exclusively from Anglo-American rock and pop history. Notable exceptions here are reggae artist Bob Marley and German-electro pioneers Kraftwerk. Marley has for many years been incorporated into popular music ‘classic canon’ due to his prominence in the albums and singles charts of the late 1970s and early 1980s and his influence on white punk and new wave artists including the Clash and the Police. Kraftwerk, having been nominated six times, were finally inducted into the Hall in 2021. Given that Kraftwerk’s first album release Kraftwerk (1970) has now passed its fiftieth anniversary, this puts the band well beyond the stated twenty-five-year period following an initial record release that qualifies an artist to be inducted into the Hall. This in itself is suggestive of an ongoing bias in the Hall’s selection process, particularly in the case of artists outside the AngloAmerican axis of popular music. Again, however, it is noteworthy that Kraftwerk have been frequently cited as a critical influence on AngloAmerican performers, including David Bowie (whose album Heroes (1977) contains the instrumental track V-2 ‘Schneider’, written as a tribute to founding Kraftwerk member Florian Schneider), post-punk bands such as Joy Division and various UK 1980s synth pop bands including Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark (OMD),  Ultravox, The Human League and Depeche Mode. While none of this detracts from the importance of artists such as Bob Marley and Kraftwerk as key innovative and cultural figures within the contemporary popular music landscape, their induction into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame also appears to be strongly associated with their acknowledgement as key sources of influence by Anglo-American artists, a factor that has also led to the broader acceptance of these artists by music audiences within the Anglo-American sphere. Since the 1950s, the trajectory of popular music has been closely intertwined with critical socio-cultural shifts and changes in the fabric of society. This has largely been a consequence of rock and pop’s significance as youth music, much of it inscribed with a political message (see Chambers 1985; Bennett 2000). Indeed, as noted earlier, the sheer fact that the status of popular music has been seen to change from one of perceived plasticity to one of cultural worthiness has much to do with how the rock generation has come of age and in many cases assumed positions of power and influence within those elite groups and institutions that once denounced rock and pop as low culture. Burgoyne (2003) highlights this quality of popular music’s rise to heritage status and also notes its

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centrality to the story of post-war popular music as told in the music hall of fame context. Once again citing the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame as an example, Burgoyne notes that a particular baby-boomer aesthetic overlays the way in which popular music history is told in the Hall, galvanising what he refers to as a curated ‘official memory’ of the 1960s and 1970s. Thus, observes Burgoyne: In the specific cultural setting of the Rock Hall … official memory is not associated with the government or with traditional patriotism; rather it is consonant with a kind of idealized generational memory that has emerged in recent years: official memory here revolves around the dominant narrative of the sixties and seventies as a period of countercultural political activism, a memory narrative which provides the Rock Hall with one of its central organising stories. Official memory in the Rock Hall is expressed in the form of a commemorative discourse that stresses the liberatory politics and anti-­ authoritarian stance of a period that has increasingly taken on the aura of the sacred, the timeless and the ideal. (2003: 210–211)

Burgoyne’s observations correspond closely with those made by other scholars, such as Lipsitz, who have noted the particular kind of impact that the perspective of the 1960s generation on the presence and ‘worth’ of their particular place in the history of post-war popular music and youth culture has on the representation of this history. Indeed, this dominance persists, even in the wake of other genres, notably punk and rap, that came after countercultural rock and had an equal, if not more significant, impact on the trajectory of youth and music. This generational bias is also reflected in the above-noted exclusion from the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame inductees list of punk in a wholesale sense and all but a handful of the most influential rap artists. Expanding on his argument, Burgoyne suggests that even as the Hall seeks to paint a picture of popular music’s role in social and cultural changes, the result is the one that force-feeds a sense of the 1960s and its music as having played the major part in such change. In this sense, notes Burgoyne, the Hall of Fame’s representation of the popular music past closely corresponds with a broader commercialising reach of the popular music and adjacent cultural industries: Along with other institutions of American mass culture such as film and television, the music industry is zealously commemorative, often casting itself in the role of preserving the nation’s past. The continuous recycling of stars, songs, and period styles, the use of older rock and roll hits in advertis-

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ing and in political rallies and celebrations, the correlation on radio stations of songs from the past with audio clips featuring the voices of national leaders from earlier decades, the various attempts to revivify the Woodstock experience, and even Bob Dylan performing via satellite feed at the Academy Awards, attest to the reach and effectiveness of the discourse of heritage. (2003: 211)

Bergengren, in a review article documenting a personal visit to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, offers a telling reflection of how this hermetically sealed version of popular music history, its lens further refracted through the specificity of the American perspective it brings to bear on this story, conspires to result in an account that is inherently contradictory: however strongly the exhibits try to remind us of the subversively countercultural and kick-out-the-jambs [sic] origins—whether in the several collage films or trenchant remarks by rockers on the energies, even meanings, in the art or even the staff wearing their badges upside down—the primary emotion generated by the hall is nostalgia … We may have once liked the music because our parents did not, but we are the parents, the bourgeois, the enemy itself now. (1999: 549)

Research conducted in the years following the publication of Bergengren’s study has revealed that the connection between generation, memory and nostalgia is less clear-cut than he suggests, with many ageing music fans taking a more sanguine stance towards the music and associated cultures of subsequent generations (see, e.g., Bennett 2013). Nevertheless, as Lipsitz observes, ‘the enduring hold of the 1960s on the imagination of the present has been pernicious’ and this  has certainly contributed in a major way to the representation of popular music heritage featured in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame (1994: 17). The hegemonic hold of the boomer generation on the music hall of fame poses important questions around issues of ownership and legitimacy within the realm of popular music heritage. On the one hand, there are clear grounds for arguing a period of critical legacy that must be accrued before heritage status can be conferred on an artist, their creative outputs and material objects associated with them. On the other hand, given the rapidly shifting nature of the popular music landscape, one must carefully consider at what point legacy and longevity begin to inhibit the recognition of achievement in a field of popular culture that is so apt to change— musically, technologically and culturally. Thus, while the Rock and Roll

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Hall of Fame grapples with the reframing of hip and hop as a genre to be ‘incorporated’, there has been little sign as yet that other genres such as dance and electro—which like hip hop can now boast a forty-year legacy— will also be accepted as musical styles and cultural scenes worthy of cultural consecration. Although hip hop has proven that the glass ceiling of what is considered ‘legitimate’ popular music heritage can be broken, a significant bias appears to persist whereby rockist notions dictate that popular music heritage is the preserve of ‘real’ musicians playing conventional musical instruments. However, and unlike discourses of heritage and worth conferred, for example, on classical music and fine art, there is a palpable sense in which heritage institutions such as the music hall of fame could remain sensitive to periodic changes of generational guard. Rock and pop do seem to be in some way tied to living memory, embodied in the collective minds of generations. With the passing of these generations, their music and its history may retain an archival significance while its everyday cultural relevance may well become increasingly intangible for all but the most strident enthusiasts.

Conventions and Fanatics From my personal involvement in various Beatles conversions around England and Europe since 1986, I have collated interesting quotes from when I sat in, listened and participated in interviews and speeches by various Beatles-related people such as Bob Wooler, Allan Williams, Pete Best, Tony Barrow, Cynthia Lennon and Alistair Taylor, to name but a few. (Badman 2009: xii)

The above observations are made by author Keith Badman in the Acknowledgements section of his book The Beatles: Off the Record. While in that context Badman’s observations set the scene for his highly insightful book that relates the story of the Beatles through direct interview quotes from the band and those who knew and worked with them, at the same time Badman provides a critical insight regarding both the seductive qualities of the fan convention and the way that such events can play their own important part in celebrating and preserving the legacy of music icons and thus contributing to discourses and understandings of popular music heritage in a contemporary sense. It is frequently reported that, even though they disbanded over fifty years ago, the Beatles continue to be regarded as the most successful and revered popular music artists in

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recent history. Surviving Beatles Paul McCartney and Ringo Starr continue to be invited to launches of new Beatles exhibitions and to various conventions worldwide that bring legions of fans, young and old, together to celebrate the group’s legacy. Indeed, the fan convention has become a powerful medium for marking the significance and contributions of various artists—living and deceased—to popular music and the broader cultural sphere. Other artists frequently celebrated through fan conventions include Elvis Presley, Michael Jackson, KISS, Rush, Jimi Hendrix, Kate Bush, Madonna, Queen and David Bowie. Although not conventionally aligned with museums and music halls of fame as spaces for the display and consumption of popular music heritage, through their collective, participatory quality, fan conventions nevertheless invite scrutiny as spaces for instances of conspicuous and, in many cases, embodied display that play their own important part in providing opportunities for public celebrations of popular music history and heritage. The history of the contemporary fan convention dates back to the mid-twentieth century with early examples of convention events being dedicated to aspects of popular culture such as science fiction writing and comic books (Woo et al. 2020). The appeal of conventions has typically been linked with the opportunities they provide for the gathering of individuals with common tastes in various forms of popular culture. Invariably, such common interest in popular culture is underpinned by a broader sharing in patterns of taste, lifestyle and aesthetics. The convention allows for the visceral expression of such sharing through, for example, the wearing of T-shirts emblazoned with the logo of a favourite comic book figure, film actor or popular music icon. In the case of conventions organised around particular cultural figures, be this from film, sport or music, convention gatherings also frequently extend to expressions of remembering and nostalgia. To focus specifically on popular music, such expressions may be facilitated through various mediums, including speeches and requiems offered by fellow musicians, music industry employees or fans or special screenings of new films and documentaries dedicated to the life and work of specific artist. Fan conventions thus frame the production and reproduction of popular music heritage around public gatherings and collective expressions of memory and/or respect for particular artists. In this sense conventions represent a space whereby intangible renderings of music heritage, that is those personally and affectively held by fans, are brought out into the open and where they are bestowed with a tangible quality. In that sense,

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fan gatherings at conventions can arguably be compared to fan gatherings in museums and music halls of fame. A critical difference, however, is that in the context of the convention it is the fans themselves who are on show and form each other’s audience in displays of ritual adoration and celebration. In that sense, what the convention illustrates is that aside from musical texts, performances and associated artefacts, the historical and heritage significance of popular music is also deeply intertwined with the memory rituals of fans. Such a celebration of heritage and legacy in the context of the convention is further emphasised through the established tradition of fans dressing up like their icons. Thus, at a Beatles convention, it is commonplace to see fans adopting images from different Beatles’ eras, from the band’s initial ‘mop-top’ early 1960s look to the more spectacular apparel of their Sgt. Pepper era. Likewise, a KISS convention will see fans adorning the costumes and make-up of classic 1970s-era KISS. This trend among fans is significant both as a demonstration of affinity with the artist and also as infusing more deeply the aura and spectacle of the fan into the event. This is pertinently observed in the case of Elvis conventions where prizes are awarded for the best impersonations of Elvis, thus entreating fans to the experience of watching in many cases highly polished renditions of Elvis songs that can lead to transcendental moments that project a palpable sense of the Elvis’s presence in the room. Again, this points to the participatory  nature of popular music heritage, and to the notion frequently shared among fans that they have a stake in rock and pop heritage. While a museum exhibition or music hall of fame may offer limited opportunities for participation, the inherently ‘co-produced’ nature of the popular music fan convention means that fans feel—and are—more fully involved in what the convention becomes and what it stands for. If, as previously argued in this chapter, popular music is in many respects a form of living heritage, an expression of heritage that is inseparable from the collective generational memory invested in it, then it is in the spaces of the fan convention that this quality of popular music heritage is critically and most succinctly manifested.

Conclusion This chapter has focused on the ways in which museums, galleries, music halls of fame and fan conventions all contribute in their own specific ways to public celebrations of popular music history and heritage. As interest in

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popular music heritage has increased since the late 1990s, these institutions and events have become primary spaces in which the significance and contribution of key eras, events, artists and genres are documented and represented as important aspects of late twentieth- and early twenty-first-­ century culture. As discussed in the chapter, in the case of the museum setting, heritage status for popular music has not been easily won. Rather, between the post-war period and the 1980s, popular music was rarely considered by cultural elites as anything other than mass-produced ephemera. This perception of popular music only began to alter as those generations who had helped shape rock and pop eras from 1950s rock and roll onwards reached middle age and began to assert influence on definitions of artistic achievement and cultural worth. As noted, however, even as popular music began to find a place in the museum setting, its incorporation remained contentious for various reasons. As institutions driven by the need to generate income, many museums are forced to derive ways of broadening their appeal. In that context, decisions as to what to exhibit in the realm of popular music and otherwise will be governed by what is considered to generate the biggest public interest. In the case of popular music, this invariably means that the topic matter chosen for exhibitions frequently maps directly onto established popular music canons rather than serving to challenge them. A further and altogether different point of tension arises when popular music fans themselves question the place of popular music in the museum setting. An example of this relates to the Punk London exhibition of 2016 when many punk fans rejected the concept and pointed to the irony of punk, a genre recognised for its anti-­ authoritarian, anti-establishment stance, becoming the subject of a museum exhibition. This chapter then turned attention to the music hall of fame. A similar, if to some extent more populist, space of popular music heritage representation and celebration, the music hall of fame has also come under criticism. Some of this relates to the decisions concerning what is included and excluded from such institutions, a problem which is, in turn, linked by some observations to generational bias. Thus, the ‘rockist’ stance observed in many halls of fame is attributed to the ongoing dominance of the 1960s and 1970s generations in the decision-making process governing the selection of artefacts. Finally, some discussion was presented on the significance of fan conventions as public spaces of popular music heritage recognition and celebration. Although not directly comparable with museums, galleries and music halls of fame, the point was made that given the highly participatory nature of popular music culture

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and the significant role of fans in this respect, fan conventions provide an extension of this participation into the realm of popular music heritage making and preservation.

Notes 1. I am grateful to the organisers of the conference for their generous invitation to be a keynote speaker at this event 2. Abbey Road Talks to Nick Mason: https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=Of9efxlrkiI [retrieved: 06.07.2021]

References Badman, Keith (2009) The Beatles: Off the Record. London: Omnibus Press. Baker, Sarah and Huber, Alison (2014) ‘Saving “Rubbish”: Preserving Popular Music’s Material Culture in Amateur Archives and Museums’, in S.  Cohen, Robert Knifton, Marion Leonard and Les Roberts (eds) Sites of Popular Music Heritage: Memories, Histories, Places. London: Routledge, pp. 112–124. Bergengren, Charles (1999) ‘Simply Contradictory: The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and Museum’, Journal of American Folklore, 112(446): 544–550. Bennett, Andy (2000) Popular Music and Youth Culture: Music, Identity and Place. Basingstoke: Palgrave. Bennett, Andy (2009) ‘“Heritage rock”: Rock music, re-presentation and heritage discourse’, Poetics, 37(5–6): 474–89. Bennett, Andy (2013) Music, Style and Aging: Growing Old Disgracefully? Philadelphia: Temple University Press. Bledsoe, Ashlee (2021) ‘Walk the (Gendered and Racialized) Line: Retrospective Consecration and the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame’, American Behavioural Scientist, 65(1): 59–82. Burgoyne, Robert (2003) ‘From Contested to Consensual Memory: The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and Museum’, in K. Hodgkin and S. Radstone (eds) Contested Pasts: The Politics of Memory (pp.  208–220). New  York, NY: Routledge. Chambers, Iain (1985) Urban Rhythms: Pop Music and Popular Culture. Basingstoke: Macmillan. Collins, Jez and Long, Paul (2014) ‘“Fillin’ in Any Blanks I Can”: Online Archival Practice and Virtual Sites of Musical Memory’, in S. Cohen, Robert Knifton, Marion Leonard and Les Roberts (eds) Sites of Popular Music Heritage: Memories, Histories, Places. London: Routledge, pp. 81–96.

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Edwards, Paul (2010) ‘Rock Photography: Cover Art from The Beatles to Post-­ Punk.’ Rock Photography, Paris, France. Ouphopo Éditeur, 2011, Bibliothèque Lunaire, 978-2-9540241-1-0. Gillett, Charlie (1983) The Sound of the City: The Rise of Rock and Roll, 2nd edn, London: Souvenir Press. Green, Ben (2016) ‘“I Always Remember That Moment”: Peak Music Experiences as Epiphanies’, Sociology, 50(2): 333–48. Hebdige, Dick (1979) Subculture: The Meaning of Style. London: Routledge. Hepworth, David (2017) 1971—Never a Dull Moment: Rock’s Golden Year. London: Black Swan. Hernádendez de Toledo, Carolina (2018) ‘The Connection of Music to Studio and Live Photography: Categorising Music Photography’. Unpublished MA Thesis, Faculty of Journalism and Media Communications, Griffith College, Queensland, Australia. Johnson, Paul (1964) ‘The Menace of Beatlism’, New Statesman: 326–327, 28 February. Leonard, Marion (2007) ‘Constructing Histories Through Material Culture: Popular Music, Museums and Collecting’, Popular Music History, 2(2): 147–167. Leonard, Marion (2010) ‘Exhibiting Popular Music: Museum Audiences, Inclusion and Social History’, Journal of New Music Research, 39(2): 171–181. Lipsitz, George (1994) ‘We Know What Time it Is: Race, Class and Youth Culture in the Nineties’, in A. Ross and T. Rose (eds) Microphone Fiends: Youth Music and Youth Culture. London: Routledge, pp. 17–28. Mankowitz, Gerd (2020) Goin’Home with the Rolling Stones ‘66’. New York, NY: Reel Art Press. Miller, Toby (2009) ‘From Creative to Cultural Industries: Not all Industries are Cultural, and no Industries are Creative’, Cultural Studies, 23(1): 88–99. Nazareth, Linda (2007) The Leisure Economy: How Changing Demographics. Economics, and Generational Attitudes Will Reshape Our Lives and Our Industries. Mississauga, Ontario: Wiley. Robinson, Lucy (2018) ‘Exhibition Review Punk’s 40th Anniversary—An Itchy Sort of Heritage’, Twentieth Century British History, 29(2): 309–317. Santelli, Robert (1997) ‘The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and Museum’, Popular Music and Society, 21(1): 97–99. Schmutz, Vaughn (2005) ‘Retrospective Cultural Consecration in Popular Music’, American Behavioral Scientist 48(11): 1510–23. Willis, Paul (1978) Profane Culture. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. Woo, Benjamin, Johnson, Brian, Bart, Beaty and Campbell, Miranda (2020) ‘Theorizing Comic Icons’, The Journal of Fandom Studies, 8(1): 9–31.

Memorabilia, Collectables and Enshrinement

Beyond the official collection and display of popular music artefacts in museums, archives and hall of fame type installations (see Chapter 3 “Museums, Music Halls of Fame and Fan Conventions”), the gathering of various artefacts into personal private collections is another significant, if largely under-acknowledged, way in which popular music heritage practices manifest in contemporary society. Typically, such collections will not be accessible to the public in the same way that official exhibitions are, although it is frequently the case that public exhibitions of popular music history and heritage will draw on artefacts donated from personal collections. As such, it is certainly possible to map connections between the private and the public when considering practices of popular music heritage preservation, representation and display. At the same time, however, it is also evident that the personal collection of popular music artefacts— images, objects and texts—from different eras of popular music and their associated cultural scenes takes on a different resonance in terms of decisions to collect and preserve particular artefacts. Socio-economic factors will often come into play here too as those with economic capital, and to a degree social and cultural capital as well, will have greater access to a range of desirable objects for collection and personal consumption. As this chapter will presently discuss, an example of this is seen in the number of vintage electric guitars and other instruments sold at auction for high prices to private collectors. Even for those without significant economic resources, however, the personal value inscribed in a collection of popular © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 A. Bennett, Popular Music Heritage, Pop Music, Culture and Identity, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-08296-2_4

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music artefacts—including things such as ticket stubs, autographed conference programmes, photographs and album covers, rare vinyl albums and so forth—is also illustrative of the cultural and heritage value bestowed on objects by the private collector (Bennett and Rogers 2016). The purpose of this chapter is to explore and evaluate how such personal, and frequently unseen, practices of preservation provide a deeper picture of popular music heritage practice as not merely a public sphere concern but something that is also highly, if not more, prevalent in the private sphere as well. The chapter begins by examining the significance of the personal collection as an expression of lifestyle and cultural identity through the inscription of meaning and value in gathered artefacts—in this case, those associated with musical taste and associated aesthetic preferences. As such artefacts age, it is argued, the cultural meaning inscribed in them deepens and assumes added historical value—this serving to accentuate such artefacts’ aura of cultural significance. Extending this discussion, the collection of rare and vintage artefacts is then considered, such a practice displaying how Weber’s ([1919] 1978) notion of status groups plays out in the popular music heritage field as those with the requisite social and economic capital engage in the conspicuous consumption of desirable objects for preservation in private collections. Underpinning each of these elements, however, is a process through which music fans’ practices of personal consumption and collection of objects contribute to forms of ritual enshrinement which, although obscured from the public eye, nevertheless amounts to a significant form of popular music heritage practice in its own right.

Enshrining the Popular At its most fundamental level, the meaning and practice of enshrinement involve the symbolic transformation of objects from the profane to the sacred. Originating from the sphere of religion, enshrinement involves the keeping of such objects in a sacred place (see, e.g., Hahn 1997). Although the literal practice of enshrinement continues to relate to its religious origins, over the years the term has also found its way into secular forms of practice, notably in the realm of popular culture where film stars, music artists and the like have assumed their own charismatic authority, frequently on a level not dissimilar to that once associated more or less exclusively with religious deities (Margry 2008). Discussing this in relation to

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Elvis Presley and the significance of Graceland, the singer’s former home, for his fans, Doss offers the following observation: Graceland’s shrinelike sensibility is especially apparent during Elvis Week, when pilgrims engage in specific rituals including music revues, impersonations, benefit concerts, art contests, memorabilia auctions, talks, memorial services and movie screenings. Fans tour Graceland, buy souvenirs at nearby gift shops, eat in special ‘Elvis Rooms’ in local restaurants, and participate in window-decorating competitions in area motels. Ordinary spaces such as motels and restaurants become sacred spaces during Elvis Week, because Elvis fans occupy them and fill them with images and objects that they deem to have special significance. (2008: 136)

Certainly, the comparison between contemporary celebrities and divine beings has on occasion resulted in controversy, as in 1966 when religious figureheads in the US objected to John Lennon’s comparison of the Beatles’ global fame with that of Jesus Christ (Williamson 2016). While comparisons such as these remain problematic due to the cultural and ideological sensitivities they often invoke, the adoration and attachment that many individuals feel towards their favourite music icons frequently assume similar qualities to those associated with religious practice—for example, in a contemporary late modern context, terms such as ‘pilgrimage’ or ‘worship’ are as likely to be associated with religion as they are with the practice of fandom (Margry 2008; McCuthcheon et  al. 2010). Similarly, music artists and other popular culture icons will sometimes identify their fans as followers, and levels of devotional practice on the part of fans will often manifest in forms of ritual behaviour that include adorning themselves with imagery associated with the icon at the centre of their adoration and even, in some extreme cases, attempting to take on their appearance (as was the case, e.g., in the early 1970s when fans of David Bowie attempted to recreate his Ziggy Stardust image; see Cinque and Redmond 2019). At the same time, however, fan worship in the realm of popular music also assumes its own distinctive qualities. Different artists, genres and eras of popular music create different tastes and different understandings of the parameters of fandom and what it means to be attached to an artist and their music. Through assembling their own repertoires of images, objects and texts associated with particular music icons, fans in turn curate their own specific practices of adoration and worship. Just as artists are

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performers, fans perform a particular identity as a fan which can in many cases become a lifestyle (Chaney 1996) articulated through the conspicuous display of artefacts associated with their chosen icon or icons. Although there has been much attention to what might be termed the ‘here and now’ practice of symbolic appropriation of such artefacts among music fans (see, e.g., Cavicchi’s (1998) study of Bruce Springsteen fans), rather less attention has been focused on how these artefacts continue to accumulate meaning and significance over time and how they are thus represented as objects of more long-term importance. An exception here is found in Willsteed’s work on the Brisbane punk and post-punk scene and how collections of artefacts, in this case privately owned fanzines, ‘have an intrinsic value as well as being representative of the time, energy and social connection required to devise and produce them’ (2019: 167–68). Willsteed’s study is focused on the field of do-it-yourself (DIY) music heritage preservation, a topic that will be returned to later in this chapter. For the purposes of the current discussion, however, it is pertinent to note that Willsteed’s interpretation of the heritage value of such DIY-produced fanzines can also extend to other, more commercially produced and acquired artefacts whose post-commodity value increases over time as the bond between owner and artefact becomes more pronounced and aesthetically nuanced. The collections of artefacts that individual fans assemble in personal collections will depend on variables including levels of commitment, disposable income and, in some cases, personal access to particular networks and events. Thus, an autographed picture of a music icon and fan taken together at a backstage event may assume a special resonance, being both a highly prized personal possession and also perhaps something of a rarity among fan collections. In such cases items take on special, not to say extraordinary properties. But even more common objects, such as an original album pressing or a deleted cassette version of a classic album, can also take on special value. Moreover, while practices of enshrinement may assume a form of conspicuous consumption, being part of a collection that is frequently shown to friends and acquaintances and/or perhaps loaned out to museums and galleries for public exhibition purposes, equally such collections may exist for private use only. Both cases, however, result in the production of alternative spaces and places for the preservation of artefacts that over time may take on their own heritage value. This may result from a variety of factors, including the increasing rarity of the artefacts collected or the retrospective consecration (Schmutz 2005) of an artist and their

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work. In other instances, heritage value may arise from the way that a local music scene is represented through the work of grassroots researchers and archivists. In such instances, objects, images and texts that have often languished in relative obscurity for many years—often considered worthless by their owners in any sense beyond a personal and nostalgic value—suddenly assume a radically different degree of cultural value as tangible documents of a historical scene that becomes an object of public interest and scrutiny. Again, Willsteed’s (2019) study of the Brisbane punk and post-­ punk scene is illustrative of this shift in symbolic meaning of privately owned objects. Thus, with the increasing awareness foisted on the significance of this era, both as a local extension of punk music and culture elsewhere in the world and in the cultural transformation of Brisbane as a city, personally owned fanzines, photographs and other mementoes have taken on a new level of meaning and value and become key artefacts in invoking Brisbane’s recent cultural past and igniting the collective cultural memory of those individuals who have been part of these scenes during their youth. In this sense what becomes clear is the fact that popular music heritage, by dint of the various and manifold ways that objects, images and texts are assembled by their owners into often highly cherished collections, can be informally produced. Indeed, for every official event that marks the achievements of a specific popular music artist or celebrates an era or genre of popular music and its broader cultural milieux, there are many more instances of individual fans involved in the business of producing popular music heritage through processes of collection that may, in some cases, never be publicly revealed and/or result in some novel instances of DIY popular music heritage preservation (see Chapter  “Museums, Music Halls of Fame and Fan Conventions”). In a holistic sense, however, such practices are equally integral to the way that popular music heritage is produced and maintained over time, in this case, through what can often involve processes of personal enshrinement.

My Personal Collection As indicated above, at the heart of music fandom and the collective adoration of particular popular music icons is a strong investment in material artefacts, that is to say images, objects and texts through which music fans articulate their appreciation of particular artists, genres, scenes and, in some cases, entire eras of popular music. The notion of music fandom as

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something defined through the consumption of music and associated cultural products has long been understood, but only more recently has serious attention been turned to how music fans own and inscribe these products with value at the level of emotional investment and cultural memory (Bennett and Rogers 2016). To a significant degree, this growing appreciation of the value inscribed in personal artefacts is tied up with the emergence of material culture studies (Miller 1987) and the contribution of the latter to what Appadurai (1988) terms ‘the social life of things’. In essence this work took to task the formerly predominant view of value as primarily tied to the economic significance of an object for sale in the marketplace and began to consider how such objects or ‘commodities’ acquire cultural value as new meanings are inscribed in them by the buyer. Such a reframing of material objects as ‘material culture’ sits within a broader shift in social theory referred to as the cultural turn (see Chaney 1994). Wresting the concept of culture away from the economic determinism that informed sociological understandings of cultural practice during much of the twentieth century, the cultural turn signalled a resurgence of interest in the Weberian concept of lifestyle and its fusing with an emphasis on reflexivity as a basis for understanding the construction of social identity and the forming of social relationships with others (Chaney 1996). In relation to popular music, the cultural turn has played a major part in revising the understanding of the cultural meaning and significance of music-related objects, images and texts. This has been characterised by a body of work that challenges previous theorisations of music consumption as determined by class (see, e.g., Murdock and McCron 1976; Willis 1978) and the recasting of such consumption practices as examples of reflexively driven lifestyle projects in the context of late modernity (see, e.g., Bennett 1999; Miles 2000; Muggleton 2000). Pivotal here has been the repositioning of the music consumer as a creative agent, picking between various music commodities and fashioning these into lifestyle projects designed to reflect individual patterns of taste and to forge bonds of association with others whose tastes and aesthetic preferences appear similar. In this latter respect, the frequently applied concept of ‘scene’ provides a useful basis through which to explore collective manifestations of musical life that are made meaningful through the common inscription of value and significance in musical commodities (see, e.g., Straw 1991; Stahl 2004; Bennett and Peterson 2004). As such, music scene scholarship connects with a wider body of contemporary social and cultural research that views the act of consumption, not as an end in itself but rather as a

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means through which to gather resources—objects, images and texts— that can be used to articulate identity, both individually and collectively (Shields 1992). Although popular music is, thus, one among a range of culturally consumed commodities that has given shape and form to late modern lifestyles, its contribution has been both significant and, in some ways, unique in terms of its resonance with the cultural legacy and heritage of successive generations beginning during the second half of the twentieth century. Thus, since the advent of rock and roll in the mid-1950s (see Shumway 1992), the emphasis on popular music merchandising has steadily grown. As a critical aspect of the post-war youth market (Chambers 1985), rock and roll and the beat music that followed it in the early 1960s were vociferously targeted at young consumers whose demand not just for music but for other related commodities—including posters, magazines, fashion wear and so on—continually increased (Malamud 1973). Although the youth market was (and remains) commercially driven, the response of youth to the accessories produced and disseminated by this market acquired important cultural resonances. Thus, as Chambers observes: Leisure was no longer simply a moment of rest and recuperation from work, the particular zone of family concerns and private edification. It was widened into a potential life-style made possible by consumerism. To buy a particular record, to choose a jacket or skirt cut to a particular fashion, to mediate carefully on the colour of your shoes is to open a door onto an actively constructed style of living. (1985: 16)

By the time the Beatles rose to global prominence in 1964, the highly lucrative nature of pop merchandising and its ready translation into a form of cultural value that young people eagerly embraced had become clearly apparent (Inglis 2000). Against this backdrop of a youth already primed for the cultural consumption of popular music products, the Beatles set a trend for an even more diverse range of merchandise that extended to things such as lunch tins, hairspray, lampshades, board games and wrist watches (Lebovic 2017). Over the years, these objects, or at least those that survive in reasonably good and thus collectable condition, have become increasingly sought after, often bringing a high price at auction and being considered prize possessions among Beatles fans and collectors of popular music memorabilia (Shuker 2014). As the living memory of the Beatles fades increasingly into the past, it will be these material objects,

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along with the Beatles’ music, films and documentaries, that come to represent the rich cultural legacy of the band and the broader era of popular culture to which they contributed. The Beatles serve as perhaps the most famous example of the increasingly pronounced cultural heritage value placed on popular music memorabilia but they are by no means the only artist whose memory is enshrined through fan collections of material artefacts. For example, early in their career, American rock band KISS were also quick to latch onto the value of merchandise as a source of revenue. At the time of writing, various items of original 1970s KISS merchandising, including doll figures depicting the four original KISS members, Gene Simmons, Paul Stanley, Ace Frehley and Peter Criss, are now highly sought-after items and attract high prices when sold at rock memorabilia fairs and auctions. Indeed, the sale and exchange of such memorabilia artefacts has become a veritable cultural industry in its own right, with both original items and reproductions also being widely available through the internet as well as traditional brick-­ and-­mortar stores throughout the world. At its most extreme, the practice of obtaining music memorabilia manifests in personal collections that take the form of personal shrines and private museums. Within this, the tactile aspect of such forms of collecting, and the intimacy associated with this, brings a level of accessibility that is not available through formal museum exhibitions where the experience of viewing artefacts is inherently temporal, public and typically acquired only on payment of an entry fee. In terms of its value as acquired and symbolically inscribed material culture, popular music memorabilia also enables music fans to articulate strong bonds of connection with particular artists. At the same time, however, given the increasing significance that is read into popular music artists and their work as aspects of contemporary popular music heritage, such objects of memorabilia offer new ways of understanding how popular music heritage is celebrated at both individual and collective levels. Frith (1987) has emphasised the ways in which fans seek to symbolically ‘own’ music and the artists who create it. The purchasing of an album or concert ticket is an example of the ways in which fans can articulate and exert such ownership. The purchasing of items of music artist merchandise, including memorabilia, provides other avenues through which such ownership manifests. In the case of personal collections, the extended and long-term nature of fan loyalty is also expressed, the fan having grown with the artist—and, as is often the case with rock and pop artists who have died, taken an active part in preserving the memory and legacy of that artist.

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Green (2016) emphasises the importance of peak music experiences as a critical way in which individuals remember and measure the impact of personal encounters with popular music (in both recorded and live contexts), in their lives (see also Chapter 2 “Music, Heritage and the Cultural Consecration of Place”). Popular music memorabilia constitutes another means by which the peak music experience can be re-triggered. Thus, the collection and preservation of material artefacts associated with such experiences provide a salient means through which they can be recalled. While for Green peak music experiences are most typically recalled through the (re)listening experience and the memories this invokes, such experiences can also be recalled through the objects that resonate closely with the music at the centre of these experiences. For example, a poster purchased at the 1969 Woodstock and Arts Fair and a T-shirt that carries the design and logo of the first Castle Donnington ‘Monsters of Rock’ festival in 1981 are obvious examples of material objects other than music itself that provide a means through which to relive peak music experiences. Indeed, it is significant to note here that the memory value inscribed need not necessarily relate exclusively to forms of official merchandise. Thus, as Bennett and Rogers note, things such as ticket stubs, travel tickets, artist autographs, festival wristbands and so on can also form an important part of how fans remember music events from the past, events that they may now identify as moments when they participated in the making of musical history and heritage. Using one of the foregoing examples, Bennett and Rogers offer the following observations on the value of such artefacts in the recall of musical memory and experience: At the height of its concrete exchange value and utility, a ticket is a means to access a desired experience and a receipt of payment. After the fact, the stub is a piece of cardboard providing scant detail of the event; artist line-ups, price, date, and venue details scan as important information but are cursory in comparison to the affective details of the experience itself … ticket stubs can act as records, as a convenient and efficient means of cataloging and displaying/recalling memory. (Bennett and Rogers 2016: 38)

Alongside the critical assessment of more official renderings of popular music history and heritage that characterise much of the scholarship in this field, considerations of such mundane and personalised forms of object retention and archiving are clearly of importance too. As discussed in the Introduction to this book, understandings of heritage in a broad sense are

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now shifting due to the emergence of a more pluralistic sphere of heritage making in which official and unofficial practices exist side by side (Atkinson 2008). The activities of individual music fans in collecting objects which are of personal value to them, yet linked through a network of collective shared experiences of particular gigs, festivals, fan conventions and so forth, serve as a pertinent example of how popular music heritage, while it can be marketed and experienced as a museum gallery or filmic/documentary exhibit, is also produced through a more subjective rendering of heritage in which personal memories from the past, mediated through forms such as popular music, are firmly entrenched. The significance of memorabilia can, of course, also be understood in terms of how it feeds into the received memories of music fans. Thus, for many music fans, their experience of particular artists and eras may not extend back through living memory but is rather a ‘mediated’ experience. Such media may take a variety of forms, including listening to ‘classic albums’, watching films and documentaries dedicated to specific artists, genres or eras of popular music, attending tribute band performances (see Chapter 5 “Heritage Media and ‘classic’ Re-­presentation”) or engaging in conversations with parents or other older relatives and friends on aspects of popular music and the way this has influenced their lives (Vroomen 2004; Bennett 2013). Again, however, for such fans, the heritage value of particular aspects of popular music and their means of articulating an appreciation of this is often achieved through the collection of memorabilia and associated artefacts, including vintage artefacts. Indeed, for those whose connection to particular rock and pop artists and eras such as psychedelia or events such as Woodstock has come primarily through a received understanding of their historical and heritage values, material objects can become an important element in their personal management of the retrospective consecration (Schmutz 2005) of such aspects of popular music history. As such, this serves as another important element in how the process and practice of popular music  heritage is reproduced over time, providing successive generations of individuals with a stock of personal resources for the inscription of heritage value. Evidence of this is apparent, for example, in the way that new generations of fans celebrate and enshrine artists such as Elvis Presley, Jimi Hendrix, Jim Morrison, Janis Joplin, John Lennon and Bob Marley through the material artefacts they acquire and assemble into personal collections through which to remember these artists and reflect on their socio-cultural and historical significance. Although each of these artists has been dead for several

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decades, they retain a strong fan base, including many people from younger generations. Obviously, part of the connection that exists between younger fans and older artists may relate to the way in which contemporary music artists cite artists such as the Beatles, the Doors, Jimi Hendrix and Bob Marley as influences. It is also the case that a number of these artists died at a relatively young age and thus retain currency as ‘youth’ icons (Bennett 2015). Whatever the factors underpinning the appreciation of younger fans for these and other artists, however, the fact remains that processes of personal attachments through the collection and enshrinement of objects and memorabilia also contribute to the way such artists and the eras and events they are associated with are understood as signature aspects of popular music history and heritage. Furthermore, such personal collections of images, objects and texts may well form the basis for future inter-generational sharing and understanding, thus contributing in a salient manner to the co-production by music fans of popular music heritage in a mundane, everyday context.

Rare and Vintage Artefacts In more recent times a new trend in collecting popular music artefacts has emerged, underpinned by a generation of middle-aged, economically empowered music fans with an interest in rare and vintage objects including musical instruments previously owned and played by famous rock and pop icons. For example, in June 2019 over 120 guitars owned by English rock guitarist, singer and songwriter David Gilmour were auctioned off at Christie’s in New  York to raise money for charity. Gilmour, most well known as a member of progressive rock band Pink Floyd but also a highly successful solo artist, is noted for a highly distinctive guitar playing style, predominantly utilising the clean sustain and tremolo features of the Fender Stratocaster, an iconic brand of electric guitar also favoured by artists such as Jimi Hendrix, Jeff Beck and Eric Clapton. It is reported that collectively, the guitars sold by Gilmour at the auction attracted a sum in excess of $30 million. The ‘star’ of the show was Gilmour’s black Fender Stratocaster (referred to as ‘The Black Strat’), a 1969 model that the guitarist had used on the legendary Pink Floyd albums Dark Side of the Moon (1973), Wish You Were Here (1975), Animals (1977) and The Wall (1979). This instrument alone sold for a price of $3,975,000, setting a new world record for the sale of a single guitar at auction.1 The market for vintage electric guitars of the post-war era began to emerge in the 1970s. As particular models of guitar, and in particular

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Fender and Gibson guitars from the 1950s, reached an age of twenty plus years, their status as mass-produced, factory-built items began to shift and a new understanding of their significance as prized objects of material culture took hold. To some degree, this was bound up with a perception that the levels of craftsmanship involved in the production of such guitars have declined over the years, notably in relation to Fender where the company’s purchase by the Columbia Broadcasting System (more commonly referred to as ‘CBS’) in early 1965 was deemed to have impacted negatively on the quality of Fender instruments produced thereafter (Uimonen 2017). Beyond such considerations of craftsmanship, however, a new aura of fascination was bestowed on such ‘vintage’ instruments that were inextricably tied to the genres and generational soundtracks that they were bound up with. As Ryan and Peterson explain: ‘When the guitar-based rock became dominant in pop music even the oldest boomers were only twelve, thus it is not surprising that rock ’n’ roll had a powerful effect on many of the baby boomers’ (2004: 108). In many respects, given its iconicity in popular music history throughout much of the latter half of the twentieth century, the electric guitar serves as a vivid example of the inscription in material objects of heritage value and significance. Alexander (2008) notes how material objects can assume iconic status, bringing an aesthetic quality to mundane, often mass-produced, consumer objects. As noted above, in its very early days, rock and roll became infused with an energy wrought through its significance as the soundtrack of a new cultural territory. In that context material objects were rapidly inscribed with meanings that have endured over time and become increasingly more potent. Particular brands of guitar, such as Gibson, Fender and Rickenbacker, have become synonymous with particular styles of music and specific artists associated with those styles. For example, the Fender Stratocaster has become indelibly connected with early innovators such as Buddy Holly and Hank Marvin but also with the rock soundscape of the late 1960s and early to mid-1970s through the work of the aforementioned David Gilmour but also arguably more influential and iconic performers including Jimi Hendrix and Eric Clapton. Similarly, the Rickenbacker 360/12 twelve-string electric guitar has also become a sought-after instrument, a large part of the attraction from the point of view of the collector being tied to the fact that this instrument had been centrally responsible for the creation of a 1960s sound associated with mid-period Beatles and also iconic tracks such as the Byrd’s cover of the Bob Dylan track ‘Mr Tambourine Man’. Interestingly, while many

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collectors of vintage guitars are themselves guitar players, a significant minority are not. As Ryan and Peterson observe, for such collectors, it is often the look and feel of such instruments, a knowledge of the eras from which they have emerged and artists associated with them that provide the primary incentive to own such guitars. In that sense, such collectors, and indeed player-collectors too, could be said to collect vintage guitars in much the same way that others might collect works of art or rare books, ‘just to possess them and perhaps also on the speculative chance that they might appreciate in value’ (2004: 104). In that sense, the collection and ownership of vintage guitars can be interpreted as a way through which popular music fans and enthusiasts with requisite knowledge and the necessary economic resources can literally buy into popular music history and heritage by owning one or more of its signature artefacts. Thus, as Uimonen notes: The emergence of vintage instruments as collectibles can be interpreted as connecting restorative nostalgia, truth and tradition. They are perfect examples of the past which needs to remain untouched, pristine, an uncontaminated not only for collectors but also for the guitar manufacturers who curate their history and recycle their designs for contemporary production. (2017: 121)

The fascination with vintage instruments as markers of popular music history and heritage does not end with six-string and twelve-string electric guitars. In 2018, Geddy Lee, bassist, vocalist and keyboards player with the now-defunct Canadian rock band Rush, published his ambitious Big Beautiful Book of Bass, a publication that charts the history of the electric bass guitar from the production of the first model, the Fender Precision bass, in 1951. The book contains many photographs of vintage bass guitars, a number of these being from Lee’s personal vintage bass guitar collection. The penchant of collectors also extends to vintage amplifiers, effects pedals and even more unlikely artefacts such as studio and live mixing consoles. And, as an increasing amount of popular music history becomes ‘heritage-worthy’, electronic synthesisers are also beginning to attract the vintage label with a number of examples from older analogue models, such as the Roland DX1 and Prophet 5 becoming the focus for restoration projects. The mellotron, an instrument made famous through its use on the unmistakeable introduction to Beatles’ (1967) song ‘Strawberry Fields Forever’ (see Martin 1979), is another keyboard

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instrument that has become infused with an iconicity born of its use in this and other landmark recordings in the history of contemporary popular music. The heritage value of such vintage artefacts is inherently complex. Although it is understood that such artefacts are linked to epochal moments in the history of rock and pop, they are at the same time interwoven with the sonic legacy of popular music in a way that renders them omnipotent and timeless. Indeed, many player-collectors of vintage guitars are frequently also collectors of vintage amplifiers and accessories such as effects pedals and such artefacts also attract increasingly high prices on eBay and other outlets for the sale of second-hand and vintage music equipment. Such is the potency of their historical and iconic power that many musical instrument and accessory producers today base much of their brand power firmly around their achievements in the past. For example, guitar makers such as Fender have signature series, endorsed by performers such as Eric Clapton and Jeff Beck, that sell as standard custom modifications made to the instruments of specific artists that led to the production of signature sounds (see Nelson 2003). The same logic applies in the case of amplifiers and electronic effects, whereby modern examples are produced according to the specifications of original models, state of the art technology being purposely produced to create a vintage sound. Such branding, while serving the obvious role of expanding the market for customers in search of ways to re-produce iconic sounds from the past, at the same time, expands the aura of fascination for the limited field of original objects. Clearly, those who collect rare and vintage musical instruments and accessories are a minority compared to the broader community of music fans who collect items of music memorabilia. And yet, the role of these collectors in the preservation of music history and heritage is no less significant. One clear sense in which this manifests is through what could be described as the preservation of sound and technique. Many collector players also have specialisations, for example, in rock, blues, jazz, roots and so forth. Their collection of vintage instruments is often accompanied by a deep immersion in the music of a particular artist associated with the instruments they collect to the extent that they are also highly competent interpreters of that artist’s sound and playing technique. Although retrospective consecration of popular music has brought with it a trend towards written notation of music and transcription of song lyrics (a practice that was unevenly managed until as recently as the 1990s), a defining feature of popular music throughout time and more so since the mid-1950s has

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been the proliferation of individual vocal and instrumental techniques that have provided bands and individual artists with their distinctive sound. Over the years these aspects of popular music, every bit as much as its material manifestations, have enchanted audiences and become interwoven with their collective understanding of popular music’s cultural significance. As such, just as the material objects, images and texts are collected by fans, so player-collectors of vintage instruments and accessories become collectors and preservers of popular music’s sonic and technical heritage. Innovative styles and uses of accessories are learned and passed on by often self-styled archivists of sound and technique. This phenomenon is spectacularly manifested during a tribute band or classic albums live performance (see Chapter  “Heritage Discourse and the Internet”), but at a mundane level is a broader labour of love for a group of fans for whom fandom involves the painstaking emulation of their chosen icon’s musical legacy. The emergence of digital technology, and particularly the arrival of Web 2.0 in the early 2000s, has drawn increasing attention to the presence and influence of such sonic archivists, and this will be returned to in Chapter “Heritage Media and ‘Classic’ Re-­presentation” of this book. For now, it is important to note how such practitioners expand the parameters of what is conceptualised in this chapter as the personal enshrinement of popular music heritage. Indeed, such sonic archiving and preservation of sound in this more tactile and interpretive sense illustrate a different level of reflexive engagement with music heritage preservation—one in which the player-collector becomes the critical medium through which the distinctive instance of human-technology interaction that resulted, for example, in the guitar solo on Free’s (1970) well-remembered track ‘Alright Now’ or the signature riff that underpins the Rolling Stones’ (1965) ‘(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction’ is recalled and replayed in note-for-note fashion, with the full flavour of each inflexion and the sound textures heard on the original recording perfectly recreated. Indeed, such a practice often surpasses the original intention of the artist, whose performance on record (or in concert) was typically considered a spontaneous moment of creativity and not intended to be preserved for posterity. In this way, the sonic archivist can be seen to engage in an act of heritage ‘back-filling’, extracting the performance, its sonic and technological properties from the spontaneous moment in which it was created and repositioning it within a circuit of continuously possible reproduction (for the individual pleasure of the player or wider public dissemination). At the time of writing, it is

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arguably too early to fully appreciate the importance of such informal practice in the sonic preservation and enshrinement of popular music heritage. Even at this stage, however, it is arguable that as ‘plug-ins’ and other forms of digital recreation come to stand in for analogue technology and the moments of innovation associated with this, there will be an increasing interest on the part of music audiences to revisit and re-appraise classic rock and pop songs of earlier decades and the musical craft of their associated creators. That such a curiosity is already emerging is clear through the success of the popular television series Classic Albums (see Chapter “Heritage Media and ‘Classic’ Re-­presentation”).

DIY Preservationists While the official, or … ‘authorized’, heritage discourse is usually produced by public, institutionalised, top–down producers; the alternative heritage discourse is produced by private, unofficial, Do-It-Yourself (DIY) producers. (Zevnik 2014: 282)

In the foregoing sections of this book, it has been shown how much of what comes to be considered bona fide popular music heritage is reliant on canonical discourses of artistry and achievement. Such discourses, it has been illustrated, result in ‘official’ representations of popular music heritage which are then used in the branding and celebration of particular spaces and places or the conspicuous display of curated artefacts in museums, galleries and related sites such as music ‘halls of fame’ (see Chapter  “Museums, Music Halls of Fame and Fan Conventions”). Alongside such official sites and events of popular music heritage representation, however, is an increasing number of what could be referred to as DIY popular music heritage projects and initiatives (see Bennett 2009). The concept of DIY music heritage is increasingly important across a range of ways in which popular music heritage is now represented and understood. In many respects, the emergence of DIY popular music heritage initiatives can be seen as a direct response to the dominance of canonical discourses of popular music heritage and the way such discourses threaten to airbrush out of existence many artists who have also contributed to the evolution of popular music genres and associated scenes throughout the world. The manifestation of DIY preservations of popular music assumes a variety of forms, ranging from single-person initiatives, including fanzines and music ‘recovery’ project, to larger concerns such as archives, the latter often making use of volunteer labour and run on a

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not-for-profit footing (see, e.g., Baker 2015). In each case, however, such DIY practices expand and enrichen definitions of popular music heritage and the opportunities for engaging with and understanding the significance of popular music’s past. The emergence of new definitions of DIY popular music heritage is closely aligned with the shifting definitions of heritage that began to occur at the end of the twentieth century and the beginning of the twenty-first century as new developments, particularly in digital technology, started to offer alternative ways of representing and archiving the past (see also Chapter 6  “Heritage Discourse and the Internet”). Another important aspect of the shift towards DIY music preservation has been a greater degree of engagement with micro-histories of popular music, particularly those associated with particular localised urban music scenes. Although such initiatives have typically been less of a drawcard than exhibitions featuring more mainstream and globally profiled artists, they have served an important purpose in terms of enriching contemporary histories of local popular music scenes (Bennett and Peterson 2004) and adding new depth to understandings of local identity in specific urban contexts. Through the use of digital technologies, DIY heritage initiatives are also able to break the convention of being tied to the use of physical space for the display of artefacts. Rather, in an online context, the spatial and temporal restrictions that govern the organisation of the physical museum are transcended and new levels of curatorial freedom are also attained. From its origins during the rock ’n’ roll era of the mid-1950s, the story of contemporary popular music has been one characterised by a strong sense of ownership on the part of the ordinary music fan (Frith 1996). Indeed, although the concept of ‘prosumerism’ is routinely associated with the post-digital era and ready access to digital technology (see Ritzer and Jurgenson 2010), it can be argued that popular music, in its contemporary sense, has been underpinned by strongly marked prosumerist trends from the outset. The distinctive styles of post-war youth cultures often began as street-level DIY innovations that were later incorporated by the youth market (Hebdige 1979). Moreover, many post-war popular music styles, beginning with rock ’n’ roll and skiffle (Stratton 2010) and continuing with punk and hip hop, also began as distinctive, non-­ mainstream styles that were developed by young amateur enthusiasts. Prosumerism in popular music is strongly underpinned by its participatory quality. As the previous sections of this chapter serve to illustrate, music fans become attached to popular music artists, their images and the texts

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they produce, inscribing them with meanings of their own. This also extends to the music-related objects that they consume. Over time, such objects acquire new currency as artefacts of historical importance. While this quality can be reinforced through more officially channelled forms of recognition and appreciation, for example, the ascription of rare and vintage status to the first pressing of a vinyl single or album, or to an import and/or limited edition, it does not follow that all popular artefacts judged to be of historical value become so only through being officially sanctioned as such. It is rather the case that such conferring of heritage status can begin, and sometimes remain, at a more unofficial level of activity. A pertinent example of this is the contemporary revival of the Canterbury Sound. As noted in Chapter 2  “Music, Heritage and the Cultural Consecration of Place”, following the late 1960s and early 1970s when the Canterbury Sound was associated with the genres of jazz rock and progressive rock through the work of bands such as Soft Machine, Caravan and Gong, the scene slipped from national and international acknowledgement for several decades. At a more micro level, however, the history and musical contributions of the Canterbury Sound were kept alive by a group of enthusiasts whose DIY efforts to preserve the memory of the scene took a variety of forms including the publication of fanzines and the collation and restoration of lost music from the Canterbury Sound artists. Two Canterbury Sound fanzines were produced between the late 1980s and the late 1990s: the UK-based Facelift (named after a Soft Machine song) and its German counterpart Canterbury Nachrichten (Canterbury News). Facelift editor Phil Howitt notes that the fanzine ‘could be seen as a precursor to today’s forums and social media devoted to the scene, but originated from an era where self-published material was a much more labour-intensive affair’ (2001: 192). Howitt’s further description of the work involved in producing Facelift from a shared house in the city of Manchester without financial backing and a publishing house serves as a highly graphic example of the DIY preservationist ethic—frequently excavating and representing obscure and forgotten materials and other artefacts for an assumed community of interested fans: The first [issue of Facelift’s] centre-piece would be an article about [Softmachine’s] 1970 performance at the Proms … This would be informed not just by the recently unearthed music, but also by contemporary reviews. Such research entailed several visits to the National Sound Archive in London, courtesy of cheap National Express Coach tickets and a photo-

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copying budget of around [ten pounds] which allowed me to bring back several music press articles, A3 promotional adverts and hastily jotted down notes. (2021: 193)

Through Howitt’s commitment to Facelift, the fanzine not only kept the cultural memory of the Canterbury Sound alive but also became a trigger for other DIY initiatives, including Calyx—The Official Canterbury Sound Website (see also Chapter 6 “Heritage Discourse and the Internet”) and The Canterburied Sounds. The latter is a four-CD set featuring previously unreleased music by bands including The Wilde Flowers (a local band that included Robert Wyatt, Hugh Hopper, Kevin Ayers and Richard Sinclair, each of whom would become key figures of the Canterbury Sound), Soft Machine and Caravan (see Bennett 2002). The music was assembled from old analogue reel-to-reel tapes and digitally remastered by Brian Hopper, brother of Hugh Hopper and a former member of the Wilde Flowers, who has become a key authority on the Canterbury Sound and owner of a number of artefacts that are occasionally displayed at Canterbury Sound events. Elsewhere in the world, the practice of DIY popular music preservation is equally as vibrant. For example, in a study of popular music heritage in Slovenia, Zevnik notes a range of unofficial initiatives. These include Radio Student, a non-commercial radio station founded in 1969 which hosts ‘a rich collection of exclusive (mostly alternative and experimental) recordings of both Slovenian and foreign musicians, supplemented with … demo recordings of unreleased songs’ (2014: 290). Another initiative, the Subcultural Asylum, is focused exclusively on Slovenian popular music and, in this particular case, alternative and underground styles of music. Rather than archiving artefacts associated with these genres, the Subcultural Asylum instead is focused on the publication of books and the release of records for wider public consumption. Similarly, Brandellero et al. document a range of amateur and fan-based practices in museums and archives across the Netherlands observing that: ‘Straddling the line between personal and collective memories, many archivists were also motivated by a desire to set the record straight as far as the factual history of Dutch popular music goes’ (2015: 9). Thus, respondents in Brandellero et al.’s study frequently commented on the sense of empowerment they experienced in being able to narrate stories of artists they felt had made genuinely important contributions to Dutch popular music and yet been overlooked in official accounts. Similarly, respondents were often critical of official media articles on aspects of Dutch popular music artists from the past for not

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engaging in the more detailed and fine-grained history that they have access to. Significantly, Brandellero et al. also draw attention to the sense of community that often prevails among DIY popular music heritage preservationists, noting: While the personal motivation of DIY preservationists is strong, they also refer to being inspired by the activities of other preservationists, through personal connection or friendship as well as through the realization that others are actively pursuing similar goals. (2015: 12)

Such connections are important for a number of reasons, including the sense of a networked series of activities, both locally and trans-locally, and in terms of the light this casts on how DIY music preservation practices are sustainable over time due to the transference of knowledge and expertise. As more instances of popular music heritage preservation activity emerge at an informal DIY level, particularly in relation to local music scenes, it is likely that networks of DIY preservationists will become increasingly salient as interpreters of popular music heritage and historical significance.

Conclusion This chapter has considered how individual music fans contribute to the practice of popular music heritage preservation through various informal activities, including collecting fan memorabilia and also the purchase of rare and vintage artefacts. The final section of the chapter has considered how, through sustained practices of collection and the acquisition of more specialised knowledge, such individuals are able to position themselves as DIY preservationists. Clearly, there are critical differences between collection, curation and preservation, and it is not the assumption here that all music fans who collect items of merchandise or other artefacts such as ticket stubs and autographs will necessarily consider these as significant beyond their direct personal value. That said, as artefacts become increasingly rare and the eras they are associated with recede increasingly into the past, it is the case that such artefacts are assuming their own aura of consecration.

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Note 1. ABC News online: https://www.abc.net.au/news/2019-­06-­22/guitar-­ sold-­at-­auction-­becomes-­most-­expensive-­ever/11237778 (accessed: 25.08.2019).

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Cavicchi, Daniel (1998) Tramps Like Us: Music and Meaning Among Springsteen Fans. New York: Oxford University Press. Chambers, Iain (1985) Urban Rhythms: Pop Music and Popular Culture. Basingstoke: Macmillan. Chaney, David (1994) The Cultural Turn: Scene Setting Essays on Contemporary Cultural History. London: Routledge. Chaney, David (1996) Lifestyles. London: Routledge. Cinque, Toija and Redmond, Sean (2019) The Fandom of David Bowie: Everyone Says ‘Hi’. Basingstoke: Palgrave. Doss, Erika (2008) ‘Rock and Roll Pilgrims: Reflections on Ritual, Religiousity, and Race at Graceland’, in P.J.  Margry (ed.) Shrines and Pilgrimages in the Modern World: New Itineraries into the Sacred. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, pp. 123–42. Frith, Simon (1987) ‘Towards an Aesthetic of Popular Music’ in R. Leppert and S.  McClary (eds) Music and Society: The Politics of Composition, Performance and Reception. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 133–150. Frith, Simon (1996) Performing Rites: On the Value of Popular Music. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Green, Ben (2016) ‘“I Always Remember That Moment”: Peak Music Experiences as Epiphanies’, Sociology, 50(2): 333–48. Hahn, Cynthia (1997) ‘Seeing and Believing: The Construction of Sanctity in Early-Medieval Saints’ Shrines’, Speculum, 72: 1079–1106. Hebdige, Dick (1979) Subculture: The Meaning of Style. London: Routledge. Howitt, Phil (2001) ‘The Story of Facelift—A Fanzine Exploring the Canterbury Scene and Beyond in the Pre-internet Age—And its Role in Knitting Together an International Community of Fans’, in A. Draganova, S. Blackman and A. Bennett (eds) The Canterbury Sound in Popular Music: Scene, Identity and Myth. Oxford: Emerald, pp. 191–202. Inglis, Ian (2000) ‘“The Beatles are Coming”: Conjecture and Conviction in the Myth of Kennedy, America and the Beatles’, Popular Music & Society, 24(2): 93–108. Lebovic, Sam (2017) ‘“Here, There and Everywhere”: The Beatles, America, and Cultural Globalization, 1964–1968’, Journal of American Studies, 51(1): 43–65. Malamud, Jules (1973) ‘The Merchandising of Music’, Popular Music & Society, 2(4): 291–96. Margry, Peter Jan (2008) ‘Secular Pilgrimage: A Contradiction in Terms?’, in P.J. Margry (ed.) Shrines and Pilgrimages in the Modern World: New Itineraries into the Sacred. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, pp. 13–48. Martin, George (1979) All You Need Is Ears. London: Macmillan. McCuthcheon, Lynn E., Lange, Rense and Houran, James (2010) ‘Conceptualization and Measurement of Celebrity Worship’, British Journal of Psychology, 93(1): 67–87.

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Miles, Steven (2000) Youth Lifestyles in a Changing World. Buckingham: Open University Press. Miller, Daniel (1987) Material Culture and Mass Consumption. Oxford: Blackwell. Muggleton, David (2000) Inside Subculture: The Postmodern Meaning of Style. Oxford: Berg. Murdock, Graham and McCron, Robin (1976) ‘Youth and Class: The Career of a Confusion’, in G. Mungham and G. Pearson (eds) Working-Class Youth Cultures. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, pp. 11–14. Nelson, Wade (2003) ‘Dialed Tone: Signature Guitars as Cultural Signifiers’, in A. Gyde and G. Stahl (eds) Practising Popular Music: 12th Biennial IASPMinternational Conference Montreal 2003 Proceedings, pp. 681–688. Ritzer, George and Jurgenson, Nathan (2010) ‘Production, Consumption, Prosumption: The Nature of Capitalism in the Age of the Digital “Prosumer”’, Journal of Consumer Culture, 10(1): 13–36. Ryan, John and Peterson, Richard A. (2004) ‘The Guitar as an Artefact and Icon: Identity Formation in the Babyboom Generation’, in A. Bennett and K. Dawe (eds) Guitar Cultures. Oxford: Berg, pp. 89–116. Shields, Rob (1992) ‘The Individual, Consumption Cultures and the Fate of Community’, in R. Shields (ed.) Lifestyle Shopping: The Subject of Consumption. London: Routledge, pp. 99–114. Schmutz, Vaughn (2005) ‘Retrospective Cultural Consecration in Popular Music’, American Behavioral Scientist 48(11): 1510–23. Shuker, Roy (2014) ‘Record Collecting and Fandom’, in M. Duffett (ed.) Popular Music Fandom: Identities, Roles and Practices. London: Routledge, pp. 165–185. Shumway, David R. (1992) ‘Rock and Roll as a Cultural Practice’, in A. DeCurtis (ed.) Present Tense: Rock and Roll and Culture. Durham, North Carolina, Duke University Press, pp. 117–134. Stahl, Geoff (2004) ‘It’s like Canada reduced’: Setting the scene in Montreal’, in A.  Bennett and K.  Kahn-Harris (eds) After Subculture: Critical Studies in Contemporary Youth Culture. London: Palgrave, pp. 51–64. Stratton, Jon (2010) ‘Skiffle, Variety and Englishness’, in A.  Bennett and J. Stratton, (eds.) Britpop and the English Music Tradition. Aldershot: Ashgate, pp. 27–50. Straw, Will (1991) ‘Systems of Articulation, Logics of Change: Communities and Scenes in Popular Music’, Cultural Studies, 53: 368–88. Uimonen, Heikki (2017) ‘Celebrity Guitars: Musical Instruments as Luxury Items’, Rock Music Studies, 4(2): 117–35. Vroomen, Laura (2004) ‘Kate Bush: Teen Pop and Older Female Fans’, in A. Bennett and R.A. Peterson (eds) Music Scenes: Local, Translocal and Virtual. Nashville, TN: Vanderbilt University Press, pp. 238–253.

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PART II

Media and Performance

Heritage Media and ‘Classic’ Re-presentation

In the context of the current academic literature on the concept of popular music heritage, by far the lion’s share of emphasis is placed on the significance of physical artefacts displayed in museum exhibitions or retrievable from archives. Beyond this, it is the heritage value of popular music tourism that attracts the second largest amount of attention from academic researchers. Such an emphasis is perhaps inevitable given that these manifestations of popular music heritage are in many ways the most tangible examples of the heritage phenomenon in popular music. Similarly, such manifestations align easily with the broader trend towards the commodification of urban cultural histories as a salient strand of cultural industries’ marketing strategies (Istoc 2012). And yet, it remains true to say that for many, indeed perhaps the majority, of music fans their knowledge and appreciation of popular music heritage and history comes neither from visiting museum exhibitions dedicated to rock, punk, reggae, rap and so forth nor through engaging in popular music tourism. Rather, such knowledge and appreciation are garnered via the same channels that popular music has attracted and made an impact on its audience since the mid-­ 1950s. Such channels, including television, radio, film and print media, are all central to the way in which individuals gain access to and consume music and its associated images, objects and texts. Since the mid-­1990s, digital media have also played an increasingly significant role in this respect (something that will be returned to later in this chapter). © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 A. Bennett, Popular Music Heritage, Pop Music, Culture and Identity, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-08296-2_5

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Returning to the more traditional forms of media noted above, however, since the early 1990s these forms have also been central in facilitating a rising tide of heritage media products targeted at music audiences. These include documentaries, biopics, glossy magazines and (auto)biographies. From the 1990s onwards, the appearance and distribution of such heritage media products have grown at an exponential rate. Indeed, such is the range and variety of products available that the popular music heritage media has become a highly lucrative sub-branch of the music market. Such products have also become inextricably bound up with everyday perceptions of popular music’s cultural significance. Thus, such media provide a platform for a range of cultural experts to comment on and discuss the critical contributions of key artists (and invariably those already acknowledged by rock and pop canons) to the historical and cultural trajectory of mid- to late twentieth- and early twenty-first-century popular culture. Such commentary focuses on a range of themes, from key songs, to memorable festival appearances and other pivotal performances, to the political views of particular artists or the creation of a ‘classic album’. In addition to commentaries from cultural experts, artists themselves and those who have worked with them—producers, engineers, press officers, managers and tour managers and so forth—will often provide reflective accounts adding further depth to the representations offered in heritage media. The purpose of this chapter is to critically evaluate the significance and contribution of such heritage media to the ways in which the heritage value of contemporary popular music is inscribed in particular artists and their work. This begins by examining the importance of documentaries, from those focusing on different eras of popular music to more niche documentaries that focus on particular artists and their work. This is followed by a consideration of the role of film, including films that depict contemporaneously pivotal events in the evolution of contemporary popular music that have since become historical timepieces. Attention then turns to print media, focusing in the first instance on classic rock and pop magazines such as Mojo and Classic Rock, publications targeted towards the taste— and pocket—of a more affluent middle-age audience. Finally, the associated vogue for rock and pop (auto)biographies is explored; such publications offer space, it is argued, for more detailed accounts that often fill in details missing from other forms of heritage media due to editing considerations and budget restrictions.

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Docomania In thinking about heritage making mediums in the sphere of popular music, the documentary format has played and continues to play a significant role, not least of all because of the amount of vintage documentary footage that is now available on YouTube (see, e.g., Bennett 2019). As early as the 1970s, the television documentary format was being used to historicise rock and pop music, drawing on pre-established canonical discourses of artistic quality and authenticity in its choice of topic matter. A notable example of this is seen in Tony Palmer’s (1977) All You Need Is Love: The Story of Popular Music. This ambitious, seventeen-episode documentary spans the history of popular music from the beginning of the twentieth century to the mid-1970s. In taking this broad sweep approach, Palmer charts the connections between rock and pop and earlier forms of music including ragtime, jazz and blues. Corner suggests that documentary ‘is a genre of inquiry and argument, of observation and illustration’ (2002: 357–38). Taking a more critical view of the documentary format, Renov argues that all documentaries are, by the very nature of their production, selective renderings of events rather than genuinely objective accounts. The content of a documentary, argues Renov, will depend on a range of factors, including technical equipment used, experience of the film crew, filming conditions and, most importantly, the subjectivity of those involved in the editing and final production stages of the documentary-­making process. Thus, according to Renov: Every documentary representation depends upon its own detour from the real, through the defiles of the audio-visual signifier (via choices of language, lens, proximity, and sound environment). The itinerary of a truth’s passage (with “truth” understood as prepositional and provisional) for the documentary is, thus, qualitatively akin to that of fiction …there is nothing inherently less creative about nonfictional representations, both may create a “truth” of the text. (1993: 7)

Renov’s observations ring especially true in the case of documentaries that take a retrospective stance, a position common among popular music documentaries. In such instances, the past is frequently presented in a way that idealises events or at the least airbrushes over many of the complexities and contingencies that played into events as they unfolded at the time. In addition to the creative licence applied in documentary making, the

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passage of time itself can have a marked effect on how the past is represented in that so much depends on the memories of those interviewed and similarly on the availability and content of surviving historical records and artefacts. Palmer’s All You Need Is Love documentary serves as an interesting case study through which to consider how these elements of the documentary-­making process work to produce a particular narrative, in this case one that charts the development of popular music throughout the twentieth century. The series draws on both archive footage and original interviews, charting a series of innovative eras in popular music that is argued to have plateaued in the early 1970s due to the dual presence of glitter rock and what would later come to be known as corporate rock. Significantly, while All You Need Is Love was in production, punk emerged but Palmer was denied both the time and the funding to explore its significance for the continuing development of popular music. In more recent years, the increasing impact of generational memory has also been evident in both the focus of popular music documentaries and who they are targeted towards. As noted in the Introduction to this book, heritage making around different eras of popular music history is closely tied to the cultural legitimisation of generational memory. The pattern since the mid-1990s has seemingly followed a common path, in that as respective post-war generations reach middle age, the memories of a sense of frustration and disenfranchisement experienced during their youth are augmented by a new ‘empowered’ generational voice. Such a voice is often most clearly articulated by those members of a generation who have attained positions of (semi)power and influence through education, income and professional status, in some cases as high-ranking employees in the media and entertainment industries. A more recent illustration of this generational influence on the selection and representation of music artists and eras as aspects of contemporary cultural heritage can be observed in the case of the UK where, since 2015, a succession of documentaries on rock and pop artists of the 1970s—among them 10 cc, the Electric Light Orchestra, Queen and Kate Bush—have been produced. Importantly, the year 2015 marked the fortieth anniversary of the landmark musical tracks ‘I’m Not in Love’ (10 cc) and ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’ (Queen) and a period during which the now-mature audience for such documentaries were teenage rock and pop fans. The foregoing examples of high-quality BBC documentaries focusing on critically acclaimed British artists from the 1970s era provide a salient illustration of how an empowered, middle-class, middle-aged generation of music fans who came of age

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during 1970s Britain is effectively promoting its own heritage media agenda, focusing on British music artists who, for this particular generation of music fans drawing on its collective, localised cultural memory, are considered to be key players in the popular music soundscape of the decade. The ease with which heritage discourses concerning music can be disseminated and absorbed via the medium of television documentary relates to the long-standing relationship between popular music and television, a relationship that crystallised during the 1950s when television became a widely available form of domestic media technology (Inglis 2010; Shumway 1992). For every generation from the 1950s to the early 2000s (when digital media began to play an increasingly central role in everyday life), television functioned as a central medium through which young audiences were introduced to their generational icons and formed cultural bonds with them (Frith 2002). Thus, as a medium through which popular music’s significance as a cultural form has long been established, the narratives of history and heritage that now feed into televisional accounts of popular music work in a relatively seamless fashion as points of cultural reference through which ageing audiences can (re)connect with their popular music past and maintain bonds with those music artists, songs and iconic musical events that helped to define them as a generation. The legacy of popular music’s relationship with television is important to an understanding of the documentary as a leading form of popular music heritage media. As part of an aesthetic assemblage of popular music heritage artefacts, popular music documentaries are, by dint of their televisional format, easily digestible cultural products. Designed to tell a story, in the condensed time frame of fifty to sixty minutes, music documentaries draw together interviews with artists and other intermediaries—notably managers, producers and journalists—along with archive footage designed to help audiences relive the time when galvanising moments in rock and pop culture took place. Often lavishly produced, such documentaries are typically designed to offer deeply human stories of how popular music history was made. In the 2016 autobiographical documentary, The Beatles: Eight Days a Week—the Touring Years, director Ron Howard uses archival footage and new interviews with the two surviving Beatles, Paul McCartney and Ringo Starr, and those who worked most closely with them to relate in graphic detail the high and low points of the group’s life on road, from the early years of Liverpool and Hamburg to the relentless touring of the early to mid-1960s, when the band decided to retire from live performance. Similarly, Morgan Neville’s 20 Feet from Stardom (2013) focuses

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on the lives and careers of the female backing singers for a range of international artists, including the Rolling Stones, Bruce Springsteen, Sting, Stevie Wonder, Lou Reed and David Bowie. While the voices of these female singers were instrumental to the success of the various tracks they appeared on, songs that include ‘Walk on the Wild Side’, ‘Gimme Shelter’ and ‘Young Americans’, the human stories of their own lives and careers, including attempts to launch solo careers, remained largely unknown until the release of the film. As such in addition to giving names and faces to many of those singers who were integral to the sound of some of the most classic songs in contemporary popular music history, 20 Feet from Stardom also plays a significant role in the retrospective cultural consecration (Schmutz 2005) of these singers and their personal contributions to popular music history as this unfolded in the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s. In addition to their official release and subsequent sale in DVD format (often with additional features such as bonus interviews and other footages), the ease with which such documentaries can now be archived on internet-based digital platforms such as YouTube increases their accessibility. Indeed, since its establishment in 2005 (Burgess and Green 2009), YouTube has rapidly become a digital repository for a vast range of audio-­ visual musical artefacts. In addition to such officially produced examples, such as those listed above, a proliferation of DIY videos is also available for streaming and download. This includes a number of home-made documentaries on a range of genres including grime, trap hop and hardcore. Although each of these genres has been the subject of more mainstream music documentary production (see, e.g., BBC Four’s Beats, Bass & Bars—The Story of Grime), the DIY documentaries available on YouTube provide a space for ordinary fans and lesser-known musicians to offer their own inter-textual readings of such genres and their status in the context of local and trans-local scenes (see Peterson and Bennett 2004). The existence of such material on YouTube and elsewhere adds a further dimension to the prevalence of DIY popular music heritage making and preservation examined at various points in this book. Like other examples of DIY activity previously considered, the production and posting of home-made videos online illustrates the extent to which popular music heritage is an increasingly pluralised domain and a form of contemporary cultural discourse with both industrial and grassroots elements. In addition to focusing on specific eras, genres, scenes and artists, the documentary format has also been used to highlight and celebrate bodies of work associated with specific artists including classic albums. The

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concept of the ‘classic album’ is inherently tied to the reclassification of popular music, and in particular rock music, as a form worthy of a cultural status that surpasses and supplants its industrially manufactured and mass-­ produced status. Specifically, the classic album descriptor acquired currency during the mid-to late 1980s as recordings such as the Beach Boy’s (1966) Pet Sounds and the Beatles (1967) Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band celebrated their twentieth anniversaries. It was not simply the age of these albums that was deemed important, but the aura that has grown around them as critically acclaimed landmark recordings and therefore worthy of what Schmutz (2005) has referred to as retrospective consecration. Schmutz defines retrospective consecration as the practice of recreating the past in a way that elevates the status of those elements considered to be the most artistic and culturally worthy. Important in the bestowing of retrospective consecration is the work of prestige giving bodies. Such bodies are often staffed by people who bring their own generational perspectives to aspects of artistic and cultural worth. Given that rock music had already achieved an element of quasi hi-­ brow status during the late 1960s and early 1970s, largely due to the accolades bestowed on many rock artists by music writers and critics of the period (Kutulas 2010), many rock recordings from the era became an early touchstone for the ascription of classic album status. Music magazines such as Billboard and Rolling Stone had conducted readers’ polls over a period of years and also had access to sales figures for albums. Such indices offered reference points for gauging the popularity of albums, but equally important was how such works continued to be represented in terms of recognition by prestige awarding bodies and other tastemakers including music critics and radio DJs. This also extends to film directors, notably Martin Scorsese, whose selective placing of classic rock and pop songs in films, such as Mean Streets (1973) and Goodfellas (1990), has also played a critical role in the conferring of heritage status on particular albums and songs. Indeed, Scorsese’s role as a tastemaker and definer of heritage status among classic rock and pop artists is further reinforced through his regular forays into music documentary and concert films working with artists such as Bob Dylan (No Direction Home, 2005) and the Rolling Stones (Shine a Light, 2008). In 1997, the concept of the classic album became a focus for the popular music heritage media with the first broadcasts of the long-running British television documentary series, Classic Albums (see Bennett and Baker 2010). The series challenged to some extent the rock hegemony

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that had overlain the original claiming of classic album status, featuring alongside the rock staples artists associated with genres including pop, punk, rap and reggae. That said, Classic Albums continued in the main to reproduce a white, male Anglo-American representation of the classic albums landscape. To date, the show has featured only two albums recorded by female artists (Carly Simon and Amy Winehouse) and five albums by non-white artists (Jimi Hendrix, Gil Scott-Heron, Bob Marley and the Wailers, Stevie Wonder and Jay Z). Notwithstanding such an obvious level of bias, the Classic Albums series has found broad appeal by making accessible to its audience the creative and technical features underscoring the conceptualisation of albums including Pet Sounds (The Beach Boys, 1966), Electric Ladyland (Jimi Hendrix Experience, 1968), Who’s Next (The Who, 1971), The Dark Side of the Moon (Pink Floyd, 1973), A Night at the Opera (Queen, 1975), Songs in the Key of Life (Stevie Wonder, 1976), Rumours (Fleetwood Mac, 1977) and Graceland (Paul Simon, 1986). Several of the albums included in the foregoing list, including those by the Beach Boys and Queen, are renowned not just because of the songs they contain, but because of the way in which their production pushed the limits of the then-available recording technology. Among the many innovative elements associated with these artists, the creation of both Pet Sounds and A Night at the Opera involved the painstaking layering of many vocal and instrumental overdubs (see Wilson 2016). Utilising an approach that embodies a blend of what could be described as sonic and technological archaeology, the physical and creative artefacts brought together in the production of the albums featured on the Classic Albums series are presented for the audience by the original musicians, producers and studio engineers involved in their making. Assuming that the albums have already been subjected to sustained listening by the majority of viewers, the origins of individual songs are explained and their production in the recording studio is analysed by breaking them down into the composite instrument and vocal tracks contained on the original tapes (or their digitised equivalents). Through isolating particular tracks in the mix and explaining the techniques used to create particular sounds and effects, the albums chosen for presentation are discursively represented as quasi works of art. Similarly, musicians who contributed to the making of particular albums are often shown performing signature elements—including guitar solos, bass lines and drum patterns—from particular songs featured on an album. In many cases, particularly when discussing less

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well-known album tracks, musicians will be asked to revisit and perform sections of music that they have perhaps not played since the album was originally made. The use of this presentation style in the Classic Albums series further piques the audience’s interest by sifting through various levels of production and laying bare for them sounds they have heard for decades in the body of a song and through which specific songs have become memorable and meaningful for them. In this way the Classic Albums series interlocks with an established understanding within the music industry and associated media and cultural industries concerning the audience’s active participation in the co-production and ascription of heritage status. Targeting an audience deemed to be already literate in the history of particular genres and key artists, and in many cases aware of and drawn to signature sounds associated with specific artists, Classic Albums draws on and aligns with this history and retrospective consecration by providing the audience with further knowledge to apply in the consumption and appreciation of their preferred music and performers. Through engaging with such pre-­ formed appreciation of particular artists and their critically inscribed signature recordings, Classic Albums operates in a dialogic mode of mediation, strengthening the bond between audience and artefact through tapping layers of collective cultural memory (Bennett and Rogers 2016) and the associated emotional investments made by music listeners in particular albums over the years. At the same time, the series also assumes that its audience has a sufficient level of musical literacy to embrace the show’s featured artists as a totality, that is to say, understanding that this corpus of artists collectively defines a landscape of classic rock and pop. Moving between the language of music fan and musical connoisseur (a term forcefully implied in rock journalism as a key characteristic of ‘serious’ musical appreciation), Classic Albums works on the premise that those with a pre-­ acquired taste for ‘classic’ rock and pop will apply this as a key criterion for watching the show, even if the artist featured in a specific episode is not necessarily one of their personal favourite artists. As such, Classic Albums provides a significant benchmark for understanding the broader logic of the popular music heritage media industry overall. Thus, for much of its target audience, what this media is engaged in is not simply the representation of individual artists, but rather their role and place in particular eras of music-making and the production of recorded music. Certainly, the nuanced relationship between musical artefact, era and generational memory is by no means lost on the producers of

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Classic Albums, with many episodes of the show setting the chosen album clearly with the time and socio-cultural context in which it was made and released. Within that, each episode also devotes some time to explaining the career development and performing history of the chosen artist up to the point when their classic album was recorded. Classic Albums then intersects with and compliments a range of other media resources through which audiences are able to enrich and expand their understanding of the historical and heritage dimensions of contemporary rock and pop artists.

Have You Seen the Movie? The medium of film is also becoming an increasingly important platform for the representation and celebration of popular music heritage. As with television, the relationship between popular music and cinema is a long-­ standing, well-established and highly subscribed aspect of the global mediascape (Inglis 2003). Most obviously, a number of films from the 1950s onwards stand out in large part because of their rock and pop soundtracks, these ranging from the early rock and roll films such as Rock Around the Clock (1956; dir. Fred F. Sears) and The Girl Can’t Help It (1956; dir. Frank Tashlin) (see Lewis 1992) to 1969’s Easy Rider (dir. Dennis Hopper) (which has been termed the counter-cultural road movie of the 1960s due to its frequent depiction of the hippie culture and lifestyle; see Laderman 1996) and films appearing in subsequent decades such as Trainspotting (1996; dir. Danny Boyle) and High Fidelity (2000; dir. Stephen Frears). In addition to the appeal of their soundtracks, films have also been used as a vehicle for the promotion of artists, either playing themselves or taking on fictitious character roles. During the 1960s, commercially successful artists such as Elvis Presley and the Beatles diversified into the film market, the Beatles playing themselves against a backdrop of fictitious storylines and characters (Neaverson 2000) while Presley took on fictional character roles that played on his physical appearance and blue-collar roots (Baker 2013). At the time, such films appealed to young fans by helping them connect with important youth icons of the day. At a distance of over fifty years, however, such films are to an extent becoming heritage documents in themselves, with the 1964 Beatles A Hard Day’s Night (dir. Richard Lester) receiving particular praise as a salient representation of the era in which it was made (Time magazine rating it as one of the top hundred best films of all time). What is significant about such films is not simply their featuring of important music icons from the past, but

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their depiction of the youth audiences and broader popular cultural contexts that gave rise to such icons and their mass appeal. Other films such as Performance (1970; dirs Donald Cammell and Nicolas Roeg) featuring Mick Jagger and Nicolas Roeg’s (1976) The Man Who Fell to Earth, starring David Bowie in his first major acting role, again utilise specific aspects of a star’s persona to accentuate the film’s storyline. Performance, set in London at the beginning of the 1970s, sees Jagger playing a retired rock star-cum-artist, living in a communal house, experimenting with his sexuality while at the same time rubbing shoulders with the city’s criminal underworld (Kleinhans 1974). Although a work of fiction, Performance resonates closely with the cultural scene of London during the early 1970s, a scene that at this time had produced its own infamous ‘icons’ in the form of characters such as the Kray Twins whose nightclubs were also popular with many of the city’s film, media and music celebrities (Haslam 2015). Bowie’s performance in The Man Who Fell to Earth is similarly enigmatic, Bowie portraying an alien visitor to Earth whose pale complexion and fragile physicality reflected the artist’s actual state of mind and body at this time. In choosing Bowie for the role, director Roeg had been inspired by Alan Yentob’s 1975 Bowie documentary Cracked Actor. Filmed while Bowie was resident in Los Angeles, the documentary captures Bowie at the height of his cocaine addiction, his behaviour in the film being somewhat erratic and showing signs of paranoia. At the time Roeg considered these traits to make Bowie a perfect fit with the vision he had for the main character in The Man Who Fell to Earth (see Trynka 2011). In the ensuing decades since the film’s release, audiences and critics have frequently been drawn to the film due to its depiction of Bowie at a key moment in his artistic transition, from his cocaine-infused lifestyle in Los Angeles to the stark minimalism of his new life in Berlin during which he was to produce three landmark albums, Low (1977), Heroes (1977) and Lodger (1979), often referred to as the Berlin trilogy (see also Chapter 2 “Music, Heritage and the Cultural Consecration of Place”). Indeed, the cover of the first of these albums, Low, features a profile of Bowie that is clearly based on the character, Thomas Jerome, that he portrays in The Man Who Fell to Earth. Bowie was later to state that the persona he assumed during his ‘Berlin years’ was modelled closely on his portrayal of Jermone, this extending to Jerome’s clothing which Bowie was apparently still wearing when he ‘walked off the set’ of The Man Who Fell to Earth following the completion of filming. The relevance of popular music films as timepieces that reflect the cultural landscape from which they emerged has become increasingly

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significant over time as the periods depicted in these films recede further into the past. Woodstock: The Movie is a salient case in point in this respect. Filmed on location and directed by Michael Wadleigh, the documentary style of the film depicts events at the three-day 1969 Woodstock Music and Arts Fair held in upper New York State in August 1969 (see Young and Lang 1979). Released in March 1970, the original three-and-a-halfhour version of the film became instantly popular with rock music fans of the era and has since acquired a status as one of the most potent representations of Woodstock for successive generations of viewers (see Bennett 2004). The making of the film itself has also acquired legendary status, involving as it did the transportation of the camera and sound crew to the rural setting of the festival where they were forced to brave the elements, including heavy rain and resulting mud, as they captured the whole of the festival’s music performance content on film. The production crew also collected a significant amount of footage of the festival audience both in the proximity of the stage and elsewhere on the festival site including scenes of yoga and meditation sessions and nude bathing in nearby lakes. Once in the editing suite, Wadleigh and his team were then faced with the task of piecing the extensive visual and sound recordings back together (Bell 1999). Mixing footage of the many live music performances with ad hoc interviews with festival organisers Michael Lang and Artie Cornfeld, various members of the festival audience and residents of Bethal, the small town close to where Woodstock took place, Woodstock: The Movie today serves as a historical document of an event that has become an iconic aspect of the broader counter-cultural legacy. In objectively considering Woodstock as an aspect of contemporary popular music’s heritage media, several facets of the film need to be considered. First, in the selection of music featured in the film, Wadleigh was careful to ensure that this encompassed a wide range of artists, from established performers such as headliner Jimi Hendrix through to newer artists of the time such as the band Santana, for whom their Woodstock appearance and inclusion in the movie was to prove a gateway to international success. Wadleigh also featured extracts from many of the acoustic performances at the Woodstock festival, notably of opening act Richie Havens, as well as artists such as Ravi Shankar, in order to provide a sense of the diversity of music featured at Woodstock. Second, the film also offers important insights regarding the culture of the time, with the young festivalgoers featured in the film expressing counter-­ cultural ideas concerning the freedom of speech, equity and tolerance and opposition to war, a theme also reflected in

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aspects of the music caught on film such as Country Joe MacDonald’s ‘Fixin’ to Die Rag’ and Jimi Hendrix’s rendition of ‘The Star Spangled Banner’ (Whiteley 2004). Indeed, the positioning of Country Joe’s solo performance1 in Woodstock: The Movie provides an interesting case study in how, with hindsight, the creative licence of the film-maker can play a fundamentally important role in how a film text feeds into and shapes the cultural memory of its audience, informing among other things the historical and heritage value that they ascribe to such texts. Earlier in this chapter it was noted with reference to the work of Renov (1993) how documentary makers will often exercise their creative decisions in ways that reposition events to produce a new ‘truth’ out of the text. At the actual Woodstock event, Country Joe volunteered to be the next artist onstage following the highly energised performance of the opening act of Richie Havens. As Country Joe himself described it, there seemed to be little interest in his performance until he started his now famous F-U-C-K cheer before launching into the anti-­Vietnam war anthem ‘Fixin-to-Die Rag’. When editing the film footage of Country Joe’s performance for inclusion in Woodstock: The Movie, Wadleigh took the decision to include it not directly after Havens’ opening performance but rather part-way through the film by which time the counter-­ cultural context of the Woodstock event, including some classic performances, had already been established. In this way, not only was Country Joe’s performance given more prominence, but also its place in driving the Woodstock legacy as a monumental counter-cultural moment was galvanised. A more obvious example of filmic curations of popular music history and heritage is seen in the rock/pop biopic. Just as rock and pop documentary films are subject to editorial and curatorial decisions, so the popular music biopic is a ‘produced’ work—to the extent that in most cases such films are as much, if not more, a work of creative fiction as they are a reliable barometer of fact. Since the release of Oliver Stone’s The Doors in 1991, many rock and pop biopics have been criticised for apparently detracting from the ‘truth’ in favour of deploying Hollywood style sensationalism. A recent example of this is the 2018 film Bohemian Rhapsody (dir. Bryan Singer) about the English rock group Queen. The film depicts Queen’s career from the formation of the band in 1970 through to what many consider to be Queen’s most memorable performance—their appearance at the UK Live Aid event held at London’s Wembley Stadium on 13 July 1985. By the time of Bohemian Rhapsody’s release, Queen’s career had already been documented in a number of books, including

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Gunn and Jenkins’ (1992) Queen: As It Began, and in documentaries such as Matt O’Casey’s (2011) Queen: Days of Our Lives. Bohemian Rhapsody, however, marked the first time that the Queen story had ever been depicted in the format of a feature film and, as such, the story of the band was reframed in several ways to bring a more dramatic effect to the plot of the film. This extends to things such as a cosmetically adjusted chronology of song releases and even the events surrounding the AIDS diagnosis of lead singer Freddie Mercury and his revelation of this to the other members of Queen (an event marked in the film as occurring just prior to the Live Aid performance whereas sources close to Mercury including his former bandmates indicate that the singer first made them aware of his illness well after Live Aid had taken place). Another rock biopic, The Dirt, released in 2019 (dir. Jeff Tremaine) about the US glam metal band Mötley Crüe has been similarly criticised for reorganising and reinterpreting the band’s history as a means of delivering an entertaining movie script. In responding to such criticisms, the makers of rock biopics frequently make the point that in the interests of making a film entertaining for a wider public, a degree of creative licence is necessary in deciding which aspects of an artist’s history to present and how to present them. How this process then melds with the way in which featured artists are interpreted by a wider public as having contributed to popular music history and heritage is pertinent to consider, given the multi-platform way that all film media products are now consumed. On the brink of wide-scale digital media development, postmodern theorists such as Baudrillard (1983) argued that global flows of media had already created a situation whereby simulacra were considered a primary text by audiences. History, claimed Baudrillard, was reduced through such a postmodern turn to what was available to view on a screen, this then shaping the audience’s view of ‘reality’. This observation has significant implications for how the rock or pop biopic is viewed by audiences now, and also how new audiences will view such film products in the future. Thus, as the events of rock and pop history from the late twentieth century recede increasingly into the past, the biopic medium may assume equal standing to whatever elements of original documentary material remain in public circulation on digital media platforms. It is thus arguable that as, symbols and markers of popular music heritage, rock and pop biopics will serve (if they are not doing so already) a similar purpose to the decontextualised artefacts that one sees in a museum display or at a fan convention. Thus, although the artefacts themselves can be used to create a narrative of an artist, era, genre and so

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forth, much is also left to the imagination of the viewer, particularly in those cases where the viewer does not come to the event with a pre-­ existing comprehensive knowledge of the artist concerned. In that sense, the artefacts on display help the viewer understand and appreciate the artist in question. The same case can be made in relation to the biopic, its playing with historical facts being designed to offer insight into the artist’s life, achievements and legacy while at the same time functioning to hold the viewer’s interest and keep them entertained. Moreover, in an age where the avenues for media dissemination are increasingly diverse, it seems reasonable to suggest that over time the rock and pop biopic could become a primary text for the remembering and celebration of key artists. Indeed, this has already proven the case with historical films from other genres, which often stand in for other forms of historical representation (Deshpande 2004). In the sphere of popular music, and other forms of mediated culture, the concept of filmic representation becoming a primary reference for understanding is made more complex through the mediated nature of popular music and its artists in a holistic sense. Performer images and personas frequently cross the line between the real and the produced, with the effect that what is portrayed, like the rock and pop biopics that accentuate this portrayal, are always in part a fictional narrative (Negus 1992).

Glossy Heavyweights A further form of popular music heritage media that has become increasingly popular since the 1990s is the ‘classic rock/pop’ magazine. Unlike the fan magazines, such as the British publication Smash Hits (see Toynbee 1993), that pre-date them, these publications are characterised by a more robust form of writing about popular music with articles often being contributed by established rock and pop writers. Featuring in-depth interviews with artists or well-research accounts drawing on secondary data sources, classic rock and pop magazines offer mature historical and retrospective accounts of particular artists—typically those who already align with existing canonical accounts of status and achievement within rock and pop hierarchies. An early example of this style of publication was Mojo, a UK magazine first published in October 1993. As the name of the magazine suggests (the word ‘mojo’, meaning magic charm or spell, refers to the title of the Preston Red song ‘Got My Mojo Working’ recorded by various artists including Howlin’ Wolf, Muddy Waters and Manfred Mann)

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the original publisher of Mojo, Emap,2 wished to target the growing readership for articles on ‘classic rock’. Mojo was joined five years later by the aptly titled Classic Rock, a magazine that shared a similarly retrospective focus but with an emphasis more squarely on hard rock and heavy metal as well as the various subgenres associated with these styles of music. Both Mojo and Classic Rock helped to signal a new area of popular music consumption and appreciation that began to take hold in the early 1990s. As noted elsewhere in this book, this involved a shift from popular music (in its post-war incarnation) being primarily a ‘youth’ music to one in which an older audience (who had respectively formed the youth generations of the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s) also had a claim. Among the first ‘coffeetable publications’ in the field of popular music, Mojo and Classic Rock were aimed at an affluent, middle-aged and largely male audience of rock and pop fans. Indeed, the launch of both of these publications, and others including Classic Pop and Classic Prog, has been underpinned by a growing awareness within the music industry that middle-aged music fans now constitute an increasingly lucrative market for a wide range of products, including reissue CDs and vinyl, concert DVDs and so forth (see Bennett 2013). Classic rock and pop magazines align with this shift in how popular music is now marketed and consumed, operating on the basis that this older audience is keen to celebrate its generational legacy, not merely through consumption of the music associated with the era of their youth but also in reading accounts that detail histories of their favourite artists, including milestone achievements associated with these artists in respect to their landmark recordings and memorable live performances. At its most obvious level, this amounts to a form of shrewd lifestyle marketing, classic rock and pop magazines targeting not only the disposable income of affluent middle-aged rock and pop fans but chiming with a lifestyle aesthetic modelled around the collection, and often ‘conspicuous display’ (Trigg 2001), of more ‘up-market’ consumer items. There is, however, another way of interpreting the widespread appeal of classic rock and pop magazines, one that also resonates squarely with the theme of popular music heritage and its significance as a source of memory and belonging among music audiences. Thus, Bennett (2013) has suggested that affective modes of musicalised belonging can often stand in for the type of collective, face-to-face articulations of belonging that manifest in places such as concert halls and music festivals. Commonly shared understandings of popular music heritage may be one important way in which such an affective association manifests itself. Museums and

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exhibitions count as spaces in which people come together to collectively share in a generational marking of what they consider to be culturally significant in terms of artists, music, fashion and so forth (see Chapter 3 “Museums, Music Halls of Fame and Fan Conventions”). Magazines such as Mojo and Classic Rock may in that sense play an important role in expanding such heritage currency back into a realm which is more individually articulated, yet at the same time affectively connects a mass readership in a form of collective celebration. In this respect, Anderson’s (1983) notion of imagined communities serves as a useful conceptual framing device to understand how individual readers who are isolated from each other can, nevertheless, feel a sense of ‘community’. Anderson’s theory is similarly focused on print media, specifically daily newspapers printed and read by mass audiences in specific national settings across the world. For Anderson, through reading the same print media content, individual readers, even though they may have no direct knowledge of each other and be spread widely across a particular country, are nevertheless connected through an affective awareness of their shared reading practices. Thus, Anderson observes: An American will never meet, or even know the names of more than a handful of his … fellow Americans. He has no idea of what they are up to at any given time. But he has complete confidence in their steady, anonymous, simultaneous activity. (1983: 26)

Anderson is referring here to affective bonding in relation to national identity, but it is certainly not a great leap of faith to apply a similar interpretation to the forms of common cultural affiliation that may arise from reading print media publications focusing on popular music history and the (youth) cultural eras associated with this. Indeed, in the realm of music fandom, it is arguable that the shared affective bond that can result from reading classic rock and pop magazines is significantly enhanced through the fact that a generational bond already exists and has been fostered through consuming and celebrating specific music artists, genres, songs, albums, gigs, festivals and so forth over a period of time in what amounts to a common biographical legacy. What evolves through the reading of classic rock and pop magazine features, then, is a more retrospective and reflective mode of consuming, one in which generational histories of music and culture are represented to readers as aspects of a cultural history in which the readers themselves have had a shared, collective role in

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producing. While it is the music artists themselves who are frequently the centre of attention in articles published in classic rock and pop magazines, a key objective of such popular music heritage media is to provide cultural and historical context through which to bring the biographical stories of the artists to life. And in that context, the way their music impacted the audience and shaped particular experiences is an important subtext of much classic rock and pop magazine writing. Taking advantage of the scope offered by in-depth interviews, often including a level of critical self-analysis by the featured artists, classic rock and pop magazines, like popular music (auto)biographies (see below), provide rich popular music heritage narratives that can be used by readers in tandem with other forms of music heritage, such as exhibitions and documentaries, to (re)evaluate the cultural significance of particular artists. At the same time, such detailed and in-depth (re)reading offers important opportunities for the assembling of what could be termed ‘heritage capital’ by consumers of such magazines. Heritage capital offers ways through which music fans self-ascribe themselves kudos and authority as veterans of galvanising moments in the history of rock and pop. To have been at Woodstock, or Live Aid, or to have watched the Beatles’ live satellite broadcast of their song ‘All You Need Is Love’ in 1967 (see Martin 1979; Bennett 2013), are all moments that, having been experienced by the individual can assume the status of ‘heritage capitol’, the ‘I was there’ proclamation whereby the music fan’s ‘peak music experience’ (Green 2016) is affirmed for them and others who share the same experience through the galvanising effect of a bona fide historical status (re)ascribed by the magazine article. This aesthetic aspect of heritage rock and pop magazines is further pronounced through their frequent featuring of more contemporary artists influenced, for example, by 1960s psychedelia or 1970s glam rock. For example, in addition to focusing on ‘classic rock’ artists such as the Beatles and Bob Dylan, Mojo has featured articles on more recently established artists such as The White Stripes and Radiohead. Ostensibly geared towards attracting younger readers, whose own generational icons are of course now being positioned in rock and pop canons of rock and assuming their own heritage status, from the perspective of older readers, the inclusion of articles on contemporary artists with ‘classic’ influences further reinforces an understanding of the cultural authority and authenticity installed in their own youth generational music epoch

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and its icons as original players in the making of popular music history and heritage. A further significant aspect of classic rock and pop magazines is the fact that they are becoming increasingly numerous and diverse in a global context. This importantly serves to defuse, at least to some degree, the frequently heard assertion that the definition of popular music heritage is firmly in the grip of the Anglo-American world. Examples of classic rock and pop magazines in an international context include Tempi Dispari (Italy) and La Historia Del Rock (Mexico). That the reading practices of music fans are located in such broader cultural and linguistic contexts contributes to how localised popular music heritages are now beginning to find a voice within a realm of retrospective consecration (Schmutz 2005) in which Anglo-American representations have all too frequently been a dominant voice (Bennett 2015). This is, of course, something of a work in progress, for even if local expressions of popular music heritage have inspired their own forms of popular music heritage media, by and large these local media at present appeal to local audiences rather than enabling the heritage legacy of local rock and pop icons to attract a more global audience. One obvious drawback with classic rock and pop magazines, irrespective of the national context in which they are set and the genres and eras of rock and pop they focus on, is the emphasis on pre-proscribed canons of critically acclaimed musical achievement. In this sense, the range and coverage of these magazines neatly correspond with the marketing of other commodities such as special anniversary CDs of ‘classic albums’, the staging of reunion tours and the (self) tributing of classic rock and pop artists. Certainly, it needs to be acknowledged that features on more obscure and ‘forgotten’ artists, such as Nick Drake and Clifford T. Ward, have helped such artists find a new level of posthumous fame; instances of such coverage are relatively rare. Rather, classic rock and pop magazines primarily tend to reinforce the status quo, becoming, like so many other popular music heritage artefacts, part of a self-fulfilling prophecy in their selling back to audiences the stories and narratives that they wish to hear about the generational icons of their youth. In this context, however, the prevalence of digital media presents an interesting challenge to the popular music heritage monopoly of classic rock and pop magazines. It has already been noted in previous chapters of this book how the prevalence of DIY music heritage practices is now serving to rebalance the canonical

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bias of more formalised institutional practices. This can also be seen in relation to the proliferation of online accounts of classic rock and pop written by enthusiasts of less well-known and under-­acknowledged artists (see, e.g., Kibby 2000; Bennett 2002). Also, it is significant that more recent genres, notably hip hop and electronic dance music, can frequently be seen evolving their own heritage narratives in an online context (Armour 2018; Katz and VanderHamm 2015). It has been previously noted how so much of the tactile, analogue nature of the popular music heritage landscape is linked to a currency of cultural authority and legitimacy associated with those generations born in the post-war, pre-digital era. With the increasing availability of online sources of information and the preference among more recent generations for such information over hard copy sources, it is possible that the dominance of hard copy, coffeetable publication such as Mojo and Classic Rock will be displaced by an online and increasingly ‘prosumerist’ approach to the defining and celebration of popular music heritage. In that sense, it is entirely plausible that the classic rock/pop magazine itself will ultimately come to be considered a popular music artefact of a bygone age.

Off the Shelf: Rock and Pop Autobiographies Aligned with the now established market for classic rock and pop magazines is an increasingly robust demand for autobiographical accounts of memorable bands and artists who have contributed to different eras of rock and pop from the 1950s onwards. As an illustration of the rapid growth in this market, between the years 2010 and 2020, there was a veritable rush of rock and pop (auto)biographies. These ranged from rock icons such as Keith Richards (Life, 2010), Neil Young (Waging Heavy Peace, 2012) and Pete Townshend (Who Am I, 2012), to punk, new wave and ska artists including Viv Albertine (Clothes, Clothes, Clothes, Music, Music, Music, Boys, Boys, Boys, 2014), Patti Smith (Just Kids, 2010) and Pauline Black (Black by Design: A 2-Tone Memoir by Pauline Black, 2011). The presence and appeal of rock and pop non-fiction is, of course, by no means a recent phenomenon. Thus, as early as the 1970s, music writers such as Robert Christgau and Greil Marcus had established the foundations for an extended form of critical writing on post-war rock and pop, as seen, for example, with Christgau’s Any Old Way You Choose It: Rock and Other Pop Music, 1967–1973 and Marcus’s Mystery Train: Images of America in Rock ‘n’ Roll Music (1975). More specifically in the field of

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rock and pop biography, an early and celebrated contributor to this field is British author Philip Norman who, since the beginning of the 1980s, has written some fourteen biographical accounts of artists ranging from the Beatles (Shout! The True Story of the Beatles, 1981) and the Rolling Stones (Sympathy for the Devil: The Rolling Stones Story, 1984) to Elton John (Sir Elton: The Definitive Biography, 2001) and Eric Clapton (Slowhand: The Life and Music of Eric Clapton, 2018). Rock and pop autobiographies are, however, a development beyond this established canon of rock and pop writing. In most cases they are entirely written by the artists themselves (although sometimes with assistance from a professional writer), presenting for the first time a first-hand account of lives that their fans have read about only through the words of others. As such, an autobiographical work by an iconic rock or pop artist is often regarded as a definitive statement, something that stands out from other accounts due to the way that the autobiographical lens allows the voice of the artist to assume centre stage. In many ways, this plethora of autobiographical rock and pop literature, much of it offering a history of artists in first-hand terms for the first time in a career spanning multiple decades, is another indication of how an ageing and economically empowered audience is dominating the popular music heritage market. Very often, in addition to being sold in quantity online, such books are also sold in the same stores and outlets that sell CDs, vinyl and music DVDs. Although it could not be claimed that such consumer outlets and items are the exclusive purview of the middle-aged and older music fan, at the same time it is true to say that this age group is more likely to frequent such stores and spend time perusing the shelves searching for items to add to their personal collections of music and related items. In the UK, this has given rise to the term ‘fifty-quid man’, a stereotype of the middle-aged male music fan whose weekly spend of fifty British pounds typically includes CDs, vinyl, a concert or documentary DVD and a book or two (see Bennett 2013). As noted earlier, this particular age demographic, roughly between the ages of forty-five and sixty-five, commands a lifestyle in which tactile consumer objects serve as an illustration of cultural capital (Bourdieu 1984)—the CD, the vinyl, the book on the shelf being more visible and thus more easily demonstrative of an income level, taste and associated lifestyle aesthetic than the essentially ‘invisible’ digital files stored on a computer. In this context, the expensive (sometimes hardback version only) copies of rock and pop biographies instantly chime with the middle-aged individual’s desire to project an image of the

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rock or pop connoisseur whose interest in popular music also extends to a deep knowledge of its history. There is, however, another way of interpreting what could be termed the ‘(auto)biographical’ turn in the world of rock and pop. Commanding careers that now often span some forty, and indeed in many cases, fifty years or more, such artists are inherently aware of the ‘classic’ and ‘heritage’ status that has been bestowed upon them. In many cases, this has been accompanied by the conferment of awards and/or inauguration into prestigious institutions such as the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame (Reising 2001; see also Chapter 2 “Museums, Music Halls of Fame and Fan Conventions”). In other instances, such status comes purely from longevity and cult adoration among fans. In both cases, however, the commitment of one’s history to print becomes a way to take creative authorship of one’s legacy. In the case of some rock musicians, such as the late Neil Peart (1952—2020), drummer and lyricist with Canadian rock band Rush, writing became a passion such that it extended into other forms of writing—in Peart’s case, a series of travel writings including Ghost Rider: Travels on the Healing Road (2002), Traveling Music: Playing Back the Soundtrack to My Life and Times (2004) and Roadshow: Landscape with Drums: A Concert Tour by Motorcycle (2006). In each of these books, Peart combined accounts of his travel experiences with biographical details of life, some of this deeply personal as in the case of Ghost Rider which documents Peart’s coming to terms with the loss of his first daughter, Selena, in a car accident in 1997 and the death of his partner Jacqueline from cancer ten months later. The autobiography format, including writing by rock and pop artists that assumes a semi-autobiographical style, provides a significant new slant on the way in which the written history of rock and pop is produced. For much of their careers, many rock and pop artists have been subject to representation by others, including music journalists and other music writers, as well as film and documentary makers. As such, and as many artists have frequently lamented in interviews, they are often depicted in ways that they cannot readily identify with, as actors whose lives are misrepresented, with their actions sometimes taken entirely out of context. The autobiography format thus offers artists an opportunity to (re)tell their story from a more embodied perspective; one in which their own and/or their band’s contributions to popular music history and heritage are filtered through the lens of personal experience. Much has been made of the connection

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between autobiographical and historical writing. For example, Popkin, in discussing the work of German philosopher Wilhelm Dilthey, notes: For Dilthey, autobiography was … a genuine source of knowledge; indeed it was the highest form of human experience. It was also the basis of all historical understanding … As he put it, “The autobiography can, ultimately, widen out into a historical portrait; this is limited, but also made meaningful by being based on experience, through which the self and its relation to the world are comprehended. The reflection of a person about himself remains the point of orientation and foundation”. (2005: 18)

Popkin’s observations have a clear resonance with the nature and significance of autobiographical writing in the sphere of rock and pop. Working on the assumption of an established knowledge among the readership of the artist and their legacy, the artist then retells this story—or aspects of it—through the medium of first-hand experience. In this context, however, there is an added dimension to consider, that being the aforementioned connection between artists and their fans. In the case of ageing artists and fans, this often assumes a generational inflexion—indeed, it is common for ageing artists and fans to claim that they ‘grew up together’ and shared many of the same cultural experiences (see Bennett 2013). Through committing often highly personal experiences to the written page, artists offer their fans/readers a further opportunity to connect with them—to relive through their reading of the artist’s autobiography their own memories of particular times and places for which their generational rock and pop icons provided the everyday soundtrack (Bennett 2020). Thus, the rock or pop autobiography assumes a dual, inter-related form of significance. For the artists, it allows them a chance to strip away some of the layers of representation applied to them by other authors and portray their history and legacy on their own terms. From the point of view of readers, this reasserts points of connection and cultural bonding between the artists and their fans and also between the fans themselves.

Conclusion This chapter has introduced the term ‘heritage media’ as a means of both conceptualising and exploring the various forms of media, both traditional and online as well as audio-visual and print-based that are now focused on the archiving and dissemination of popular music history and heritage. As

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an increasingly mediatised form from the 1950s onwards, popular music has essentially created its own rich archive containing a range of material from live performances to in-depth interviews with particular artists. Such material has been drawn on in more recent retrospective appraisals of artists, eras and key milestones in musical achievement and their links to broader socio-cultural events occurring in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. The chapter has considered the importance of such heritage media in relation to a range of different treatments of popular music heritage. In the sphere of audio-visual media, this has included an examination of documentary series and films, including iconic examples such as Woodstock: The Movie as well as the more recent trend towards rock and pop biopics. The chapter has also considered the significance of print-­ based forms of heritage media such as glossy retrospective magazines including Mojo and Classic Rock. Such publications, it was noted, are aimed primarily at a middle-aged, higher-income bracket audience (as indeed are many of the products associated with the popular music heritage market). Finally, consideration was made of the increasing number of rock and pop autobiographies now available for purchase. Although such publications also target an affluent middle-aged market, it has been suggested here that the autobiography also provides a medium through which artists can engage in the representation of popular music history and heritage by introducing their own voices and perspectives into a heritage and legacy landscape that has been frequently dominated by the voices of others, notably music critics and writers.

Notes 1. Country Joe also appeared with his band Country Joe and the Fish and was in fact the only artist to appear twice at Woodstock (see Allen 2004). 2. In January 2008, Mojo was taken over by Bauer who has published the magazine since this time.

References Allen, Dave (2004) ‘A Public Transition: Acoustic and Electric Performances at the Woodstock Festival’, in A. Bennett (ed.) Remembering Woodstock. Aldershot: Ashgate. pp. 111–126. Anderson, Benedict (1983) Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origins and Spread of Nationalism. London: Verso.

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Armour, Zoe (2018) ‘Dedicated Followers of PaSSion (1995–Present): Seasoned Clubbers and the Mediation of Collective Memory as a Process of Digital Gift Giving’, in A. Hardy, A. Bennett and B. Robards (eds) Neo-Tribes: Consumption, Leisure and Tourism. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 137–152. Baker, D. (2013) ‘Elvis Goes to Hollywood: Authenticity, Resistance, Commodification and the Mainstream’, in S. Baker, A. Bennett and J. Taylor (eds) Redefining Mainstream Popular Music. New York, NY: Routledge, pp. 89–101. Baudrillard, Jean (1983) Simulations. New York: Semiotext(e). Bell, Dale. (ed.) (1999) Woodstock: An Inside Look at the Movie that Shook Up the World and Defined a Generation. Michael Wiese Productions: Studio City, CA. Bennett, Andy (2002) ‘Music, Media and Urban Mythscapes: A Study of the Canterbury Sound’, Media, Culture and Society, 24(1): 107–120. Bennett, Andy (2004) ‘“Everybody’s happy, everybody’s free”: Representation and Nostalgia in the Woodstock Film’, in A.  Bennett (ed.) Remembering Woodstock. Aldershot, Ashgate, pp. 43–54. Bennett, Andy (2013) Music, Style and Aging: Growing Old Disgracefully? Philadelphia: Temple University Press. Bennett, Andy (2015) ‘Mediation, generational memory and the dead music icon’, in C. Strong and B. Lebrun (eds) Death and the Rock Star. Aldershot: Ashgate, pp. 61–72. Bennett, Andy (2019) ‘“On the programme tonight”: The Old Grey Whistle Test as Tastemaker for British AOR Audiences in the Early 1970s’, Popular Music History, 12(3): 316–332. Bennett, Andy (2020) British Progressive Pop 1970–1980. New York: Bloomsbury. Bennett, Andy and Baker, Sarah (2010) ‘Classic Albums: The re-presentation of the rock album on British television’, in I. Inglis (ed.) Popular Music on British Television. Aldershot: Ashgate, pp. 41–53. Bennett, Andy and Rogers, Ian (2016) Popular Music Scenes and Cultural Memory. Basingstoke: Palgrave. Bourdieu, Pierre (1984) Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste, trans. R. Nice. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. Burgess, Jean and Green, Joshua. 2009. YouTube: Online Video and Participatory Culture. Cambridge: Polity. Corner, John (2002) ‘Music and Documentary’, Music and Television, 21(3): 357–366. Deshpande, Anirudh (2004) ‘Films as Historical Sources or Alternative History’, Economic and Political Weekly, 39(40): 4455–59. Frith, Simon (2002) ‘Look! Hear! The Uneasy Relationship of Music and Television’, Popular Music, 21(3): 277–90. Green, Ben (2016) ‘“I Always Remember That Moment”: Peak Music Experiences as Epiphanies’, Sociology, 50(2): 333–48.

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Gunn, Jacky and Jenkins, Jim (1992) Queen: As it Began. London: Pan Books. Haslam, Dave (2015) Life After Dark: A History of British Nightclubs and Music Venues. London: Simon and Schuster. Inglis, Ian (ed.) (2003) Popular Music and Film. London: Wallflower Press. Inglis, Ian (2010) ‘Introduction’, in I. Inglis (ed) Popular Music and Television in Britain. Farnham: Ashgate, pp. 1–7. Istoc, Elana-Manuela (2012) ‘Urban Cultural Tourism and Sustainable Development’, International Journal for Responsible Tourism, 1(1): 38–56. Katz, Mark and VanderHamm, David (2015) ‘Preserving Heritage, Fostering Change: Accidental Archives of Country Music and Hip Hop’, The Public Historian, 37(4): 32–46. Kibby, Marjorie D. (2000) ‘Home on the Page: A Virtual Place of Music Community’, Popular Music, 19(1): 91–100. Kleinhans, Chuck (1974) ‘Performance. Walkabout. Don’t Look Now: Nicholas Roeg—Permutations Without Profundity’, Jump Cut: A Review of Contemporary Media, 3: 13–17. Kutulas, Judy (2010) ‘That’s the Way I’ve Always Heard It Should Be’: Baby Boomers, 1970s Singer-songwriters, and Romantic Relationships’, Journal of American History, 97(3) 682–702. Laderman, David (1996) ‘What a Trip: The Road Film and American Culture’, Journal of Film and Video, 48(1/2): 41–57. Lewis, J. (1992) The Road to Romance and Ruin: Teen Film and Youth Culture. London: Routledge. Martin, George (1979) All You Need Is Ears. London: Macmillan. Neaverson, Bob (2000) ‘Tell Me What You See: The Influence and Impact of the Beatles’ Movies’, in I.  Inglis (ed.) The Beatles, Popular Music and Society. Basingstoke: Palgrave, pp. 150–162. Negus, Keith (1992) Producing Pop: Culture and Conflict in the Popular Music Industry. London: Edward Arnold. Palmer, Tony (1977) All You Need is Love: The Story of Popular Music. London: Futura. Peterson, Richard A. and Bennett, Andy (2004) ‘Introducing Music Scenes’, in A. Bennett and R.A. Peterson (eds) Music Scenes: Local, Translocal, and Virtual. Nashville, TN: Vanderbilt University Press, pp. 1–15. Popkin, Jeremy D. (2005) History, Historians and Autobiography. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Reising, Russell (2001) ‘The Secret Lives of Objects; The Secret Stories of Rock and Roll: Cleveland’s Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and Museum and Seattle’s Experience Music Project’, American Quarterly, 53(3): 489–510. Renov, Michael (1993) ‘Introduction: The Truth About Non-fiction’, in M. Renov (ed) Theorizing Documentary. London: Routledge, pp. 1–11

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Schmutz, Vaughn (2005) ‘Retrospective Cultural Consecration in Popular Music’, American Behavioral Scientist 48(11): 1510–23. Shumway, David R. (1992) ‘Rock and Roll as a Cultural Practice’, in A. DeCurtis (ed.) Present Tense: Rock and Roll and Culture. Durham, North Carolina, Duke University Press, pp. 117–134. Toynbee, Jason (1993) ‘Policing Bohemia, Pinning up Grunge: The Music Press and Generic Change in British Pop and Rock’, Popular Music, 12(3): 289–300. Trigg, Andrew B. (2001) ‘Veblen, Bourdieu, and Conspicuous Consumption’, Journal of Economic Issues, 35(1): 99–115. Trynka, Paul (2011) Starman—David Bowie: The Definitive Biography. London: Sphere. Whiteley, Sheila (2004) ‘“1, 2, 3 What are we fighting 4?” Music, Meaning and the Star’, in A.  Bennett (ed.) Remembering Woodstock. Aldershot: Ashgate, pp. 18–28. Wilson, Brian with B. Greenman (2016) I am Brian Wilson. London: Coronet. Young, Jean and Lang, Michael (1979) Woodstock Festival Remembered. New York, NY: Ballantine Books.

Heritage Discourse and the Internet

During the mid-1990s the internet rapidly assumed status as a key medium for the representation and celebration of popular music heritage across the industrialised world. Importantly, this also extended to informal and DIY forms of popular music heritage practice which acquired new levels of visibility and trans-local connection through internet platforms (see also Chapter “Memorabilia, Collectables and Enshrinement”). In the case of music artists too, the internet offered a new range of opportunities for them to engage with their audience; this included access to communities of fans interested in particular heritage artefacts including classic recordings and live performances. Indeed, in an overall sense, internet technology has made communication between artists and their global networks of fans far easier than was the case in the pre-digital age. Likewise, music fans are able to connect with each other, forming in some cases what Peterson and Bennett (2004) refer to as ‘virtual scenes’, that is, music fans who engage in scene practices that are exclusively or primarily conducted online. Initially, virtual music scenes manifested in the form of internet-­ based fan sites and chat rooms. With the emergence of Web 2.0, however, levels of online connectivity between fans rapidly began to develop in new ways through the opportunities that the expanded capacity of internet technology provided, including the posting of user-generated content on platforms such as YouTube, Myspace and, latterly, Facebook and Instagram (see, e.g., Bennett and Rogers 2016a). The internet also gave rise to new

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ways of understanding music scenes as fans with common tastes for particular music artists and genres began to exchange images, texts and personal knowledge online. Within this, discourses concerning the historical and cultural significances of particular artists, genres and scenes started to emerge, suggesting that virtual scenes could also be spaces in which shared, or indeed conflicting understandings of popular music heritage emerged. Similarly, the internet also quickly became a means through which music fans could organise themselves against threats to perceived sites of popular music heritage, including the proposed demolition of the childhood homes of prominent musicians and iconic local music venues (Bennett and Strong 2018). In this sense, the presence of online posts and discussions creates an added level of awareness between music fans regarding their common concern over sites of popular music heritage and their preservation, thus prompting forms of action designed to challenge or counter actions designed to compromise or destroy physical artefacts that music fans consider to be part of their collective cultural heritage. At another level, the internet, particularly since the era of Web 2.0, has provided new opportunities for archiving aspects of popular music history and heritage; these ranging from live performance and interview footage to documentaries, films and studio tracks by a range of artists, from celebrated global icons to often unknown local bands and artists who may have released only one or two singles or perhaps never even progressed to that stage. As such, the internet has also become a seminally important resource through which knowledge of popular music history and heritage can be acquired. Indeed, given the ease of access which many individuals now have to internet technology, it has become a primary resource for personal, leisure-based research and also an important tool for many engaged in professional forms of music research, for example, in academia (Hewson et al. 2016) and journalism (Machill and Beiler 2009). Similarly, through the various professional and amateur tutorials posted on YouTube, new possibilities for studying and learning how to play music associated with various artists who attract the heritage label have also increased exponentially, giving rise to a new range of possibilities for the celebration of popular music heritage through the musical emulation of favourite tracks and passing this expertise on to others.

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In Praise of … Internet Fan Sites A particularly salient example of online popular music heritage is the presence of websites dedicated to different popular music icons. Although this is not a readily acknowledged site of practice for popular music heritage preservation, like other examples focused on in this book, fan-generated websites—and more recently Facebook and Instagram pages—yield their own opportunities for the presentation and discussion of artefacts considered to be of value in a popular music heritage context. Unsurprisingly perhaps, such fan sites began to emerge as soon as the internet started to gain traction as a form of accessible domestic technology. Building on an already established legacy of fanzines (Atton 2010) and fan letters (Vermorel and Vermorel 1985), popular music fans quickly adapted the representational and discursive practices associated with these earlier analogue forums to online spaces. One immediate and critical advantage of the internet as a form of fan communication over earlier analogue forms was in the way that it instantly broadened the frequency of such communication and access among fans, essentially creating global networks of fans of particular popular music artists and genres. Thus, as Kibby observes: The ritual exchange of information online allows fans a feeling of community between themselves and between them and the performer, facilitating a belief in a commonality, although they are dispersed geographically and disparate in needs and experiences. An electronic place in which to ‘gather’ enables a direct link between fans, and even makes possible a direct connection between fans and performer. (2000: 91)

In an article on the short-lived ‘chat page’ established by record label ‘Oh Boy Records’ for fans to exchange messages concerning legendary American country-folk singer-songwriter John Prine, the label’s major artist, Kibby suggests that this chat page served as an early example of the community-building properties of the internet, specifically in the context of music fans. Kibby advances this argument by suggesting that such community-­building qualities satisfy a desire among fans to forge a sense of connection with a music artist, or artists, something that according to Kibby became problematised to a significant degree with the industrialisation of music and the increasing representation of artists as mediated images and packaged commodities distinct from their audience. While the

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folk–industrial music dichotomy has been challenged through various studies, including an extensive scholarship on music scenes and belonging (see, e.g., Straw 1991; Bennett and Peterson 2004), the point remains that since the industrialisation of music during the first half of the twentieth century, fans have had to evolve new ways of connecting with artists. Such strategies have taken a variety of forms from affective scenes and communities (Bennett 2013) built around admiration of a particular artist (Cavicchi 1998) to self-ascribed fan community titles, such as the Deadheads (fans of American psychedelic rock band the Grateful Dead (Adams 1998)) and the KISS Army (Bailey 2005) that generate a sense of belonging at both face-to-face and affective levels. The emergence of the internet has given rise to further possibilities for fans to connect with artists and feel a sense of connection with them. With the introduction of Web 2.0 technologies, and the facility this allows for the uploading of content, this sense of connection has been further amplified. Thus, as Beer observes: What is interesting here is that it is possible to find out a vast range of information about a performer to read about their personal history, to watch live performances from gigs we never attended (and that were often not captured by official film crews), to access interviews and even encounters in the street videoed on mobile phones, and so on. In short we can engage in research into any popular performer with great ease and free access. Getting to know these performers is apparently straightforward, particularly for the experienced wikizen. (2008: 229–230)

As Beer’s account illustrates, the internet has become a highly significant, if not pivotal, space for celebrations of fandom and also a place where articulations of fan identity can be expanded through the posting and sharing of content. Such practices have in turn facilitated new expressions of what could be termed musicalised cultural memory (Bennett and Rogers 2016a) as myriad artefacts, for example, concert footage, interviews, bootlegs and other audio-visual content—both popular and rare— are archived in a shared and easily accessible place for collective usage. In many respects, the practice of uploading content in this way and the archival qualities it displays amounts to yet another example of the DIY music heritage making practices previously referred to in this book. In every respect, this is an unintended consequence of the rapid emergence and availability of digital technology. While much of the literature on the

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unintended consequences of digital technology focuses on negative impacts (see, e.g., Reyns et al. 2013), positive impacts are also evident, not least of all in terms of the creativity that digital technology affords individuals in the realms of online production, dissemination and consumption. The way in which aspects of popular music heritage celebration and preservation now manifest themselves in online spaces is a compelling example of the creative possibilities afforded by the internet and the digital platforms and technologies associated with it. As the range of possible music artists, genres, eras and events that can be inscribed with heritage status expands, the growth of Web 2.0 archiving activity expands along with this. Such a scenario is perhaps in itself unremarkable given the overall extent of the online activity now occurring across a range of popular culture related themes including sport, cinema, television, literature and so on. What is perhaps more significant in the realm of online popular music heritage making is the amount of historical backfilling (Bennett 2021) that goes along with the process of online musical archiving. In the pre-digital era, popular music heritage was more obviously in the hands of official heritage making institutions. While fanzines and fan conventions provided some level of alternative discourse regarding popular music history and heritage, these were in the main fringe activities. While it is still the case that an official museum exhibition devoted to a famous artist or genre is likely to attract more media attention than unofficial, online heritage making activities, at the same time the internet has broadened the playing field. In essence, it is now the case that many more actors are involved in making decisions as to which music and which music artists are deserving in terms of archiving and preservation. Indeed, such practices can also have some bearing on how music artists and scenes from the past are represented in the present. The evolution of Web 2.0 brought with it new possibilities for fans to share content, including their own voiceovers, offering critical comments on aspects of popular music history, both well-known and lesser-known. In the field of music-­ making, it has frequently been noted how the advent of digital technology provides access to professional quality recording and production techniques that were previously only available through hiring a professional recording studio. A similar situation pertains in the sphere of film and documentary production. Thus, many fan-generated films and documentaries posted on YouTube seamlessly interweave with professionally produced, commercial content that has been archived on the platform and in many cases attract equal if not greater amounts of views.

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In addition to film and video content, the internet also allows music fans to contribute to the creation of music heritage archives by uploading photos and written accounts. For example, the ‘glastonburyfestivals’ website has a facility whereby members of the public can upload photos of their attendance at the festival from its inception in 1970 through the most recent edition of Glastonbury in 2019. Grainy black and white photographs from the 1970 and 1971 Glastonbury festivals, when the event was relatively small and obscure, provide a salient example of the extent to which the internet has provided a space for aspects of contemporary culture, largely hidden from public view for over half a century. Photographs of the festival site demonstrate both the differences—small crowds and scant facilities—and continuities—such as the iconic Pyramid stage—with the latter-day Glastonbury festival. Similarly, stage photos of bands such as Family, who appeared at Glastonbury in 1971 at the height of their fame only to disband two years later, provide a deeper account of the history of English rock during the early 1970s than is often readily available in more mainstream accounts.

Virtual Scenes With the development of internet technology and the introduction of Web 2.0, the opportunities for forms of virtual music scene activity utilising user-generated content have increased exponentially. As noted above, a key aspect of the internet’s use in forms of online exchange has been the discussion, debate and critical celebration of various aspects of popular music history and heritage. The concept of the virtual scene adds another layer of understanding to such online mediations between fans. Thus, while the notion of an online community may connote a relatively diffuse gathering of music fans, the concept of scene suggests a deeper level of collective energy and commitment invested in a music artist or genre. Indeed, such has been the level of online activity in this regard that the preservation of popular music heritage has become a significant aspect of virtual music scenes—such scenes having brought attention to forgotten or overlooked aspects of popular music history. The concept of the virtual music scene was introduced in the early 2000s as it became increasingly evident that clusters of music fan activity, analogous to and yet distinct from physical scenes in bricks and mortar settings, were beginning to manifest on the internet (see Bennett 2002). As an extension of popular music’s long-standing mediation through technology (Frith 1988), it was

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perhaps inevitable that the internet would also lend itself to the production, dissemination and consumption of popular music and its associated cultural resources as soon as it started to become more widely available. More significant still, however, was the ease of access that the internet offered for participation in forms of musical exchange—and the forms that this exchange took—for geographically dispersed groups of individuals. In essence, what the internet created was an opportunity to continue and extend practices and discourses that had evolved in the context of physical, face-to-face scenes through a communication technology that removed the necessity of face-to-face interaction. This, in effect, created a virtual environment for the creation of music scenes. Thus, as Peterson and Bennett observed in an early assessment of the ‘virtual scene’: Whereas a conventional local scene is kept in motion by a series of gigs, club nights, fairs, and similar events, where fans converge, communicate and reinforce their sense of belonging to a particular scene, the virtual scene involves direct net-mediated person-to-person communication between fans … This may, involve, for example, the creation of chat-rooms or list-­ serves dedicated to the scene and may involve the trading of music and images on-line. (2004: 11)

While the technological advancements associated with Web 2.0 have greatly enhanced the creative possibilities for fans to engage in virtual scene activity, examples of virtual music scenes date back to the era of Web 1.0. A salient example of this was Aymeric Leroy’s launching of Calyx—the Official Canterbury Sound website (see Leroy 2021). An established music writer, Leroy’s decision to start the website was grounded in his own extensive knowledge of progressive rock, including the Canterbury Sound whose associated artists, including Soft Machine, Caravan and Gong, are regarded as key early contributors to progressive rock and jazz rock (see Stump 1997; Bennett 2004; Draganova et al. 2021). In a very clear sense then, from its initial establishment Calyx played a significant part in reintroducing the Canterbury Sound into contemporary popular music history. Indeed, the re-emergence of the term Canterbury Sound during the mid-1990s led to a veritable renaissance of interest in the Canterbury Sound bands and their significance as an often overlooked chapter in the history of English progressive rock and jazz rock during the late 1960s and early 1970s. The revival of the Canterbury Sound serves as

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a pertinent and highly rich example of the internet’s role in the representation of aspects of popular music history and the conferral of heritage status. It is also illustrative of how internet technology provided the basis for a dispersed group of fans, with personal knowledge of and enthusiasm for bands and artists associated with the Canterbury Sound to collectively engage online, giving visibility and substance to a ‘scene’ that had been hitherto been largely, punctuated at intervals by the publication of fanzines such as Facelift and its German sister publication Canterbury Nachrichten (Canterbury News) (see Howitt 2021; see also Chapter 4 “Memorabilia, Collectables and Enshrinement”). Analogous to the DIY forms of material popular music heritage preservation explored in Chapter 4 “Memorabilia, Collectables and Enshrinement”, an immediate effect of the establishment of Calyx—The Canterbury Sound Website was the empowerment it gave to fans to collectively work outside official representations of popular music heritage. Although the term Canterbury Sound had been introduced by journalists in the late 1960s to describe bands such as Soft Machine, Caravan and Gong, the term had largely become forgotten as progressive rock crystallised into a genre that was increasingly defined by internationally successful progressive rock bands, including Yes, Genesis, Pink Floyd, Jethro Tull and Emerson, Lake and Palmer (Macan 1997). Significant about the Canterbury Sound’s re-emergence online, and a key tenet in its evolution as a virtual scene, was the participatory nature of the Calyx website. Thus, Leroy, as the site’s creator, provided scope for contributions from fellow fans that contributed to Calyx becoming an early example of online ‘prosumer’ activity (see Ritzer and Jurgenson 2010; see also Chapter 4 “Memorabilia, Collectables and Enshrinement”) involving the creation of a virtual scene centrally dedicated to the representation of a period of popular music history that had been side-lined through its practical expulsion from canonical debates. Taking advantage of the internet’s capacity for facilitating the online connection of a trans-­ local community of globally dispersed fans, contributors to Calyx used the website to engage in a discussion of the Canterbury Sound’s contributions to popular music history and to backfill parts of that history deemed to be missing, given that the notion of a Canterbury Sound had remained in relative obscurity for a quarter of a decade. A significant part of this historical backfilling included creating a fully fledged spatial narrative of the Canterbury Sound that connected it back to the physical city of Canterbury (see Bennett 2002). Interestingly, it was not only fans but also some of the

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original Canterbury Sound musicians who engaged in this online, retrospective re-evaluation of Canterbury Sound as a culturally significant aspect of the jazz and progressive rock scenes of the late 1960s and early 1970s. Such contributions from musicians involved in the Canterbury Sound, and often with local origins in the city of Canterbury or its environs, breathe further life into the notion of the Canterbury Sound as a scene with its own locally distinctive roots. Thus, as Bennett observes: while physically removed from Canterbury, ‘Canterbury Sound’ fans effectively forge a sense of community through their collective construction of the city in musicalized terms, the online discussions of fans being informed by a shared image of Canterbury as an urban space that provided the necessary stimulus for the birth of the Canterbury Sound and which remains central to its ‘spirit’. (2002: 91)

As the above observation illustrates, in a very palpable sense, a virtual scene can often stand in for the absence of a physical scene. This is particularly pertinent when considering historical narratives of scenes in that, through online forums, knowledge exchange and the galvanising of particular themes and tropes becomes more visible and apparent. While pre-­ digital fanzines also performed this function, access to such publications was more limited and much depended upon their continuity over time. Publishing on the internet is less costly in terms of time and resources, thus the production of historical narratives of a scene, genre or specific artist is often more consistent and sustainable. Such ease of access to online resources is also advantageous in terms of increasing the footprint of a music scene, including one such as the Canterbury Sound with a hidden and often obscured history. Indeed, a notable impact of Calyx was that its launch broadened international awareness of the Canterbury Sound and also attracted a new, younger audience to Canterbury Sound artists and their music (Bennett 2002; Draganova et al. 2021). In this sense, as the hub of a virtual music scene dedicated to the Canterbury Sound, Calyx also importantly demonstrated the cross-­ generational characteristics that are often inscribed in virtual music scene practices and also the importance of virtual music scenes as sites of inter-­ generational knowledge sharing and exchange of ideas. In the context of popular music heritage representation, such practices are critically important as they contribute to the reproduction of discourses concerning the relative value of music and its associated images, objects, texts and spaces.

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Although these artefacts hold value in themselves, the memories and collectively shared narratives of those fans who embraced them as aspects of their (youth) cultural identities during the eras with which they are directly associated are also of inherent value in understanding the cultural properties of such artefacts—and, as such, their historical and heritage values. Such accounts have undoubtedly been passed from one generation to the next in the pre-digital era. In the context of virtual music scenes, however, the archiving of such exchanges inscribes them with a sense of tangibility missing from the pre-digital era when they were neither so frequently documented nor so readily accessible.

Online Heritage Activism Web 2.0 has also provided a basis for an increasing prevalence of what could be termed online activism around popular music heritage and its preservation, particularly in a local context where physical sites of popular music heritage, notably music venues or the childhood homes of popular music icons, are frequently threatened with demolition and/or re-­ purposing (as hotels, apartments, office blocks and so forth). In many respects, online music heritage activism serves as a pertinent example of how the digital/virtual has in effect foisted greater attention on the physical than existed in the pre-digital age. Thus, in the pre-digital era, sites of popular music heritage were often closed, or even demolished, with little or no protest. Such was the case with the Cavern Club in Liverpool, a venue made popular by the Beatles who played 292 shows there between 1961 and 1963 (Leigh 2015). Although the Cavern was eventually reopened (in 1984) on a new site using excavated bricks from the original site in its construction, the closing and demolition of the original venue in 1973 reflect on a time when decisions regarding important sites of popular music history and heritage could be made without attracting attention and opposition from music fans. Elsewhere in the world, a similar situation has also frequently applied as, for example, in the case of the iconic Cloudland venue in Brisbane, Australia, demolished in 1982 (see Stafford 2006; see also Chapter “Music, Heritage and the Cultural Consecration of Place”). Some fifty years later, this situation has changed. Not only has the concept of popular music heritage entered broader public discourse, but the opportunities to participate in forms of music heritage preservation, both online and offline, have increased exponentially. In terms of the attention now focused on buildings and other spaces of historical significance in the

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domain of popular music, the internet now plays a substantial role in disseminating information about this to a global audience. Historical music venues are today threatened by two conspiring factors. First, the trend towards gentrification in global cities around the world creates a situation whereby many venues are closed and/or repurposed on the grounds that they, and their clientele, are not suited to the lifestyles and taste cultures of the high-income groups that gentrification is designed to attract (Tarassi 2018). Second, to curb noise issues and other possible complaints arising from the presence of live music venues in gentrified areas, there is an increasing trend towards relocating all live music entertainment to purposely designed night-time economy precincts (Burke and Schmidt 2013). These areas of a city frequently contain both live music venues and nightclubs, thus forcing two often quite different clienteles— mainstream clubbers and more alternative audiences—into the same space, thus creating tensions (Carah et al. 2020). That many iconic music venues, many of which feature more alternative and indie styles of music, are under threat of closure has promoted various forms of action among those who frequent these clubs. In March 2021, online publication the Austin Monitor featured an article by journalist Chad Swiatecki drawing attention to the threat posed to live music venues in Austin, Texas by increasing real estate prices. The article notes that Austin’s Downtown Commission is engaged in supporting ideas and proposals to preserve live music venues in the city’s downtown area, live music being a significant aspect of Austin’s cultural heritage (see, e.g., Shank 1994). Swiatecki then goes on to quote August Harris, chair of the Downtown Commission who stated: Austin’s music scene was built on affordability plus the concentration of people between the university and government and the people who moved here who were interested in music. As downtown has increased dramatically in cost, small music venues that are the backbone of the Austin music scene and are very low-margin business become harder to maintain. (Swiatecki 2021)

In other instances, the threat of closure and demolition or repurposing of iconic music venues has resulted in forms of organised protest, using online platforms to spread awareness and call music fans to action. Such was the case with the Palace Theatre, a music venue in Melbourne, Australia, a city renowned for its reputation as a live music centre (Walker 2012). Built in 2012, the Palace Theatre became a music venue in the

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1980s when it was known as the Metro nightclub, being renamed the Palace in 2007. In 2012, the Palace was sold to developers who proposed to demolish the building and construct a new hotel on the site. Among the efforts to prevent the planned demolition was the Save the Palace campaign. This included a Facebook page which was published as a community page that could be accessed and read by anyone with an interest in the Palace and its future. As Bennett and Strong note: The Facebook page … provided a focus point that allowed a large group of diverse people to work collectively to not only campaign to save the Palace, but to create dialogue about what the Palace means … Over only a two-day period on the Facebook page commentators mentioned bands and artists as diverse as Alice Cooper, The Boomtown Rats, Bad Religion, Aphex Twin, The Offspring, Brian Setzer and Kyuss. (2018: 375)

In addition to such online activity, the Save the Palace campaign also involved rallies and vigils held outside the Palace by demonstrators who ranged in age from late teens to middle age. Although the campaign was ultimately not successful in preventing the Palace from being closed, it serves as a further example of the extent to which venues and other spaces and places of popular music history are now regarded as bona fide aspects of cultural heritage. The campaign also provides an illustration of the facility of the internet as a resource for bringing people together to protest the threat to such sites, a form of action which places more voices in opposition to the neo-liberalist ideology of gentrification and the latter’s inherent commoditisation of city spaces with little regard for aspects of cultural heritage and legacy except where these are emphasised by cultural elites.

The Digital Archiving of Rock and Pop Heritage The most commonly acknowledged impact of the so-called digital revolution on popular music has been the access that this has given consumers to music on a scale unimaginable in the pre-digital age. Through music downloading and/or streaming, consumers are able to access their preferred music essentially at will, as well as searching for new music using a broad and ever-increasing range of digital platforms (Nowak 2015). An equally interesting, if perhaps unforeseen, consequence of internet technology has been the capacity that it has provided for the digital archiving of popular music. Commonly performed on a relatively ad hoc basis by

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individuals, the amount of recorded music, music films, documentaries, interviews and so forth that is now available online renders this a highly palpable resource for materials covering the entire history of popular music from the very early days of recording, photo and film technology. Indeed, at the time of writing, it is safe to assume that the internet is the single most largest repository for sound and moving images of every kind, most of them free of charge save for the cost of a computer and internet connection. At the same time, the available technology for accessing and downloading or streaming music and associated audio-visual artefacts has also increased in an exponential fashion. Thus, since the mid-1990s, in addition to the radically improved capacity of desktop and laptop computers, tablets and smartphones have become everyday forms of domestic internet-­enabled digital technology. Similarly, television screens can now easily be connected to home internet networks, thus further expanding opportunities for viewing digitally archived music-related content in the private, domestic sphere. Although the artefacts contained in such online environments remain on a virtual plane, lacking the tactile qualities of objects in a museum, the books on a shelf or the vinyl, CDs and DVDs on a rack, their capacity for the production of knowledge concerning popular music history and heritage is indisputable. Indeed, given the way that such items can be retrieved and viewed or listened to an infinite number of times, their role in the development and understanding of popular music as a bona fide aspect of contemporary cultural history and heritage is arguably significant. Among the primary internet platforms for depositing audio-visual artefacts, YouTube remains a primary resource (Burgess and Green 2009). Launched in February 2005, YouTube’s function as a digital repository was quickly latched on to by music fans with the result that in a very short space of time it had become a highly rich resource that contained a vast range of audio-visual materials, many of which were essentially quite rare and vintage artefacts having languished in personal archives for a number of decades. A key advantage of YouTube is its use of algorithmic technology to source and rank similar material to that being manually retrieved by the user. From the point of view of an individual interested in or actively researching a single artist, a genre, a music event or a specific era of popular music history, YouTube is thus a highly valuable resource in that it means via a single manual search other relevant, and often unfamiliar, material can also be sourced and viewed. An interesting aspect of the kind

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of popular music material available for retrieval on YouTube is that it often allows for a researcher to acquire a more holistic sense of particular genres, for example, early 1970s rock, than what is presented in current documentaries and reviews that tend to focus largely on more iconic and canonical artists. The same is true of classic music television programmes such as Britain’s Old Grey Whistle Test or Germany’s Beat Club where it is often possible via YouTube to retrieve footage of whole episodes and/or more obscure artists who appeared on these shows but are often excluded from ‘highlights’ and ‘best of’ compilations (see Bennett 2019). In a critical sense then, YouTube could be said to facilitate a more open and flexible pathway to an understanding and appreciation of popular music heritage. Although the algorithmic aspect of YouTube can guide the viewer through a pre-constructed repertoire of music and associated information, it also offers flexibility for manual searches, thus allowing users to create their own, personalised library of viewing and listening options. Such options for self-education concerning popular music heritage can be particularly valuable for younger viewers, for whom the archived audio-visual material from previous decades offers insights as to the socio-cultural significance of popular music in eras that pre-date their living memory. Indeed, there are some critical questions around how current and future generations of youth will respond to current renderings of popular music heritage, given the radically evolving mediascape of the early twenty-first century. One possible outcome of this could be a decline in the value of material artefacts as makers of popular music heritage and an increasing reference to the digital representation of such heritage. The increasing prevalence of popular music heritage discourse in the digital domain also means that curatorial decisions which have routinely governed the content of more traditional, physical popular music archives are removed. Decisions as to what to place in the digital archive are placed in the hands of users, albeit with the eventuality that copyright owners may elect to block access to particular videos or take them down. In essence, however, much of the material posted on YouTube tends to remain there for longer periods of time. Moreover, with considerations of physical storage capacity removed, there is significant potential for the digital archive to grow on a continual basis. This is also an important consideration as physical artefacts, such as CDs and DVDs, are apt to be deleted from stock and/or become increasingly hard to obtain. The extent to which YouTube serves as a repository for obscure, often largely forgotten tracks and artists, can be illustrated in a single example—Arkwright’s

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1975 version of the Houghton Weavers’ song ‘Where Do You Go from Here’. A minor hit at the time of its release when it was primarily played on BBC Radio 2 by presenters such as Terry Wogan, the song pays tribute to working-class life in the north of England during the early 1970s when mills and factories still formed a major part of Britain’s industrial landscape and were a key source of employment for unskilled and semi-skilled workers. In 2007, ‘Where Do You Go from Here’ was the topic of a post on The Mudcat Café website, a site established for music fans to trade memories, lyrics and recordings of songs. The memory of the song that inspired an individual fan to post subscribers to the site for information led to further discussion about the song and the posting of the full set of lyrics online. Several years later a recording taken from an original vinyl pressing of the single was posted on YouTube. This is one of the numerous instances whereby recordings long since deleted from stock and essentially whitewashed out of popular music history have been reintroduced for public reference and consumption on the basis of fan stories that evoke memories accompanied by an expressed desire to hear particular songs again. In addition to becoming a repository for existing audio-visual material, YouTube has also gained significance as a digital platform for the posting of user-generated content. A range of artefacts can be found on the platform including self-made music documentaries and ‘best-of’ style compilations of specific genres. In addition, however, YouTube has also become a vibrant resource for exchanges between musicians interested in the technical aspects of music and its production. This includes a large number of videos that discuss the musical composition of various songs and instrumental pieces with detailed demonstrations of how to play them. In many cases, the attention to detail paid by often-amateur musicians plying their skills for free is significant, extending to, for example, how guitar parts in a particular track are layered or ‘overdubbed’ in the studio to produce a particular sound. In current discussions of popular music heritage preservation, detailed discussions of musical texts themselves rarely feature. To some extent, this may relate to the fact that in the eras of popular music that have become a focus for heritage practice, much of the music associated with these eras was rarely written down in notated form (Middleton 1990; Moore 1993). Similarly, when others wished to learn a track, they would do so by either listening to records or, when the opportunity presented itself, watching the original musicians play the song and learning their specific part via a process that Bennett (1980) refers to as ‘songgetting’. The DIY instructional videos posted on YouTube offer greatly

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enhanced opportunities for musicians to learn their favourite rock and pop tracks, many of which now fall comfortably into the category of heritage tracks. This, in turn, provides new possibilities for the preservation of classic rock and pop songs by offering individual musicians (who become selfstyled online instructors) the ability to break them down into their composite parts so that others may learn them and in many cases incorporate such songs and instrumental pieces into their own performance repertoires. A particularly well-evolved example of this is seen in the What Makes This Song Great? YouTube series devised and hosted by American multi-instrumentalist Rick Beato. Drawing on a wide variety of songs from different genres and different decades, Beato combines his skilled technical explanations of how particular tracks have been put together with details of their production, the year they were released and the musicians and production staff involved in their creation. Beato’s YouTube series also includes interviews with original artists and with those who specialise in reproducing the music of specific artists. Often using the original mixes of songs as a means to identify, isolate, analyse and recreate specific instruments and voices, Beato’s series serves as a highly comprehensive educational resource for musicians at all levels.

Music Heritage in Pandemic Times In early 2020, the world encountered its first pandemic crisis in over one hundred years in the shape of COVID-19. As fears over the global spread of the pandemic rapidly escalated, countries around the world reacted by closing borders, enforcing social distancing and imposing lockdowns (Atalan 2020). The impact of this on the live music industry was devastating as tours were cancelled and music venues closed down indefinitely (van Leeuwen et  al. 2020). Similarly, landmark music festivals such as Glastonbury were cancelled. One significant response to the prohibition of physical live music performances on a global scale was the use of the internet for the streaming of live music events. Thus, as Frenneaux and Bennett observe, a wide range of musicians from successful mainstream acts to semi-professional and amateur performers have adopted the internet as a new performance medium either through the posting of videos or ‘via actual live performance in front of the camera’ (2021: 3). This imposed performance trend also extended to ‘heritage acts’ including Neil Young, Neil Diamond and the Rolling Stones. In the case of Young and Diamond,

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‘fireside’ performances saw these artists performing from home using an acoustic guitar to perform some of their classic songs in an unplugged format. In the case of Diamond, the song for the fireside performance, his 1969 hit ‘Sweet Caroline’, featured altered lyrics (notably ‘touching hands’ adapted to ‘washing hands’) to suit the changed conditions of the pandemic. As Lehman accurately observes, Diamond’s decision to re-­ arrange the lyrics of the song in this way points to the way that popular music artists can become mediators for forms of social discourse, both anti-hegemonic and, in this particular case, overtly hegemonic. Lehman reasons that Diamond, as a heritage act, could have drawn from range of other hits to engage himself and his audience with the isolating effects of the pandemic, such as ‘Solitary Man’. As Lehman goes on to argue, ‘by denouncing “touch”, an essentially human means of communication and affect, this adaptation of “Sweet Caroline” further isolates those who need connection and contact most’ (2020: 2). A further example of a streamed live performance during early 2020 involved another heritage act, English rock band The Rolling Stones. In an even more complex act of technological achievement, the four members of the band, Mick Jagger, Keith Richards, Charlie Watts and Ronnie Wood, performed live from their homes in England, France and the US. The first of several live-streamed performances that The Rolling Stones have staged during the pandemic, the chosen song on that particular occasion was ‘You Can’t Always Get What You Want’, a track from the band’s 1969 album Let It Bleed and originally featured as the B-side of the hit song ‘Honky Tonk Women’. Originally written as a commentary on the winding down of the 1960s and the decline of ‘Swinging London’ sensibility, the song’s lyrics translated easily, and without modification, to the tense and uncertain atmosphere during the early days of the lockdown. Indeed, this particular performance denotes one of the earliest examples of a heritage rock band performing one of their classic tracks as a means of attempting to communicate a sense of hope and optimism to the audience. In the case of both Diamond and the Stones’ performances, the use of classic tracks also positions audiences outside the pandemic situation through evoking memories, experienced or received, of a pre-pandemic era which in turn may inspire the hope of a post-pandemic era when the tracks will assume new memories and significance as songs of comfort and support during a time of extreme crisis.

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Conclusion This chapter has considered the complex and multifaceted role of the internet as a resource in the narrativisation of popular music heritage. As the discussion presented here has illustrated, the emergence of the internet as a widely available digital technology during the mid-1990s coincides with the period during which greater and more focused attention was placed on popular music as a heritage worthy cultural form. While this chapter is not the only one in the book to discuss popular music heritage’s representation in digital fora, it has focused on key manifestations of this. This began with a consideration of the internet’s significance in galvanising communities of interest among popular music fans invested in particular heritage artists, genres and scenes. Fan sites were an early and rapidly evolving aspect of the internet’s popular music-focused content and have remained a highly prevalent part of the digital landscape in the era of Web 2.0. Attention then shifted to the topic of virtual music scenes. Although the concept of the virtual music scene has been challenged on the grounds that music scenes invariably have local, trans-local and virtual elements and thus involve at least some element of face-to-face interaction, there can be little doubt that the internet has facilitated a significant degree of trans-local and trans-temporal interaction between music fans that did not exist in the pre-digital era. In this context, access to virtual forms of communication also opens up greater possibilities for the sharing of content. As the chapter illustrated, this is particularly pertinent in the case of music scenes with a historical legacy, as is the case with the Canterbury Sound, the primary example focused on in this section of the chapter. The discussion then turned to the topic of online heritage activism. Again, the internet has done much to engender the connection between individuals concerned to protest about the closure and in some cases demolition of iconic local music venues. At the same time, it is fair to say that the internet as a resource has contributed in no small measure to creating a larger global awareness of both the number and location of iconic music venues around the world and their links with famous popular music artists of the mid- to late twentieth century. The chapter then focused on the significance of internet platforms such as YouTube as digital archives for audiovisual artefacts. In addition to the uploading of existing audio-visual artefacts, it was also considered how many music fans post their own self-­ made product online. This also extends to music-making, with many self-­ made videos posted on YouTube dealing with particular aspects of song

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composition and playing techniques employed. Such content contributes in its own way to the preservation of popular music heritage through explaining and passing on the knowledge needed to play classic songs and instrumental pieces from a range of popular music genres. Indeed, it can be argued that such home-made, not-for-profit products represent a ‘folkification’ of popular music—a form of learning that is presented by the people for the people rather than being sold as a commercial form of online learning. Finally, the chapter offered some reflections on the significance of the internet during the COVID-19 pandemic as a place where heritage popular music artists have live-streamed performances of their classic tracks in an effort to remain connected with their audience and engage with the disruptions and uncertainty caused by the pandemic.

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van Leeuwen, Marco, Klerks, Yvonne, Bargeman, Bertine, Heslinga, Jasper and Bastiaansen, Marcel (2020) ‘Leisure Will Not Be Locked Down—Insights on Leisure and COVID-19 from the Netherlands.’ World Leisure Journal 62(4): 339–343. Vermorel, Fred and Vermorel, Judy (1985) Starlust: The Secret Life of Fans. London: W.H. Allen. Walker, Clinton (2012) History is Made at Night: Live Music in Australia. Strawberry Hills, NSW: Currency Press.

Tribute Bands, Self-Tribute and ‘Classic Albums Live’

Tribute performances have become a pivotal way in which rock and pop artists and their music are celebrated and remembered in the early twenty-­ first century. In some quarters, tribute acts are seen as a form of novelty—a type of performance to be enjoyed, if not to be taken ‘too seriously’. Indeed, tribute acts themselves will sometimes buy into such an image and perception by injecting aspects of comedy and tongue in cheek references into their performances. All of that said, the art of tribute is also a highly complex and multifaceted sphere of live music performance and entertainment. As anyone who has attended a tribute band performance will likely attest, the appeal and success of the tribute band formula rests not only on their ability to reproduce the sound and musical style of the music but is also underpinned by the overall spectacle of the event. Putting this in more conceptual terms, it can be argued that, at its most vivid the tribute performance preserves the aura of the tribute act—musically, visually and often culturally as well. The world of tribute performances is also a highly professionalised, not to say monetised, field of cultural production. The most successful examples of tribute bands often draw large audiences and can command relatively high ticket prices for their shows. Indeed, despite their ostensible status as live simulations of ‘real artists’, tribute bands often assume an altogether different quality. Thus, in many instances, tribute bands ‘stand in’ for the tributed act, who may be deceased, retired or perform live only rarely (see also Neil 2006). In essence, tribute bands (re) supply the live spectacle that is so important for the audiences’ © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 A. Bennett, Popular Music Heritage, Pop Music, Culture and Identity, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-08296-2_7

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understanding of their favourite artists as aspects of musical and cultural heritage. Moreover, in that context tribute bands cater for a diverse range of tastes, spanning the music and artists of many genres across different decades. Significantly, however, it is not just tribute bands that occupy the sphere of tribute performance. Thus, with the success of the classic albums documentary formula (see Chapter “Heritage Media and ‘Classic’ Re-­ presentation”) has come a different kind of tribute venture in the form of classic albums live. Such events bring together high-quality and versatile musicians to perfectly reproduce on stage a particular classic album. A critical mark of difference between the tribute band and classic albums live formats is that in the case of the latter the focus is on the impeccable reproduction of the music as it appears on a specific album rather than necessarily on faithfully  capturing the  appearance and stagecraft of the featured artist. Nevertheless, the task of capturing the aura of a body of work—in this case an entire album or perhaps several albums—remains central to the craft of the classic albums live formula. A further aspect of contemporary tribute performances is what could be referred to as ‘self-tribute’. This refers to instances where original artists focus on an aspect of their own work, typically an album or perhaps a specific era of their career, and devote a show or even an entire tour to reproducing this chosen body of work live for the audience. Similar to the tribute band, the self-tribute performance responds to the demand of an audience to hear classic tracks and relive a classic era of performance. In this case, however, the central involvement of the original artist adds a different dynamic to the spectacle of the tribute performance—the original artist re-embodying a celebrated aspect of their past. The purpose of this chapter is to consider these different aspects of tribute performance and their significance within the context of contemporary understandings of popular music heritage. A critical point, it is argued, is the importance of tribute performances as a way of animating the meaning of popular music heritage as a living form of heritage. As noted above, a key appeal of popular music has been its quality as live music, as part of a performance spectacle that involves both performers ‘and’ the audience. It is generally the case that other forms of popular music heritage representation fail to capture this dynamic, reducing the spectacle of popular music heritage to a series of decontextualised objects, images and texts. Tribute performances help to position some of these artefacts back into the live performance context where they first gained notoriety. Or in the case of classic albums

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live and similarly with self-tribute performances, the objective is to painstakingly recreate a recorded work in a live context such that it facilitates a collective celebration on the part of artist and audience of the chosen body of work as an object of artistic value and cultural heritage.

Pick a Band, Pick an Era Although it is now a worldwide and highly popular phenomenon, the origins of the tribute band remain somewhat obscure (Homan 2006). For example, Australia is a country with a long-standing tradition of tribute bands, a tradition that is said to be rooted in the country’s geographical distance from other continents and the difficulties and costs involved for international bands and artists travelling there. Certainly, a number of Australian tribute acts, including Bjorn Again (a much-coveted and critically acclaimed ABBA tribute band) and the Australian Pink Floyd have proven to be highly successful, both within Australia and internationally. Notwithstanding Australia’s specific claims on the tribute band concept, however, one of the oldest and most long-standing tribute bands is British act The Bootleg Beatles. Formed in 1980 this celebrated Beatles tribute band has performed over 4000 times including an appearance at the Glastonbury Festival (Jones 2001) and a recreation of the famous rooftop concert by the Beatles (featured in the film Let It Be (1970) dir. Michael Lindsay-Hogg) on 30 January 1999 to mark the thirtieth anniversary of this historic event (Gregory 2015). The Bootleg Beatles’ replication of the rooftop concert offers a useful illustration of the painstaking steps that tribute bands will often go to in order to capture the aura, both sonically and visually, of the tribute act. Indeed, the performance was a faithful reproduction of the Beatles final live performance, even down to the choice of instruments and amplification. In describing the performance of another Beatle’s tribute band, Rain, Meyers observes similar traits: For each different period, Rain went offstage, changed costume and hairstyles (Rain and other Beatles tributes make extensive use of wigs), and switched instruments to match the kinds of guitars and drums The Beatles were using at that particular stage in their career, including Gretsch guitars, a Hofner violin bass, and a Ludwig drum set: instruments which, in addition to being visually recognizable to knowledgeable audience members, also have sonic characteristics which help tribute bands re-create nuances of timbre as accurately as possible, as conversations with members of Rain and other tribute bands stressed. (2015: 63–64)

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Since the late 1980s, the popularity of the tribute band has grown exponentially, evolving from a show business gimmick into a highly slick form of live performance genre in itself as well as a highly lucrative form of branding (Marticotte 2016). Many tribute bands attract high fees and large audiences, putting on shows that collectively embrace the entire history of contemporary popular music from as far back as the early 1950s with some tributes to artists such as Frank Sinatra reaching back even further in time (Pearson 2014). In the same period that has witnessed a growth in the popularity of tribute bands, other related factors have assumed an increasingly important role in carving out a role for tribute bands as simulated purveyors of rock and pop’s canonically acknowledged finest performers. If the performance and consumption of rock and pop have always been a heavily mediated experience (Frith 1988), the importance of mediation has assumed new levels of importance as rock and pop performers have grown old, retired and, in many cases, died. In such cases, it is in the audio-visual archives of such artists, their ‘classic’ music and ‘classic’ era(s) of live performance that their ‘aura’ (Benjamin 1973) is preserved. Benjamin first used the concept of aura as a means of considering how the aesthetic essence of an original object could be both retained and projected through subsequent reproductions or simulations of the object (a contention dismissed by critical theorists such as Adorno and Horkheimer who argued that the aesthetic value and aura of an object was lost through the act of its mass production, see Adorno and Horkheimer 1969). For Benjamin, however, the essence of the aura was not restricted to an original object but could move beyond it. Indeed, according to Benjamin, it is precisely at the point of technological reproduction that the aura is effectively released, becoming free to do its work of allowing the viewer to inscribe the object with meaning. Thus, as Bratu Hansen observes: Benjamin suggests that aura as a medium of perception—or “perceptibility”—becomes visible only on the basis of technological reproduction. The gaze of the photographed subject would not persist without its refraction by an apparatus, that is, a nonhuman lens and the particular conditions of setting and exposure; it already responds to another—and other—look that at once threatens and inscribes the subject’s authenticity and individuality. (2008: 342–43)

Although Benjamin did not focus on music as such, his emphasis being more firmly on the significance of the aura in relation to photographic

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reproduction of images, scholars such as Middleton (1990) have argued that his work is directly transferable to the field of popular music where so much of the latter’s cultural value, particularly since the 1950s, has been dependent upon mass production and mass dissemination. In the light of Middleton’s observations concerning the significance of aura in relation to the function of recorded music, it is pertinent to consider the way that tribute bands function to reproduce in a live music context the aura of the original artists they portray. As such, tribute artists, before they can take their craft to the stage, must become expert in reading and reproducing the aura of the original artist through making use of the sonic and audio-­ visual resources at their disposal—resources stored in analogue and digital recordings and in online digital archives such as YouTube. In effect, through their flesh and blood re-articulation of archived audio-visual material of original artists and their music, tribute bands are co-opting the tribute act’s aura, breathing new life into this through the medium of live performance. In this way, tribute bands contribute their own distinctive brand of heritage work to the cultural memory of popular music audiences. This occurs primarily through tribute bands’ reintroduction of the live, ‘here and now’, spectacle of different historical chapters of rock and pop that are otherwise only accessible through digital and analogue mediums. Thus, to see a tribute band such as the Counterfeit Stones is to see a finely honed reproduction of a series of classic moments from the live history of the Rolling Stones from the early 1960s through to the 1980s. Indeed, during a single show both the image and music of the Counterfeit Stones shift at intervals to depict the different eras of the Rolling Stones’ complete live performance legacy across a period of time during which the band are considered to have released their classic, generation-defining material. The result is both a compelling recreation of the Rolling Stones in concert through time and an intriguing showcase of the band’s heritage attributes as rock icons that connect with a global audience through successive decades in which the band has produced landmark material that is culturally resonant with the respective eras in which it was written and first performed in front of an audience. In the case of the Rolling Stones, this band is (at the time of writing) still active. Nevertheless, a band such as the Counterfeit Stones serves as a significant counterpoint to the original act, moving back and forth through the history of the band and its image, contrasting their youthful arrogance of the early 1960s with their shifting status as global superstars of stadium

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and arena rock during the ‘glory years’ of the 1970s. This deft sleight of hand also corresponds seemingly with different audience expectations, some spectators being more favourable towards the Rolling Stone’s ‘Brian Jones era’ of the 1960s while others prefer their more blues rock-­orientated sound of the 1970s when Mick Taylor, who took over from Brian Jones, and Ronnie Wood (who in turn replaced Taylor and has remained with the band ever since) stamped their own characteristic sound and style on the Rolling Stones’ music. While bands such as the Counterfeit Stones pay tribute to original artists who are still in existence, other tribute acts work to revive bands, their music and image(s), who are now essentially resigned to popular music’s past, at least in terms of live performance. Examples here include Led Zeppelin tribute act Led Zepagain and Musical Box (a Genesis tribute band who focus on Peter Gabriel era Genesis music). Each of these artists recreates for the audience a preferred version of the tributed act. In the case of Led Zepagain, the focus is on Led Zeppelin at their creative and performative peak between 1969 and 1975, a period during which the band wrote and recorded some of their most well-remembered music and performed legendary concerts across North America and Europe (see Fast 2001). Musical Box focus on a similar period in the career of Genesis—a time when, with Peter Gabriel as their lead vocalist, Genesis, along with other artists such as Yes, Jethro Tull, Emerson Lake and Palmer and Pink Floyd, were at the vanguard of the English progressive rock scene (Macan 1997) and produced what many consider to be their classic works, including the albums Nursery Cryme (1971), Foxtrot (1972), Selling England by the Pound (1973) and The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway (1974). The appeal of Musical Box goes further, depicting Genesis during what many fans consider to be their most visually striking live performance era due to the dramatic onstage posturing and customary of Peter Gabriel. At a time when rock’s stage theatrics were still in their infancy, Gabriel cut a striking and provocative figure, for example, by donning one of his wife’s red dresses and a fox’s head mask to recreate the central character on the cover of the Foxtrot album and dressing as Britannia for the live performance of ‘Dancing with the Moonlit Knight’, the opening track from Selling England by the Pound (see Rutherford 2014). As much as their faithful reproduction of classic era Genesis, the featuring of Gabriel’s various stage personas has become a favoured aspect of Musical Box’s shows, not least of all because many of those attending their concerts are too young to have seen the original Gabriel era Genesis performances where these iconic images first gained notoriety.

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In essence then, tribute bands can be said to constitute a form of live music performance heritage, masterfully tapping into the cultural memory of rock and pop audiences and providing an opportunity for them to relive these memories in the context of a live music spectacle. This involves a seamless, postmodern sleight of hand that trades heavily on the audience’s willingness to be deceived by a simulacrum that temporally stands in for the ‘real thing’—although, of course, in many cases the ‘real thing’ is itself merely a memory from the past whose closest approximation is experienced via a concert DVD, YouTube video or, as is increasingly becoming the case, the bio-pic (see Chapter  “Heritage Media and ‘Classic’ Re-­ presentation”). Indeed, at a point where so many of rock and pop’s classic artists are only available via such mediums, the tribute band plays an increasingly significant role. Thus, as Bennett observes: … tribute bands respond to a range of mundane, everyday desires exhibited by audiences: to relive a particular moment in their youth; to experience again their personal icons in a live setting (and perhaps take their children along too); to engage in the rapport between performer and audience deemed integral to the communicative quality of popular music. (2006: 19–20)

As the above observation illustrates, as time progresses and the audiences for tribute bands become increasingly more inter-generational, it is possible to perceive a time when tribute band performances will in effect become the ‘primary text’ (Moore 1993) through which classic rock and pop is experienced, understood and appreciated. Just as audiences for jazz and blues music have long since become accustomed to watching other consummate professionals perform the music of their personal favourites in the jazz world, so might a future scenario be one where audiences enjoy the music of artists from the spheres of rock and pop performed by tribute bands. Indeed, as time progresses, the term tribute band may itself turn obsolete as tribute artists become the primary way in which the live spectacle of popular music’s heritage is enjoyed. To an extent, the transformation of the tribute band into a different form of live music heritage categorisation is already evident in the form of the classic albums live format. This is something that will be returned to later in this chapter.

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Heritage Artists and Self-Tribute In a 2009 interview for Clash Music, Pete Townshend, lead guitarist and primary songwriter for legendary British rock band The Who, described the latter-day incarnation of the band, which consists of only two original members, Townshend and lead singer Roger Daltrey, as ‘little more than a brand’.1 Indeed, although having released two new studio albums since the death of bassist John Entwistle in 2002, namely Endless Wire (2006) and Who (2019), in live performance The Who have focused on consolidating their heritage rock status through electing to primarily perform tracks composed and released between the mid-1960s and the late 1970s. This is the period during which The Who are considered to have produced their best and most influential work, including albums such as 1965’s My Generation (which spawned the youth anthem of the same name), Tommy (1969), Who’s Next (1971) and Quadrophenia (1973). The Who’s focus on their ‘classic material’ in live performance bespeaks an increasingly common trend among heritage rock artists in showcasing classic material and other audience favourites, effectively paying tribute to their own musical achievements of the past. If the concept of the tribute band is reasonably well mapped in academic work (see the foregoing section of this chapter), little has been written about the art of ‘self-tribute’. In a way paralleling the success and appeal of tribute bands, whose stock in trade has always been a focus on classic rock and pop acts, an increasing number of heritage rock brands are now pursuing a similar strategy in playing back to their fans a ‘preferred’ version of events that resonates with the audience’s collective memory of the artist at what is considered to be their creative and ‘authentic’ peak (authenticity in this case being used as a means of positioning critical receptions towards bands and artists that frame discourses such as ‘heritage band’ and ‘classic album’). Alongside The Who, self-tribute is now becoming an established trend in popular music. In 2013 seminal British rock band Status Quo regrouped its original line-up, Francis Rossi (lead guitar and vocals), Rick Parfitt (rhythm guitar and vocals), Alan Lancaster (bass guitar and vocals) and John Coughlan (drums), to perform a series of concerts across the UK that was branded as the ‘Frantic Four’ tour. The reunion followed the settling of a dispute that had occured between the band  and Alan Lancaster after Lancaster’s departure from in 1987. Lancaster’s last performance with Status Quo, prior to the reunion was the band’s performance at Wembley Stadium in July 1985 as the opening act at Live Aid (see Rossi 2019). The

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Frantic Four tour saw Status Quo drawing exclusively on albums released between 1970 and 1976, including their breakthrough album Piledriver (1972) and its highly celebrated successor Hello! (1973). Several tracks chosen from these albums for the tour had never been performed live before. Pioneering American glam rock band KISS adopted a broadly similar formula as far back as 1996, reforming the band’s classic line-up of Gene Simmons (bass and vocals), Paul Stanley (guitar and vocals), Ace Frehley (guitar) and Peter Criss (drums) complete with the onstage customary, make-up and special effects that had defined KISS throughout the 1970s and significantly contributed to the band’s appeal as a live act who enjoyed major commercial success during that period. Although Frehley and Criss subsequently left the band again, original KISS members, Gene Simmons and Paul Stanley carried on touring and performing a classic repertoire of KISS songs largely drawn from albums released during the mid1970s such as Destroyer (1976) and Love Gun (1977) (Leaf and Sharp 2005). The decision to return to full make-up and classic back catalogue mode has consolidated KISS’s position as one of the most lucrative acts in the rock business (see Kieran et al. 2018). Other examples of classic rock bands consolidating their heritage status by focusing primarily on their back catalogue include the Eagles. In 1994, following a fourteen-year hiatus, the Eagles formally reunited and have toured on and off since that time, recruiting Glen Frey’s son Deacon as a touring member of the band following his father’s untimely death in January 2016. Although the band recorded some new material, including a new studio album entitled Long Road Out of Eden in 2007 (their first in almost thirty years), since reuniting the Eagles have relied heavily on material recorded during the 1970s and appearing on highly successful albums such as One of These Nights (1975), Hotel California (1976) and The Long Run (1979). The band have also toured more visibly under the heritage rock banner, notably in 2014 when the History of the Eagles tour saw them reuniting with original guitarist Bernie Leadon who had featured on the first four albums by the Eagles, performing on classic tracks such as ‘Take It Easy’, ‘Peaceful Easy Feeling’ and ‘Desperado’. The tour promoted a two-DVD set, also entitled History of the Eagles, released the previous year and documenting the period between the Eagles’ formation in 1971 and break up in 1980 and the period following the reformation of the band in 1994. Predictably perhaps, some of the commentary directed at the increasing number of rock artists now attracting a heritage rock label and trading extensively on their ‘classic’ material has interpreted this in bluntly

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economic terms. For example, an article published on the Sonoran News website in April 2017 noted that a six-day event entitled ‘Desert Trip’ held in 2016 and featuring heritage rock acts such as The Who, Bob Dylan, the Rolling Stones, Neil Young and Paul McCartney grossed an estimated 160 million dollars.2 On the surface there would appear to be an unequivocal logic in such an interpretation of the motivations underpinning the willingness of artists to adopt the heritage rock label, including the increasing instance of self-tribute activities now associated with this label. It is also undoubtedly the case that the heritage rock brand has become a major source of income for the music industry. Carah suggests that while branding has been a significant part of popular music marketing since at least the mid-twentieth century, the cultural industries have become increasingly more adept at creating a seamless fit between branding and everyday experience. In this way, he argues, ‘brand building exercises [now] have important implications for the way that citizens understand how brand-building shapes popular culture, society and politics. The brand is an open, reflexive and living object within popular culture’ (2010: 5). The ‘self-tribute’ dimension of the heritage rock act’s live performance logically extends such a branding exercise through drawing on and effectively packaging an audience’s preferred concert experience. With new studio album releases now few and far between for many heritage rock artists, their shows tend to deliver a ‘greatest hits and other on-stage favourites’ format, typically in comfortable, seated auditoriums with state-of-the-art public address systems that deliver perfect sound mixes. Such an environment is designed to cater to the taste and lifestyle of an ageing audience whose disposable wealth is such that they afford the higher ticket prices often demanded by classic and heritage rock acts. It is also arguable, however, that while the economic rationale underpinning the heritage rock brand is undeniable, such an interpretation on its own too narrow and crudely essentialises a quite complex dynamic occurring between band and audience. Most pertinently, what is missing from such a perspective are the deeply embedded issues of culture, identity and generational belonging that also play into the heritage rock discourse and underpin the music’s deeper resonances with both artists and audience. In this sense, self-tribute is not merely a musical performance; rather it is a rekindling and representation of a structure of feeling bound up with heritage rock’s inscribed qualities of generational affect. Through aligning with the demonstrated success of tribute bands in reaching out to audiences by fulfilling a desire to experience their icons during their classic

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years, original artists are able to perform in a similar space through the art of self-tribute. Earlier it was noted how Pete Townshend has referred to the current line-up of his band The Who as a tribute band with two original members of The Who in it. Whatever the future of tribute band performances might be, at the time of writing the fact that original artists are engaging in self-tribute during the final years of their careers defines an essential difference between these artists and tribute bands in the conventional sense of the term. The fact that self-tribute performances actually involve the original artist adds a critical dimension to the live heritage rock experience that cannot be achieved by the more conventional tribute band. Thus, in the self-tribute context, ageing artists are brought together with their ageing audience to share in moments of generational bonding that constitute articulations of cultural memory strongly punctuated by musicalised narratives of the past. In the rapidly expanding literature on popular music and ageing, acknowledgement is made of the fact that what was once branded as ‘youth music’ is increasingly becoming a soundtrack for generational ageing (see, e.g., Kotarba 2002; Bennett 2013). Within this, the descriptors of classic albums and classic songs, these being strongly associated with the work and legacy of heritage rock artists, take on a quality not merely as things relevant in the scheme of music marketing or the building of a classic rock canon but as markers of generational identity and the embeddedness of this within cultural memory. This chimes with the concept of cultural memory which, as Bennett and Rogers observe, has gathered momentum as ‘individuals have increasingly come to situate their own individual memories within pools of collective experience that are produced through common patterns of consumption—for example, in relation to music, television, film, fashion, and so on’ (2016: 39). While such a pattern of collective cultural memory may emerge among any generation, in terms of those ageing audiences for whom the current spate of self-tribute performances by classic rock acts finds a central appeal, what was widely understood about popular music—and particularly rock music—in the late 1960s and early to mid-1970s has a particular bearing on how the cultural memory of this generation has crystallised over time. In a pre-digital era where music was less hooked into other forms of media, and the branding that goes along with this (see, e.g., Carah 2010) than is the case today, from a fan perspective the rock music of the 1960s and early 1970s appeared to have a more stand-alone quality as a barometer of the times, bound up with the culture and society from which it sprang.

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Such a perception of rock’s generational significance remains critical to its reception by ageing audiences and is thus keenly inscribed in their understanding and appreciation of heritage rock artists (see Bennett 2009). According to Frith, individuals effectively feel that they own ‘their favorite music in ways that [are] intense and important to them … mak[ing] it part of [their] identity and build[ing] it into [their] sense of [them]selves’ (1987: 140, 143). Although Frith intends this as a universal statement about the importance of music, the situation he describes here is also something that is nuanced by time and context. In the context of what we now refer to as ‘heritage rock’, the time and context are the late 1960s and into the 1970s, a time when audiences eagerly awaited the release of their favourite band’s new album, queued up all night to buy tickets for a concert or fervently anticipated the chance to see their favourite artists on weekly television programmes or hear their music on radio chart shows (Bennett 2020). This is not to compare then and now through a lens of value judgement but merely to reflect on how the ‘then’ of the collective memory of ageing fans of bands such as The Who, Status Quo, KISS, the Eagles and other heritage rock acts frames their understanding of music in particular ways, including ways of thinking about the past and linking this to the present. Heritage rock artists themselves are, of course, not distinct from this process although the cultural lens on the past that they share with their audience is augmented by a business lens imposed through the necessity of working within the capitalist framework of the music industry. Nevertheless, a strong sense of connection has always existed between artists and their audiences, a connection vividly demonstrated by Cavicchi (1998) in his study of fans of Bruce Springsteen where many fans identify similarities between themselves and Springsteen in terms of political values and worldviews. Such connections between fans and artists have become significantly enhanced through the possibilities afforded by digital media and online social networking for artists to reach out to their audiences (Beer 2008). During the time of rock’s emergence during the late 1960s, such a felt connection between artists and their audience was often romantically construed through references to the existence of a rock community. Although claims that such a community could acquire a more conventional physical basis, a sentiment conveyed in popular terms of the time such as counter-culture (see Bennett 2014), have been challenged as inherently naïve and unworkable in practice (Frith 1981), the concept of community as an aesthetically derived concept remains viable when charting the connections between artists and

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audience. This can be extended to our understanding of self-tribute performances by heritage rock artists and the connection that manifests between these artists and their audience in this type of live performance context. In discussing the significance of the classic albums live format for heritage rock discourses, Bennett (2009) draws on Benjamin’s (1973) concept of aura suggesting that in working to match the sound of the tributed classic album as closely as possible, the band—or ensemble—endeavours to preserve the aura of the recorded work. This interpretation can also be extended to the context of live performance and self-tribute by heritage rock artists. Thus, in addition to the choice of featured music, it is often the case that self-tribute performances are choreographed in such a way that they consciously draw on imagery that evokes an earlier time and place. To perform songs, or even  complete albums, that may have not been featured in concert for many years, or to recreate stage sets and imagery that evoke a band or artist as they appeared decades earlier at the height of their fame, is to create a series of memory texts that both band and audience can draw on in their celebration of generational bonding over a period of time that increasingly extends to fifty years or more.

Live as You’ve Always Heard It Before: Classic Albums Live Adjacent to the art of self-tribute, for a number of years now bands and artists have been staging live performances, and in some cases entire tours, that showcase one or more of their classic albums in their entirety. Examples here include Bruce Springsteen (Born to Run) and Roger Waters (Dark Side of the Moon and The Wall). In Chapter “Heritage Media and ‘Classic’ Re-­presentation”, consideration was made of the successful British television series Classic Albums and its contribution to understandings of the album as a body of work. It was noted how the series draws on a relatively rigidly defined canon of milestone studio albums as previously defined by ‘quality’ music press publications such as Rolling Stone, Billboard and, more recently, Mojo and Classic Rock (see also Chapter “Heritage Media and ‘Classic’ Re-­presentation”). In 2003, Canadian musician Craig Martin initiated a new venture in the classic album’s tradition entitled ‘Classic Albums Live’. Based in Toronto this is a concert series drawing upon a core of expert rock musicians, plus other players brought in to play more

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specialist parts, such as brass and woodwind, to perform classic albums in their entirety in a live concert setting. To date ‘Classic Albums Live’ has performed over fifty albums in various cities across Canada and the US. Featured albums include Led Zeppelin, Led Zeppelin II and Led Zeppelin IV, Sticky Fingers and Exile on Main Street (the Rolling Stones), Crime of the Century and Breakfast in America (Supertramp), Dark Side of the Moon, Wish You Were Here, Animals and The Wall (Pink Floyd), Rubber Soul, Revolver, Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, The Beatles (also known as the White Album) and Abbey Road (the Beatles), Queen’s A Night at the Opera, Bruce Springsteen’s Born to Run and Prince’s Purple Rain. In addition, ‘Classic Albums Live’ has also performed the entire back catalogue (a total of 213 songs) by the Beatles in a single concert performance lasting thirteen hours at Toronto’s Phoenix Concert Theatre. While there are some parallels with the craft of the tribute band, ‘Classic Albums Live’ differs from the tribute band format in several important ways. To begin with, there is no obvious attempt to emulate the image of the musicians being portrayed. In making explicit that this is not the objective of the classic albums live format (to the extent that this is sometimes carefully explained to the audience before a performance begins), a discourse is set in place that strives to effect distance between the simulacrum of the tribute band and the attempt of classic albums performers to raise the status of their performance to the same high art status as performances of classical music. Thus, in the context of classic albums live, accurate emulation is reserved for the musical component of the performance with the musicians involved going to great lengths to create the sound of the songs they are performing on stage. Indeed, given the highly diverse range of material contained on albums by bands such as the Beatles, Led Zeppelin, Pink Floyd and Queen, and the quite individual ways in which the songs were originally recorded (using a range of different instrumentation, amplification and effects—and in some cases several different recording studios), the task of reproducing such songs live in an authentically convincing fashion can be an inherently difficult task. This is particularly the case when some of the songs in question were never designed to be performed live but were regarded instead as studio tracks. However, it is not merely the task of achieving the faithful reproduction of a studio album in a live context that is significant but also the way that this task is visually and discursively presented to the audience. Thus, to return to the high art objective noted above, the ‘Classic Albums Live’ experience is frequently described not as a performance but as a recital.

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Similarly, the musicians are likened to members of an orchestra, their task being to perform and interpret the body of work contained on a single album as faithfully as possible (Bennett 2009). Thus, as described in the programme notes for a ‘Classic Albums Live’ performance of the album Led Zeppelin II attended by the author at Brock University, St. Catharines, Canada, in 2006: Classic Albums Live… specialises in recreating live…the greatest albums from the 1960s and 1970s… Each performance is faithful to the exact sound of the albums. All of the musicians’ focus is put into the music; they perform the works of Queen, Led Zeppelin, the Beatles, Pink Floyd and more, the same way an orchestra performs the works of Mozart. Every sound, every note, and every guitar and drum solo is performed live. (Classic Albums Live 2006: 13)

As noted earlier in this book, if significant tracts of rock and pop music have been discursively separated from the conditions of their industrial mass production through devices of critical acclaim and the plaudits of various prestige giving bodies, ‘Classic Albums Live’ continues the work of imbuing such works with a quasi-high art status. The ascription of virtuoso ability that has frequently been applied to various rock and pop performers is further heightened in the case of ‘Classic Albums Live’ through the association with orchestral musicians. Thus, if ‘classic albums’ have already been selected for retrospective consecration as objects of cultural heritage, their alignment with the status and aura of classical works through the performative medium of ‘Classic Albums Live’ further enhances the opportunities for the ascription of heritage value. A further aspect of the ‘Classic Albums Live’ concept that ascribes heritage status relates to its accentuated impact on the album selected for live performance as a work of art. In essence, this relates to the way that the live performance re-engages the ‘aura’ of an album as a body of work. If, as noted earlier, studio albums were rarely intended for live performance in their entirety by their original creators—at least at the point where an album was initially released—from the point of view of an audience, the album frequently provided the primary text (Moore 1993) through which the output of an artist was to be understood and appreciated. This aligns closely with Benjamin’s (1973) notion of aura as a quality embedded in an object. Opposing the critical theory of Frankfurt School theorists, such as Adorno and Horkheimer (1969) who suggested that cultural authenticity

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of an original object was expunged through the act of mass production of that object, Benjamin argued that this quality, which he described as the ‘aura’, could survive the process of mass production and remain tied to an object that was commoditised, purchased and consumed. For this quality of an object to shine through, it relied, much as was the case with an original work of art, on the work of cultural intermediaries. In the case of ‘classic albums’, their classic status was thus created through the prestige ascribed to them by music critics and journalists. ‘Classic Albums Live’ extends such conferment of prestige through skilful reproduction of selected albums back to an audience who have already been attuned to the act of ‘high’ consumption and have a pre-formed notion of what to expect when classic albums are performed by virtuoso performers whose task is to create an opportunity for the collective celebration of milestone achievements in rock and pop via the medium of an expertly orchestrated live performance spectacle.

The ‘Future’ of Classic Rock and Pop At the time of writing, a number of classic rock and pop bands of the 1970s, including Foreigner, Rainbow, Status Quo and 10 cc, are touring with only one original member still in the band. Indeed, it is also increasingly the case that bands continue to tour despite having none of the original members in their current line-up. Two salient examples here are legendary British bands Mud and Dr Feelgood. In each case, some of the current members of these bands joined at a time when original members of the line-up remained, and essentially inherited the name and legacy. Not quite tribute bands, such contemporary versions of Mud and Dr Feelgood, classic 1970s bands from the British glam and pub rock scenes respectively, are charged with the task of carrying on the tradition of these bands as staple live acts. Although the current incarnations of each band may write and perform some new material, there is an unwritten understanding on the part of the bands and their audience alike that what is being preserved and celebrated are the classic tracks from the respective heydays of the bands. Since the ‘rock and roll’ years of the 1950s and early 1960s, the fragility of rock and pop icons has been all too readily apparent, with the untimely death of artists such as Buddy Holly, Brian Jones, Janis Joplin and Jimi Hendrix being pertinent examples in this respect. At that point, however, the thought of growing old appeared anathema to many of the youth

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generation, as underlined in The Who’s 1965 hit, ‘My Generation’. But if youth and its music seemed to be characterised by temporality in the 1950s and 1960s, as various foregoing accounts in this book serve to illustrate, the picture now is radically different. As rock and roll and the succession of ‘youth music’ genres that followed it have become indelibly woven into the fabric of contemporary culture, the erstwhile celebration of temporality has been displaced by an earnest celebration of ‘legacy’ and a desire for preservation. Predictably perhaps, this also extends to the sphere of live performance and a desire among audiences to continue experiencing the iconic music of previous eras in a live setting. That such a connection between legacy, heritage and live music performance should be attached such significance is underscored by the fact that for many, their ‘peak experiences’ of music are attached to its consumption in a live context (see Green 2016). In that sense, a desire to go on experiencing music live and to see this ‘ritual’ of watching, listening and collective appreciation being emotionally transmitted to new generations begins to take a familiar shape. Indeed, in beginning to understand the cultural dynamics at play here, much can be gleaned from the histories of older musical styles associated with the spheres of classical music, jazz and folk. In each instance, pieces of music, songs and styles of playing have effectively been handed down through subsequent generations of musicians and audiences. Although the original composers of classic repertoire in each of the above musical fields are in most cases long since deceased, a convincing rendition of their music can render the spirit or aura of the original artist alive for both performers and audience. As noted earlier, this has been the stock in trade of the tribute band since the first tribute bands began to perform and gain notoriety for their impeccable simulation of the tributed artist. A critical question to be asked here, however, concerns the validity of the term of tribute band. At the moment, such artists are still largely considered a novelty form of musical performance. And yet, it is undeniably the case that for ardent fans of artists from previous decades, tribute bands are in many cases becoming the primary way in which such fans experience live music. As the twenty-first century enters its third decade, many of those artists who have defined popular music in a contemporary sense either have died or are contemplating the final years of life. Many have acknowledged those tribute  artists who are continuing to perform the music of ageing and deceased  music icons  live and introduce it to new audiences. Like orchestral and jazz musicians, members of tribute bands

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are in most cases interchangeable. The glue that binds them is the ability to reproduce the music of the tributed act. Tribute bands then mark the beginnings of a new era of classic repertoire and recital, terms of reference that have already been embraced by the ‘classic albums live’ concept in an effort to counter what are considered by some to be the more ‘Disneyfied’ aesthetic of tribute bands. In many respects, the writing is already on the wall in this respect. Just as the physical artefacts of historical rock and pop eras are increasingly beginning to find their way into museum spaces, so the ‘live’ experience of popular music is similarly taking an increasingly more curated form. Moore (2004) has noted how as early as the 1960s, seemingly spontaneous and improvisatory performances were in many cases ‘set pieces’ built on previous performances to the extent that audiences could essentially expect a particular kind of performance at any given concert or festival. With the increasing prominence of tribute bands, self-tribute performances and classic album recitals, this situation has essentially become the norm. When audiences purchase tickets to see any of the above kinds of performances, they are paying for a specific kind of experience. Indeed, the curated, live music heritage experience is often the product of a highly meticulous chain of ‘cultural labour’ in which teams of producers and technicians work together in a way entirely commensurate with Becker’s concept of the ‘art world’. Thus observes Becker: Think of all the activities that must be carried out for any work of art to appear as it finally does. For a symphony orchestra to give a concert, for instance, instruments must have been invented, manufactured, maintained, a notation must have been devised and music composed using that notation, people must have learned to play the notated notes on the instruments, times and places must have been provided, ads for the concert must have been placed, publicity must have been arranged and tickets sold and an ­audience capable of listening to and in some way responding to the performance must have been recruited. (2008: 2)

In the ‘art world’ of heritage rock and pop, past forms of live performance are studied so that sounds, images and special effects can be slavishly reproduced. Going to watch a Queen tribute band, one can reasonably expect to see and hear a lead vocalist who will have spent much time (often with various forms of coaching) to capture not only the voice but also the moves of Freddie Mercury. Similarly, for most Queen tribute acts, the

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special effects, including a scaled-down version of Queen’s distinctive overhead stage lighting rig, will have been simulated so as to bring an additional element of authenticity to the spectacle of simulation. Increasingly, events will feature a number of tribute artists playing on a single bill, often interspersed with original artists adopting their own mode of self-tribute as a precursor to a time when their music will also be played entirely by tribute artists. A tantalising glimpse of how the future scenario of live heritage rock and pop is unfolding can be seen in the shape of the Dolina Charlotty Resort and Spa, a secluded holiday retreat in Poland 10 kilometres from the city of Ustka. A popular annual entertainment feature at the resort is the Rock Legends Festival. Held each summer since 2007, the festival has featured an impressive roster of artists, including Carlos Santana, Bob Dylan, Robert Plant, ZZ Top, Deep Purple, Ray Manzarek and Robby Krieger of the Doors, Mike and the Mechanics, Whitesnake, Korn, Bryan Ferry, Billy Idol, Alan Parsons, the Waterboys, Marillion, Uriah Heap and Bonny Tyler. Featuring its own purpose-built amphitheatre with a capacity for 10,000 people, Dolina Charlotty is among an increasing number of resort-style locations and similar lifestyle destinations, such as wineries, that offer live rock and pop entertainment featuring artists from the late 1960s through to the 1990s whose audience is now primarily middle-aged and often in a higher income bracket (see Bennett 2018). Other artists who have performed at the Dolina Charlotty amphitheatre include veteran British rock band Status Quo and trans-Atlantic melodic-rock band Foreigner. That such artists are now increasingly featured at such events, sometimes with only one member from a band’s original line-up, illustrates a segueing moment between the original artist and tribute successor. From an audience perspective, such performances mark occasions for collective celebration, such occasions being set to continue into the future when the simulacra of the tribute have become the norm.

Conclusion This chapter has considered the contributions made by tribute bands and live performances of classic albums to the popular music heritage field. As the chapter has illustrated, both the tribute band and classic albums live genres are complex, encompassing both bona fide tribute artists and original artists engaging in the field of self-tribute, either through performing collections of greatest hits and onstage favourites or featuring their own

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classic album showcases. The points of contact between original and tribute artists are also becoming increasingly blurred as many classic rock and pop bands of the 1960s through to the 1990s now contain perhaps only one or two original members and focus on back catalogue music rather than producing new material. The demand to see tribute artists and self-­ tributes attests to the fact that despite the success of other forms of popular music heritage featuring objects, images and texts, for many music fans the heritage value of rock and pop is also realised in its significance as a live performance medium. In this sense, live performance of classic rock and pop music generates its own specific avenues for the celebration and preservation of collective cultural memory shared by successive generations of rock and pop audiences.

Notes 1. See Clash Music, ‘Pete Townshend Dismisses Own Band: The Who “Its [sic] Own Tribute Band”’: http://www.clashmusic.com/news/pete-­town shend-­dismisses-­own-­band 2. ‘Older Rockers Raking in the Cash’: http://sonorannews.com/2017/ 04/13/old-­rockers-­raking-­cash/ (accessed: 11.11.17).

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Index1

A ABBA, 139 Abbey Road (album by the Beatles), 150 Abbey Road Studios, 24 AC/DC, 8, 31, 32, 42 Adorno, Theodore W., 2, 140, 151 Albertine, Viv, 106 Alexander, Jeffrey, 72 ‘All You Need is Love’ (song by the Beatles), 104 All You Need is Love (television series), 90 ‘Alright Now’ (song by Free), 75 Anderson, Benedict, 103 Animals (album by Pink Floyd), 71, 150 Any Old Way You Choose It: Rock and Other Pop Music, 1967–1973 (book by Robert Christgau), 106 Appadurai, Arjun, 66 Arkwright (band), 128 Art world, 154

Aura, 46, 52, 56, 62, 72, 74, 80, 93, 137–141, 149, 151–153 Autobiography (writing style), 106–110 Ayers, Kevin, 79 B Badman, Keith, 54 Baudrillard, Jean, 100 Bauman, Zygmunt, 17 Beat Club (television programme), 128 The Beatles: Eight Days a Week-the Touring Years (film by Ron Howard), 91 Beatles, the, 2, 3, 5, 9, 18–20, 24, 26, 27, 41, 54–56, 63, 67, 68, 71–73, 91, 93, 96, 104, 107, 124, 139, 150, 151 Beato, Rick, 130 Beats, Bass & Bars–The Story of Grime (BBC Four documentary), 92 Bebop, 2

 Note: Page numbers followed by ‘n’ refer to notes.

1

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 A. Bennett, Popular Music Heritage, Pop Music, Culture and Identity, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-08296-2

173

174 

INDEX

Beck, Jeff, 71, 74 Becker, Howard S., 154 Beer, David, 118, 148 Benjamin, Walter, 140, 149, 151, 152 Bennett, Andy, 3, 4, 6, 7, 18, 21–23, 29, 43, 51, 53, 62, 66, 69–71, 76, 77, 79, 89, 92, 93, 95, 98, 102, 104–107, 109, 115, 116, 118–123, 126, 128–130, 143, 147–149, 151, 155 Bennett, H. Stith, 129 Bergengren, Charles, 53 Big Beautiful Book of Bass (book by Geddy Lee), 73 Billboard (magazine), 3, 93, 149 Bjorn Again, 139 Black, Pauline, 106 Black By Design: A 2-Tone Memoir by Pauline Black, 106 Black Sabbath, 3, 18, 26 Blues, 17, 20, 23, 25, 28, 74, 89, 142, 143 Bohemian Rhapsody (film by Bryan Singer), 99, 100 ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’ (song by Queen), 90 Bootleg Beatles, the, 139 Born to Run (album by Bruce Springsteen), 149, 150 Bowie, David, 2, 5, 8, 25, 39, 42, 49, 51, 55, 63, 92, 97 Brandellero, Amanda, 79, 80 Branding (and popular music), 76, 146 Breakfast in America (album by Supertramp), 150 Bron-Yr-Aur, 16, 32, 33, 34n3 Burgoyne, Robert, 51, 52 Bush, Kate, 55, 90 Byrd, The, 72

C Calyx–The Official Canterbury Sound website, 79, 121 Canterburied Sounds (CD series), 79 Canterbury Nachrichten (fanzine), 78 Canterbury Sound, 22, 78, 79, 121–123, 132 Carah, Nicholas, 125, 146, 147 Caravan (band), 78, 79, 121, 122 Cavern Club, 5, 124 Cavicchi, Daniel, 64, 118, 148 Chamber, Iain, 3, 51, 67 Chicago blues scene, 16, 21, 25 Christgau, Robert, 106 Clapton, Eric, 71, 72, 74, 107 Clash Music (magazine), 144 Clash, The, 49, 51 Classic album, 1, 10, 64, 70, 75, 88, 92–94, 96, 105, 138, 143, 144, 147, 149–152, 154–156 Classic Albums Live (concert series), 3, 10, 137–156 Classic Albums (television series), 3, 76, 93–96, 149 Classic Pop (magazine), 102 Classic Prog (magazine), 102 Classic rock, 1, 42, 76, 88, 93, 95, 101–106, 130, 143–145, 147, 152–156 Classic Rock (magazine), 3, 88, 102, 103, 106, 110, 149 Clothes, Clothes, Clothes, Music, Music, Music, Boys, Boys, Boys (book by Viv Albertine), 106 Cloudland (music venue), 22, 23, 124 Cobain, Kurt, 17, 48 Columbia Broadcasting System (CBS), 72 Corner, John, 89 Cornfeld, Artie, 98 Coughlan, John, 144

 INDEX 

Counterfeit Stones, the (Rolling Stones tribute band), 141, 142 Country music, 17, 21, 28, 30 Country Music Hall of Fame (Tamworth, Australia), 30 COVID-19, 130, 133 Cracked Actor (documentary by Alan Yentob), 97 Crime of the Century (album by Supertramp), 150 Criss, Peter, 68, 145 Cultural capital, 61, 107 Cultural memory, 6, 19, 20, 65, 66, 79, 91, 95, 99, 118, 141, 143, 147, 156 D Daltrey, Roger, 144 ‘Dancing with the Moonlit Knight’ (song by Genesis), 142 Dark Side of the Moon (album by Pink Floyd), 2, 3, 10, 45, 71, 94, 149, 150 Deadheads, 118 Deep Purple (band), 155 DeNora, Tia, 20, 21 Depeche Mode, 51 ‘Desert Trip’ (festival), 146 ‘Desperado’ (song by the Eagles), 145 Destroyer (album by KISS), 145 Diamond, Neil, 130, 131 Dietrich, Marlene, 48 Dilthey, Wilhelm, 109 Diltz, Henry, 48 Dirt, The (film by Jeff Tremaine), 100 Disneyfication, 27 Dolina Charlotty Resort and Spa, 155 Doors, the, 48, 71, 155 Doors, The (film by Oliver Stone), 99 Doss, Erica, 63

175

Downtown Commission (Austin, Texas), 125 Drake, Nick, 45, 105 Dr. Feelgood (band), 152 Dylan, Bob, 32, 33n1, 53, 72, 93, 104, 146, 155 E Eagles, the, 3, 8, 145, 148 Easy Rider (film by Dennis Hopper), 96 Electric Ladyland (album by Jimi Hendrix), 3, 94 Electric Light Orchestra, 8, 90 Emerson, Lake and Palmer, 122, 142 Endless Wire (album by The Who), 144 Entwistle, John, 144 Exile on Main Street (album by the Rolling Stones), 150 F Facelift (fanzine), 78, 79, 122 Fender Precision (bass guitar), 73 Fender Stratocaster (guitar), 71, 72 Ferry, Bryan, 155 ‘Fifty-quid man,’ 107 Finnegan, Ruth, 26 Fireside performances, 131 ‘Fixin’ to Die Rag’ (song by Country Joe and the Fish), 99 Florida, Richard, 29 Foreigner (band), 152, 155 Foxtrot (album by Genesis), 142 Frankfurt School, the, 151 ‘Frantic Four’ tour (Status Quo), 144, 145 Free (band), 75 Freed, Alan, 50 Frehley, Ace, 68, 145

176 

INDEX

Frennaux, Richard, 130 Frey, Glen, 145 Frith, Simon, 1, 6, 25, 26, 29, 68, 77, 91, 120, 140, 148 G Gabriel, Peter, 142 Genesis (band), 122, 142 Gentrification, 125, 126 Ghost Rider: Travels on the Healing Road (book by Neil Peart), 108 Gibson Les Paul (guitar), 72 Gilmour, David, 71, 72 ‘Gimme Shelter’ (song by the Rolling Stones), 92 The Girl Can’t Help It (film by Frank Tashlin), 96 Glam rock, 104, 145 Glastonbury (festival), 120, 130, 139 Gong (band), 78, 121, 122 Goodfellas (film by Martin Scorsese), 93 ‘Got My Mojo Working’ (song by Preston Red), 101 Graceland, 63 Graceland (album by Paul Simon), 94 Grateful Dead, the, 118 Green, Ben, 21, 45, 69, 104, 153 Grime (genre), 92 Grunge, 17, 18 H Hardcore (genre), 92 Hard Day’s Night, A (film by Richard Lester), 96 Hard rock, 2, 47, 102 Harrison, George, 3, 5, 27 Havens, Richie, 98, 99 Heavy metal, 2, 18, 102 Hello (album by Status Quo), 145

Hendrix, Jimi, 3, 48, 55, 70–72, 94, 98, 99, 152 Hepworth, David, 45 Heritage activism, 124–126, 132 Heritage band, 1, 144 Heritage rock, 8, 45, 100, 104, 131, 144–149, 154, 155 Heroes (album by David Bowie), 25, 51, 97 High Fidelity (film by Stephen Frears), 96 Hip hop, 50, 54, 77, 106 Historia Del Rock (magazine), 105 History of the Eagles (documentary), 145 History of the Eagles (tour), 145 Holly, Buddy, 17, 22, 72, 152 Home of Metal (exhibition), 42 ‘Honky Tonk Women’ (song by the Rolling Stones), 131 Hopper, Brian, 79 Hopper, Hugh, 79 Horkheimer, Max, 140, 151 Hotel California (album by the Eagles), 145 Houghton Weavers, The (band), 129 Howard, Ron, 91 Howitt, Phil, 78, 79, 122 Human League, The, 51 I ‘(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction’ (song by the Rolling Stones), 48, 75 Idol, Billy, 155 Imagined communities, 103 ‘I’m Not in Love’ (song by 10cc), 90 Internet fan sites, 117–120 J Jackson, Michael, 8, 55 Jagger, Mick, 48, 97, 131

 INDEX 

Jay Z, 94 Jazz, 2, 23, 74, 89, 123, 143, 153 Jazz rock, 22, 78, 121 Jethro Tull (band), 122, 142 Johnson, Paul, 41 Jones, Brian, 48, 139, 142, 152 Joplin, Janis, 48, 70, 152 Joy Division, 8, 51 Just Kids (book by Patti Smith), 106 K Kemp, Gary, 45 KISS, 3, 8, 55, 56, 68, 118, 145, 148 Korn, 155 Kraftwerk, 51 Kray Twins, the, 97 Krieger, Robbie, 155 Kruse, Holly, 24, 27 L Lakeside Park (St. Catharines, Canada), 31 ‘Lakeside Park’ (song by Rush), 31 Lamb Lies Down on Broadway, The (album by Genesis), 142 Lancaster, Alan, 144 Lang, Michael, 98 ‘Last Time, The’ (song by the Rolling Stones), 48 Leadon, Bernie, 145 Led Zepagain (Led Zeppelin tribute band), 142 Led Zeppelin, 16, 32, 142, 150, 151 Led Zeppelin (album by Led Zeppelin), 34n3, 150 Led Zeppelin II (album by Led Zeppelin), 150, 151 Led Zeppelin III (album by Led Zeppelin), 16, 32, 34n3

177

Led Zeppelin IV (album by Led Zeppelin), 150 Lee, Geddy, 73 Lehman, Eric T., 131 Lennon, John, 3, 5, 27, 63, 70 Lens, Jenny, 49 Leonard, Marion, 43, 46 Let it Be (film by Michael Lindsay-­ Hogg), 139 Let it Bleed (album by the Rolling Stones), 131 Life (book by Keith Richards), 106 Lifestyle, 55, 62, 64, 66, 67, 96, 97, 102, 107, 125, 146, 155 Live Aid, 99, 100, 104, 144 Lodger (album by David Bowie), 25, 97 London Calling (album by The Clash), 49 Long Road Out of Eden (album by the Eagles), 145 Long Run, The (album by the Eagles), 145 Love Gun (album by KISS), 145 Low (album by David Bowie), 25, 97 M MacDonald, Country Joe, 99 Madonna, 8, 55 Mankowitz, Gered, 48 Mann, Manfred, 101 Man Who Fell to Earth, The (film by Nicolas Roeg), 97 Manzarek, Ray, 155 Marcus, Greil, 106 Marillion (band), 155 Marley, Bob (and the Wailers), 51, 70, 71, 94 Martin, Craig, 149 Marvin, Hank, 72 Mason, Nick, 45

178 

INDEX

McCartney, Paul, 3, 5, 27, 55, 91, 146 Mean Streets (film by Martin Scorsese), 93 Memoryscapes, 16, 20–23 Mercury, Freddie, 100, 154 Merseybeat, 17, 24, 26 Meyers, John Paul, 139 Middleton, Richard, 129, 141 Mike and the Mechanics, 155 Mojo (magazine), 3, 88, 101, 110, 110n2 Monsters of Rock (festival), 69 Moore, Allan F., 129, 143, 151, 154 Moral panic, 2 Morrison, Jim, 48, 70 Morrison Hotel (album by The Doors), 48 Mötley Crüe, 100 ‘Mr Tambourine Man’ (song by Bob Dylan), 72 Mud (band), 152 Musical Box (Genesis tribute band), 142 Music scenes, 7, 10, 16, 19, 21–24, 26, 29, 44, 65, 66, 77, 80, 115, 116, 118, 120, 121, 123–125, 132 My Generation (album by The Who), 144 ‘My Generation’ (song by The Who), 153 MySpace, 7 Mystery Train: Images of America in Rock ‘n’ Roll Music (book by Greil Marcus), 106 N Nashville, 21, 28 Neville, Morgan, 91 New Music Express, 49 Nick Mason’s Saucerful of Secrets, 45

A Night at the Opera (album by Queen), 94, 150 Nirvana (band), 10, 17 No Direction Home (film by Martin Scorsese), 93 Norman, Philip, 19, 107 Nursery Cryme (album by Genesis), 142 O Old Grey Whistle Test, The (television programme), 128 One of These Nights (album by the Eagles), 145 P Palace Theatre (and Save the Palace campaign) (Melbourne, Australia), 125 Parfitt, Rick, 144 Parsons, Alan, 155 ‘Peaceful Easy Feeling’ (song by the Eagles), 145 Peak music experience, 21, 69, 104 Peart, Neil, 31, 108 Performance (film by Donald Cammell and Nicolas Roeg), 97 Peterson, Richard A., 21, 23, 66, 72, 73, 77, 92, 115, 118, 121 Pet Sounds (album by the Beach Boys), 93, 94 Physical Graffiti (album by Led Zeppelin), 32, 34n3 Piledriver (album by Status Quo), 145 Pink Floyd, 2, 3, 10, 39, 42, 45, 71, 94, 122, 139, 142, 150, 151 Plant, Robert, 32, 155 Police, the, 8, 51 Pop, Iggy (and the Stooges), 49 Popkin, Jeremy, 109

 INDEX 

Post-punk, 17, 64, 65 Presley, Elvis, 17, 19, 27, 55, 63, 70, 96 Primary text, 100, 101, 143, 151 Progressive rock, 22, 39, 45, 71, 78, 121–123, 142 Prophet 5 (synthesizer), 73 Prosumerism, 77 Psychedelia, 17, 70, 104 Punk, 2, 17, 23, 39, 44, 47, 49–52, 57, 64, 65, 77, 87, 90, 94, 106 Punk London (exhibition), 42, 44, 47, 57 Purple Rain (album by Prince), 150 Q Quadrophenia (album by The Who), 144 Queen (band), 48, 154 Queen II (album by Queen), 48 R Radiohead (band), 104 Radio Student (Slovenia), 79 Rain (Beatles tribute band), 139 Rainbow (band), 152 Rap, 2, 52, 87, 94 Red, Preston, 101 Reed, Lou, 2, 49, 92 Reggae, 2, 51, 87, 94 Renov, Michael, 89, 99 Retrospective consecration, 39, 40, 64, 70, 74, 93, 95, 105, 151 Revolver (album by the Beatles), 150 Richards, Keith, 48, 106, 131 Rickenbacker 360 (guitar), 72 Roadshow: Landscape with Drums – A Concert Tour by Motorcycle (book by Neil Peart), 108 Robinson, Lucy, 42, 44

179

Rock, Mick, 48 Rock and roll, 2, 17, 50, 52, 57, 67, 72, 96, 152, 153 Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, 5, 50–54, 108 Rock Around the Clock (film by Fred F. Sears), 96 Roeg, Nicolas, 97 Rogers, Ian, 6, 7, 22, 62, 66, 69, 95, 115, 118, 147 Roland DX1 (synthesizer), 73 Rolling Stone (magazine), 3, 5, 93, 149 Rolling Stones, the, 48, 75, 92, 93, 107, 130, 131, 141, 142, 146, 150 Rooftop concert (the Beatles), 139 Roots (music), 26, 28 Rossi, Francis, 144 Rubber Soul (the Beatles), 150 Rumours (album by Fleetwood Mac), 94 Rush (band), 31, 73, 108 Ryan, John, 72, 73 S Santana, Carlos, 155 Santana (band), 98 Santelli, Robert, 49, 50 Scorsese, Martin, 93 Scott, Bon, 31, 32 Self-tribute, 10, 137–156 Selling England by the Pound (album by Genesis), 142 Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band (album by the Beatles), 2, 93, 150 Shankar, Ravi, 98 Shine a Light (film by Martin Scorsese), 93 Shout! The True Story of the Beatles (book by Philip Norman), 107

180 

INDEX

Simmons, Gene, 68, 145 Simon, Carly, 94 Simulacra, 100, 155 Sinatra, Frank, 140 Sinclair, Richard, 79 Sir Elton: The Definitive Biography (book by Philip Norman), 107 Skiffle, 77 Slowhand: The Life and Music of Eric Clapton (book by Philip Norman), 107 Smash Hits (magazine), 101 Smith, Patti, 106 Smith, Pennie, 49 Soft Machine, 78, 79, 121, 122 Songs in the Key of Life (album by Stevie Wonder), 94 Spatialisation, 16–20, 27, 33 Springsteen, Bruce, 64, 92, 148–150 Stanley, Paul, 68, 145 Star, Ringo, 3, 5, 27, 55, 91 ‘Star Spangled Banner, The’ (version by Jimi Hendrix), 99 Status Quo (band), 144, 145, 148, 152, 155 Sticky Fingers (album by the Rolling Stones), 150 Sting (artist), 92 ‘Strawberry Fields Forever’ (song by the Beatles), 73 Subcultural Asylum (Slovenia), 79 ‘Sweet Caroline’ (song by Neil Diamond), 131 Sympathy for the Devil: The Rolling Stones Story (book by Philip Norman), 107 T ‘Take it Easy’ (song by the Eagles), 145 Tempi Dispari (magazine), 105

10 cc (band), 8, 90, 152 Time (Magazine), 96 Tommy (album by The Who), 144 Townshend, Pete, 106, 144, 147 Trainspotting (film by Danny Boyle), 96 Trap hop, 92 Traveling Music: Playing Back the Soundtrack to My Life and Times (book by Neil Peart), 108 Tribute bands, 3, 10, 31, 70, 75, 137–156 20 Feet From Stardom (film by Morgan Neville), 91, 92 Tyler, Bonnie, 155 U Uimonen, Heikki, 72, 73 Ultravox, 51 Uriah Heap, 155 Urry, John, 20, 27 V Vintage guitars, 73, 74 Virtual music scenes, 10, 115, 120, 121, 123, 124, 132 W Wadleigh, Michael, 98, 99 Waging Heavy Peace (book by Neil Young), 106 ‘Walk on the Wild Side’ (song by Lou Reed), 92 Wall, The (album by Pink Floyd), 71, 149, 150 Ward, Clifford T., 105 Waterboys, the, 155 Waters, Muddy, 149 Waters, Roger, 101

 INDEX 

Watts, Charlie, 48, 131 Web 2.0, 75, 115, 116, 118–121, 124, 132 Weber, Max, 62 What Makes This Song Great? (YouTube series), 130 ‘Where Do You Go From Here’ (song by Arkwright), 129 White Album, The (album by the Beatles), 150 Whitesnake (band), 155 White Stripes, the (band), 104 Who (album by The Who), 144 Who Am I (book by Pete Townshend), 106 Who’s Next (album by the Who), 3, 94, 144 Who, The, 3, 94, 144, 146–148, 153 Wilde Flowers, The (Canterbury Sound band), 79 Willsteed, John, 23, 64, 65 Winehouse, Amy, 48, 94 Wish You Were Here (album by Pink Floyd), 71, 150 Wogan, Terry, 129 Wolf, Howlin, 101

181

Wonder, Stevie, 92, 94 Wood, Ronnie, 131, 142 Woodstock Music and Arts Fair, 16, 29, 98 Woodstock: The Movie (film by Michael Wadleigh), 98, 99 Wyman, Bill, 48 Y Yentob, Alan, 97 Yes (band), 122, 142 ‘You Can’t Always Get What You Want’ (song by the Rolling Stones), 131 Young, Neil, 106, 130, 146 ‘Young Americans’ (song by David Bowie), 92 YouTube, 7, 89, 92, 115, 116, 119, 127–130, 132, 141, 143 Z Zevnik, Luka, 76, 79 Ziggy Stardust, see Bowie, David ZZ Top (band), 155